SOUNDTRACKS - STUDIO DAN

Thomas Wally: Being Karl Dieter. A music theater performance (2024), UA, 90'

Text: Thomas Wally. Literary references to Thomas Mann, Haruki Murakami and Virginia Woolf Studio Dan Xizi Wang, conductor

 A commission by Studio Dan. With the kind support of the BMKOES and the SKE-Fonds

19.15, Introduction: Gunter Schneider in conversation with Thomas Wally

 

New Music on the Couch is the ambiguous title of Thomas Wally's series on Ö1. The sofa is of course a suitable place for listening to music from the radio. But the couch is also the psychoanalyst's couch, and that's where it gets down to business. Just like in Wally's show, in which he has been analyzing selected pieces from the 20th and 21st centuries since 2021 - sharp, insightful and entertaining. From Bartók and Webern to Boulez and Ligeti to Haas and Saunders, many big names have already given us a glimpse into their compositional depths. Now Wally is bringing the concept to the stage - but this time with music that does not exist in this form. It only exists in fully composed coexistence with the analysis. This becomes the actual work. In dissected excerpts, Thomas Wally takes on the piece as narrator together with the twelve-member Viennese ensemble Studio Dan. The fictional work is inspired by literary descriptions of music: Virginia Woolf's The String Quartet, in which she describes the stream of consciousness of a person in a concert audience; Charlie Parker plays Bossa Nova by Haruki Murakami; and Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, including some invented compositions by the protagonist, composer Adrian Leverkühn. There are said to have once been musicology seminars in which only analysis and no music at all was heard. With Thomas Wally, the two go together wonderfully. And just like on the Freudian couch, these insights into deeper layers can lead to a better understanding and more enjoyment of music - that is Wally's goal.