Musical Belongings VII: Bach und Balafon - lautten compagney BERLIN trifft Ba Banga Nyeck & Friends

In the organizer's words:

With its Cameroon project, lautten compagney BERLIN explores the possibilities of music beyond the colonial canon. The focus is on two musical traditions: the rich musical tradition of the balafon, an idiophone that has been played in West Africa since the 13th century, meets music by Johann Sebastian Bach, played on historical instruments from the 17th century. The balafon is considered to be an invention of the Sosso, whose king Soumaoro Kantè is said to have possessed a balafon with magical powers. The Ethnological Museum has several examples in its collection.

Cameroon-born percussionist and composer Ba Banga Nyeck is one of the musicians who are keeping the rich heritage of the balafon alive and reinterpreting it for the present day. Ten years ago, he developed a new chromatic balafon with twelve notes based on the traditional five-tone balafon in order to be able to play Bach's music on the instrument.

What does it sound like when this balafone Bach comes into conversation with the historical baroque sound? And how can the hypnotic patterns be fused with contrapuntal fugues? Such sound experiments can be expected at this edition of MUSICAL BELONGINGS at the Humboldt Forum. On a visual level, the Cameroonian artist Tanka Fonta will accompany the project with one of his mythopoetic pictorial narratives.

Participants

Ba Banga Nyeck

Ba Banga Nyeck is a musician from Cameroon and inventor of an innovative chromatic balafon model, which he presents on international stages. His work demonstrates that the balafon - a traditional African xylophone - can enter into a dialog with classical, contemporary, jazz and modern music and fit seamlessly into orchestral formations around the world. In 2012, he was recognized by UNESCO for his project to develop a cultural industry around the balafon in Côte d'Ivoire; he was also honored by the World Masters of Arts and Culture (South Korea) and supported by the Organisation Africaine de la Propriété Intellectuelle (OAPI) for the invention of his instrument. He is also the winner of the main prize of the "Triangle du Balafon" competition in Mali.

He has performed throughout Africa, Asia, the United States and France, notably at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and at the Philharmonie de Paris as a guest soloist with the orchestra Les Siècles under the direction of François-Xavier Roth. He is also a member of the instrumentalist community of the Musée de la Musique - Philharmonie de Paris. He has already performed on stage with major artists such as Mory Kanté and Richard Bona and has recorded records in collaboration with Manu Dibango. Ba Banga Nyeck is the author of "Balafon chromatique ou le manifeste du balafoniste universel" (Éditions Baudelaire, 2023), he is also a cultural entrepreneur, a member of SACEM and the Bureau Ivoirien des Droits d'Auteur (BURIDA) and founder of the International Balafon Festival (FestiBalafons) in Abidjan and of "Folk & Fusion" in Alsace.

Tanka Fonta

The artist Tanka Fonta, born in 1966 in Buea, Cameroon, lives and works in Berlin. As a multidisciplinary visual artist, composer, poet, writer, instrumentalist and philosopher, his work includes murals, installations, orchestral compositions and philosophical texts. His work explores human consciousness, the psychology of perception and the relationships between thought, language, sound and visual form. He has presented major projects internationally, including at the São Paulo Biennial 2025, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt 2023 and the Kunstverein Hannover, and has collaborated with institutions such as the Goethe-Institut. His orchestral and audio works have been commissioned and performed internationally, and his scores are held in over 700 library collections worldwide, including Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Wolfgang Katschner

