mixed pieces

To children and teenagers, movement is an elementary need – and sitting still for hours in a concert hall can be quite a challenge for them. Contemporary music, on the other hand, is a wonderful experience when combined with movement: if you dance to it, you also learn how to listen intensely for structures, sequences and fragmentation in the compositions. Accompanied live by piano and timpani sounds and guided by Corinna Vogel, a professor of music pedagogy, and participants in one of her seminars, students from Cologne’s schools explore pieces lending themselves to dance particularly well. The first is Misato Mochizuki’s Moebius-Ring – the musical equivalent of the mathematical paradox of the infinite, a twisted loop without inner or outer sides. And the finale will feature György Kurtág’s Eight Piano Pieces – extremely brief miniatures which, even on their own, seem like physical gestures crying out for motion.