Festival

NAMES (New Art and Music Ensemble Salzburg)

Marina Iglesias flutes | Marco Sala clarinets | Špela Mastnak percussion | Alexander Bauer e-organ/keyboards | Matthias Leboucher piano/keyboards | Anna Lindenbaum violin | Leo Morello cello | Marco Döttlinger live-electronics

 

 

Clara Iannotta echo from afar (ii), for six musicians, electronics (2022)
Rojin Sharafi SÀNG, for ensemble, video (2024)
Thomas Grill Blueprinting, performed environment for ensemble, live-electronics (2024)
Marco Döttlinger points of no return, for 7 performers, mini-synthesizers, live-visuals (2024)

 

Further program information

Once again, the concert series "open music" contributes to the impuls Festival, taking place in Graz between February 17th and 28th in 2025. During the first three days of the Festival, a special focus is put on Austrian musicians, ensembles and composers. At the Opening Night three works created in 2024 (they will receive their world premieres shortly beforehand in the Salzburg concert cycle of NAMES), hereby represent exciting positions of the current Austrian scene working outside of narrowly defined classical circles. Together with another quite recent work by Clara Iannotta, who teaches in Vienna and also at the impuls Academy, the program bears witness of how diverse and pioneering contemporary composition can be.

 

Rojin Sharafi, born in Tehran in 1995, is a Vienna-based sound artist and composer of acoustic, electro-acoustic and electronic music. She has worked on various multimedia art projects and collaborated with a wide range of musicians, ensembles, filmmakers, video artists and performers. Her music crosses genre boundaries by incorporating elements from different eras and musical genres such as noise, folk, ambient, metal to classical contemporary composed music. Fusion texture, narrative layers and formalistic approaches are her musical trademarks. Rojin Sharafi is also a successful live performer.

Thomas Grill works as a composer and performer of electroacoustic music, as media artist, technologist and sound researcher. His artistic work encompasses various areas of audible and cross-media art, with a focus on loudspeaker-based music, electroacoustic improvisation, as well as installations and interventions. He researches and teaches at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.

Marco Döttlinger, Austrian composer and sound artist, studied music theory and composition as well as computer music in Salzburg, Paris and Basel with Christian Ofenbauer, Frederic Durieux and Georg Friedrich Haas, among others. He is a member of NAMES. The main aspects of his artistic work lie in the integration of computer-aided processes in the field of contemporary (sound) art and time-based arts.

Last but not least, the internationally renowned composer, professor and curator Clara Iannotta allows us to participate in the experience of radiotherapy in a musical introspection with "echo from afar (ii)". The recording of the treatment permeates the various levels of the composition, its identity, articulation and rhythm are retained, its DNA is modified – a composition that itself has the effect of acoustic radiation.

 

NAMES (New Art and Music Ensemble Salzburg), founded in 2014, is a Salzburg based ensemble for contemporary music, which was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung's Ensemble Prize in 2023. With the aim of enriching the concept of music, the nine musicians, coming from seven different European countries, attempt to unite various forms of contemporary art in their programs and concepts. They work together with a wide variety of artists from different disciplines (performance, dance, video art, literature...), hereby setting a special focus on electronic and electro-acoustic ensemble and chamber music. As one of Austria's up-and-coming ensembles, NAMES is already looking back on many international concert activities: Wien Modern, Aspekte, Dialoge Festival, Mixtur Barcelona, Druskomanija Lithuania, Limina (formerly Crossroads) Festival, Daegu Contemporary Festival, Primavera Verona, Schönberg Center Vienna, aDevantgarde Munich, KlexosLab New Music Festival Plasencia, Spain and many more. The ensemble sees itself as a collective in which all artistic and economic decisions are developed and made together. Through the combination of musically high-quality chamber music and the desire for aesthetically appealing experiences, NAMES represents an experimental laboratory for lovers of new sounds and concepts.