A lutenist by training, Wolfgang Katschner founded the lautten compagney BERLIN together with Hans-Werner Apel in 1984, the heart of his multifaceted work as a musician, organizer and researcher in the sound worlds of "early music". On CDs, Wolfgang Katschner and his ensemble present themselves as border crossers; alongside world premiere recordings of operas such as "Didone abbandonata" are unusual combinations of composers: Philipp Glass and Tarquinio Merula ("Timeless"), Heinrich Schütz and Friedrich Hollaender ("War & Peace") and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and Astor Piazzolla ("Misterio"). Each of these programs stands for the conviction that "early" music is just as modern as the music written later and, once one steps out of one's self-imposed isolation as a musician of "early" music, can be combined with more modern repertoire to great benefit for musicians and audiences alike. Wolfgang Katschner has also been a successful guest conductor at German opera houses for several years. From 2012-2016, he was musical director of the Winter in Schwetzingen; after guest appearances in Bonn (Handel's "Rinaldo" and "Giulio Cesare") and Oldenburg (Hasse's "Siroe"), he was responsible for several opera productions at the Staatstheater Nürnberg: "Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria", "Serse", "La Calisto" and "Bajazet". Most recently, Katschner conducted Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo" at the Semperoper Dresden and Antonio Cesti's "L'Orontea" at the Theater an der Wien. Wolfgang Katschner is also increasingly involved in the training of young artists. He was a guest professor at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin, at the Sing-Fest in Hong Kong, Artist in Residence at BarockVokal in Mainz and worked with singers at the Franz Liszt School of Music in Weimar in 2018 and 2019.

Christian Filips

Christian Filips is a poet, music dramaturge, director and translator. He studied philosophy, literature and musicology in Vienna and Berlin. Since 2006 he has worked as a freelance author, director and music dramaturge for the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, the lautten compagney BERLIN and the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, among others. As a music dramaturge, he specializes in hybrid formats that combine early and contemporary music, literature, performance and action art. As a theater maker, he has developed immersive productions for urban spaces together with partners in Mumbai and Nairobi. As a translator, he has collaborated with the Arab-German collective WIESE (Wie es ist) / مرج (for Hamburger Bahnhof, among others). Filips is currently working with the poets Logan February (Nigeria) and Lionel Fogarty (Australia) on the POESIE DEKOLONIE project at Engeler Verlag; the first volume published was "Mental Voodoo: Gedichte" by Logan February. In April 2023, he curated the festival for world literature POETICA 8 at the University of Cologne. In August 2023, he received the Erlangen Literature Prize for Poetry in Translation. Most recently, the poetry collection Im Traum die Auskunft sagt: Hier! Selected poems 1996-2022 published by Engeler Verlag.

lautten compagney BERLIN

Oboe - Eduard Wesly

Recorder - Martin Ripper

Horn - Elliot Seidman

Violin - Andreas Pfaff, Yumiko Tsubaki

Viola - Ulrike Paetz

Violoncello - Bo Wiget

Double bass - Annette Rheinfurth

Theorbo / Baroque guitar - Hans Werner Apel

Theorbo / Renaissance guitar / Baroque guitar - Max Hattwich

Lute / musical direction - Wolfgang Katschner

Percussion - Peter A. Bauer

The lautten compagney BERLIN under the direction of Wolfgang Katschner is one of the most renowned orchestras of early music. In the 39 years since it was founded in 1984, it has delighted music lovers all over the world. In the fall of 2019, it was awarded the OPUS Klassik as Ensemble of the Year. It sets unique musical accents with concerts, opera performances and crossover projects. The ensemble is one of the few independent producers of music theater projects in Germany. Its unusual and innovative programs are appreciated by audiences and national and international critics alike. In addition to its performances in Berlin, the lautten compagney tours Germany, Europe and the world with around 100 concerts a year. The last major non-European tours took them to ten cities in China in 2019 and to Bogotá in Colombia in fall 2021. The lautten compagney recently celebrated the acclaimed premiere of Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo" at the Dresden Semperoper as the first guest ensemble in the opera house's recent history.

The lautten compagney cultivates musical traditions with great repertoire works as an important part of its program spectrum. Wolfgang Katschner and his ensemble are not only curious about music, but also about new ways of performing it in concert. The lautten compagney has found its own individual platform for experimentation in the :lounge format, among others. Here it shows that early music and contemporary music can indeed be combined. In the :lounge, live sampling and sounds enrich the timbres of the baroque instruments and offer space for surprising improvisations. When old works are inspired by new ideas in this way, musical boundaries disappear.

lautten compagney BERLIN

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Further information: Price: 20 EUR/ reduced 10 EUR. Please book your ticket in advance online or at the box office in the foyer. Musical introduction at 6 pm in the Mechanical Arena in the foyer. Public discussion from approx. 8:30 p.m. in Hall 2. Language: German. Location: Hall 2, ground floor.