On five consecutive Saturdays in 2010 the Berlin-based Ensemble Zwischentöne presented ‘I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY AND I AM SAYING IT’ with the 35 megaphones of Otto Beck’s “Orchester für direkte Demokratie” on the Berlin Schloßplatz. 

In response to the increasingly professionalized niche existence of contemporary music, their concern was to reexamine the gap between 20th century avant-garde music’s real existence in concert pieces and its programmatic existence as a challenge to the relationship between art and life. Embedded in the aesthetic vocabulary of a public demonstration (megaphones, pickets, banners, and flyers), each week brought together programmatic texts of 20th-century music (by Adorno, Babbitt, Boulez, Cage, Lachenmann, and many others) and compositions written or arranged especially for our “megaphone orchestra” (by Peter Ablinger, Jens Brand, Philip Corner, Sean Griffin, Maik, hans  w. koch, David Lidov, Thomas Meadowcroft, Adam Overton, and many others). 

For SPOR 2012, Ensemble Zwischentöne will present a selection of these works and texts on a single afternoon at a series of carefully chosen sites in Aarhus. The selection will not only reflect on SPOR’s 2012 theme, but responds to the clamor of international Cage centennial celebrations. The Aarhus version of ‘I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY AND I AM SAYING IT’ will include Marina Rosenfeld's ‘Self-Portrait/Self-Portrait with Material’ her contribution to the 2010 Berlin staging.  

In collabortion with SNYK