“My work arises from the tension and resonance between body, sound, drawing, interior and exterior space, between disciplines, digital and analogue media, places, continents – always between people.” (Charlotte Hug)
“When you play in a group, everyone has to bring their perceptions into resonance with each other.” (Lê Quan Ninh)
The Symposium: Improvisation und Resonanz opens with the 27th edition of the exploratorium’s Sound & Lecture series, featuring a performance by violist, vocalist and winner of the 2025 Swiss Music Prize Charlotte Hug together with percussionist Lê Quan Ninh. Both are luminaries of free improvisation and have set standards with their independent and distinctive language. Both are not only outstanding musical personalities – with their lucid ideas on improvisation, they have also set inspiring benchmarks for the study of improvisation. After the performance, they will talk to Mathias Maschat about their practice and their thoughts on resonance and improvisation.
Charlotte Hug drew significant inspiration for her artistic work from her engagement with Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance. She considers it crucial when improvising to adopt an “open attitude of resonant relationships”. She enters into resonant relationships not only with other people, but also with the environment in general, specifically with powerful natural sites such as glaciers or primeval forests. For her, resonance is never stable, but rather a continuous process of change. Unavailability and transformation, as essential characteristics of resonance, are fundamental conditions for her “most successful and joyful improvisations”. Not least, her solo album, released in April 2025, bears the paradigmatic title In Resonance With Elsewhere.
Lê Quan Ninh also talks about how, in group improvisation, everyone must attune their perceptions to one another, indeed “bring them into resonance with one another”. The degree of openness in such a collective approach is crucial for achieving the greatest possible freedom and for intensifying everyone’s perceptions. Furthermore, interaction with the resonant qualities of his instruments is of central importance to Lê Quan. In a very basic acoustic understanding of resonance, he says that one must “love the vibration and not just think about it”: “A wave catches you, even if only for a moment, as if you were becoming a poet, that is, capable of opening enough gates within yourself to receive it with full force.”
Charlotte Hug holds degrees in music and fine arts, has won various awards (most recently the Swiss Music Prize 2025) and artist residencies in Berlin, Paris, London, Johannesburg and Shanghai, was Artiste Etoile at the Lucerne Festival and was nominated for the Classic:Next Innovation Award in 2019. Hug’s music is documented in an extensive discography, including collaborations with Elliott Sharp, Maggie Nicols, Lucas Niggli, several CDs with the London Stellari String Quartet, her own choral and orchestral works, and four solo CDs on international labels. Hug is a long-standing member of the London Improvisers Orchestra, developed open concepts for the LIO and has worked with various improvisers’ orchestras such as the KIO in Krakow and the SPIO in São Paulo. Her works and spatial scores are performed by international ensembles, choirs and orchestras as well as interdisciplinary ensembles. In addition to exhibitions in galleries and museums, she is a prolific concert performer as an improviser, soloist with voice and viola, composer and conductor of her own works at major festivals in Europe, North and Latin America, Canada, South Africa, Russia and China.
Lê Quan Ninh is a classically trained percussionist who has been active in contemporary music and free improvisation since the early 1980s. As a founding member of the renowned percussion quartet Hêlios (1986–2012), he has collaborated with numerous composers, including Georges Aperghis, Vinko Globokar and Kaija Saariaho. In 2006, he founded the ensemble ]h[iatus with cellist Martine Altenburger, whose members are both performers and improvisers. Ninh volunteers on the artistic advisory board of the Le Bruit de la Musique festival and the Association Ryoanji, which is dedicated to promoting contemporary music. He is a sought-after improviser, has played in permanent formations with Peter Kowald, Michel Doneda and Daunik Lazro, among others, and is currently active in the trio Krči+N with Loris Binot and Émilie Škrijelj. He maintains close ties to the dance scene. In autumn 2024, La Voie Négative, the expanded, bilingual version of his texts on improvisation, was published. Since June 2024, he has been president of the Sonatura association, which brings together French-speaking audio naturalists.
19:00: soundwalk with Thomas Gerwin
