Talk in German + Performance with voice & live scoring
Guest: Charlotte Hug
Moderation: Mathias Maschat
Swiss artist Charlotte Hug has created a new genre of transdisciplinary, spatial-scenic music and art with her innovative musical-visual performances at special locations and her spatial scores with son icons (visual music). As an extreme musician with voice and viola, she specializes in hybrid sound mixtures. This creates her own unmistakable sound language. This is also reflected in her statement: “The viola is my voice – singing is my instrument. Together they form a third element.”, which is the starting point and thread of the conversation with Mathias Maschat in the imp[or]trait series. It is the last part of the current VOICE focus in the Denkraum Improvisation and, against the background of the universality of Hug’s approaches, a preview of the symposium on practitioners’ perspectives on improvisation that will take place at the beginning of February.
For Charlotte Hug, her work emerges in the charge and the resonance present in the body, in sound, drawing, interior and exterior space, between disciplines, digital and analogue media, places, continents – always between people. Improvisation plays a crucial role. For her, the most successful and gratifying improvisations are always accompanied by a certain loss of autonomy and by transformation. The talk will explore these and other aspects of Charlotte Hug’s thinking.
Charlotte Hug trained her voice as part of a classical singing degree, but she also draws inspiration from the high notes of her viola, as she said in an interview: “I do the imitation of the viola and I just love this very high sound, and if I try I can do this with my voice as well. So the viola is actually my singing teacher. This is such a liberated language, and the singing is like the wild non-educated voice of me.”
Hug holds degrees in music and fine arts, has won various awards and artist residencies in Berlin, Paris, London, Johannesburg and Shanghai, was Artiste Etoile at the Lucerne Festival and has been nominated for the 2019 Classic:Next Innovation Award. 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 three solo CDs on international labels. A long-standing member of the London Improvisers Orchestra, Hug has developed open concepts for the LIO and 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. Besides exhibitions in galleries and museums, she continues her busy concert schedule as an improviser and soloist with voice and viola.
In addition to the imp[or]trait talk at the exploratorium, Charlotte Hug presents two of her projects in the concert series biegungen im ausland the day after the talk (2 December, 21:00):
Lisa Ullén / Nina de Heney / Charlotte Hug: Lisa Ullén – piano; Nina de Heney – double bass; Charlotte Hug – viola, voice
Stellari String Quartet: Philipp Wachsmann – violin, Charlotte Hug – viola, voice; Marcio Mattos – cello, John Edwards – double bass
http://www.charlottehug.ch
In cooperation with biegungen im ausland
Recording: https://youtube.com/live/GmEj4IC72LU
