Piano music x digital images

Maki Namekawa has created a new program for this year’s Ars Electronica, bringing music by György Ligeti, Chick Corea and, for the first time, Polish composer Hania Rani to the visual arena of the Deep Space venue.

She will be visually accompanied by Cori O’Lan, who will once again connect the Deep Space’s high-end graphics cards with his real time visualization system to provide an immersive visual interpretation of Maki Namekawa’s performance.

Chronologically, the program starts in the early 1950’s with György Ligeti’s ingenious Musica Ricercata of which Maki Namekawa has included pieces 1, 3, 4 ,5, 8 and 10 in this program. In a very literal sense, this music represents what the composer Ligeti, who was always inspired by the natural sciences, sought and found again and again in his ongoing artistic explorations.

Chick Corea’s Children Songs are from the 1970s and 80s, a collection of musical ideas that, rhythmically, harmonically and atmospherically, as Corea himself put it, aim to convey “simplicity as beauty.” (“To convey simplicity as beauty, as represented in the Spirit of a child”) This is a perfect challenge for Maki Namekawa, who has long since earned an international reputation for her outstanding Philip Glass interpretations. With her interpretation of the Children Songs, she once again brings her fascinating “virtuosity of supposed simplicity” to bear and imbues the pieces with a new musical aura. She performs the songs 4, 6, 11, 14, 16, 18, 20.

The same can be said about her interpretation of the pieces by Hania Rani. The Polish composer is one of the stars of a musical direction that is often called neo-classical. Yet with her very authentic and open style as a composer, but also as a pianist and singer, she has often proven that she cannot be pigeonholed. The four pieces Maki Namekawa has included in her new program are Eden, Hawaii Oslo, Glass and Luca, all released in 2019.

Credits

Maki Namekawa – piano
Cori O‘Lan – real time visualizations