To hear on Sunday
20 and 27 November 2011, 2pm - 9pm
La boîte de Fukuyama
(Fukuyama's box)
Electroacoustic composition (2001)
by Georg Katzer
Georg Katzer on "Fukuyama's box" [11'30'']:
In this piece, sounds from the world of information technology are processed in a highly amplified way, the sizzle and crackle of the chips and contacts, the hiss in the wires. With brute force like out of Pandora's box an electronic "orgue de la barbarie" (hurdy-gurdy) breaks into this mysterious and hermetic world. The rest is noise.
The American philosopher Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the End of History after the fall of communism. (Unfortunately, for many peoples there hasn't been any history of their own at all since a few hundreds of years.) Nothing moves any more, the bottles empty, the utopias over and done, the world only the total of clicks and cracks in the deluge of the information channels?
But who is constantly turning the crank of the "orgue de la barbarie"?
2001, Studio of the composer/Studio IMEB Bourges
Premiere Bourges 2005, Festival "Synthèse"
Georg Katzer was born 1935 in Silesia. Studies (composition/piano) in Berlin (East) and Prague. Afterwards student in Hanns Eislers master class at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, where he himself was elected a member in 1978. Here he founded the Studio for Experimental (Electroacoustic) Music. In 1980 he was appointed a professor and he got a master class for composition at the Akademie der Künste. He lives near Berlin as a freelance composer. He received composition awards in the DDR, France (Bourges), Switzerland and the FRG, guest of honor at the Villa Massimo, Rom. Along with his compositional work (orchestra pieces, solo concerts, chamber music, three operas, two ballets, elctroacoustic- and multimedia works) Georg Katzer is also involved with multimedia-projects and improvised music. He has played with Johannes Bauer, Wofgang Fuchs, Paul Lytten, Radu Malfatti, Phil Wachsman, Phil Minton, Tony Oxley among others, on European tours.
Georg Katzer