Marina Rosenfeld

The Agonists (2023)

From the catalogue of Donaueschinger Musiktage, 2023:

“I have been invited to Donaueschingen three times. The first time I was booed off the stage* in the Jazz section. Indignant at the time, perhaps I am more sympathetic now to the problem of category. The second time I was met with a rain of flowers from the wings, a theatrical performance of appreciation orchestrated by Bill Dietz’s troupe of claqueurs that pre-empted a repeat performance of that galvanizing moment some fifteen years earlier. But my theoretical catalogue essay that year introducing the work Deathstar Orchestration (… an evocation of excess, an ego-trip, a gesture associated with the phase of a band's lifespan…that includes the stadium and a need for the expanded palette afforded by orchestral instruments in their colorfulness and variety…) anticipated and possibly insured a certain hostility from within the ensemble itself. Working within an experimental framework that made the production of musical notation for live musicians an aftereffect, even a curiosity, of a chain of significations initiated in the art gallery, my appearance in the role “composer” could only make sense outside the festival’s bounded conception of composition: I was the “New Yorker Klangkünstlerin" provocatively assigned to the concert stage.

Theoretically, this year I can approach the creation of an exhibition with less abrasion between myself and the category problem of which  Donaueschinger Musiktage’s catalogue and, by extension, history, are emblematic. The form of spectatorship in the museum for which my audience is primed can surely be rewarded with a material instantiation of some idea about sound. But I find myself posing the same questions that have occupied me since the 1990s: what can music be? What can a composer do?

In The Agonists, these questions are staged obliquely, across aural, optical and affective registers. Listeners may recognize some sounds. At this point, for example, the attentive listener will be familiar with my voice and its phantom or synthetic double. I have found that finished works sometimes generate additional traces—in this case, a set of blank scores that are also posters after the fact. The work Deathstar/Deathstar Orchestration (2017) is finished, but as a format, it still has something to do.

The pun or double entendre, which has often circulated in my work in a subliminal or secondary register, occurs in The Agonists at slightly higher volume, I think: the exhibition could be described as both about reception, and as a kind of reception (the word function can toggle between the social and the conceptual in the same way), where utterance, likeness and signal jostle for position or intelligibility, like distracted or argumentative guests caught in a grammatical or libidinal matrix. The exhibition as situation or format— a space neither prosocial nor antisocial, but one promoting a kind of disorderly or agonistic sociality — is where I find another return to an idea of music’s possibility. What is a concert if not a deadpan assemblage of sexed bodies, recursive scripts, and empty (or pregnant) volumes, staves, airwaves and bandwidth?” —Marina Rosenfeld, 2023

*in a duo with Ikue Mori