The dance in music

It is now good manners for the large and small dance companies in Berlin, but also for the companies that only give guest performances at the Theater am Halleschen Ufer and the Hebbeltheater, to have a dance performance accompanied by a video installation. The fact that this is so fashionable at the moment (as in spoken theatre) is surely also due to the fact that the necessary equipment, the cameras, the editing computers, the projectors have become so affordable that even low-budget productions can afford them. The same applies to the sound, the noises, the music that usually comes out of the loudspeakers, physically present musicians are rather the exception and probably too expensive. Adapting the composition of the music to the aesthetic conditions of the dance, to the conditions of the whole setting of dance, light, video and sound, is not uncomplicated with the means of digital sound processing, but at least it has become easier, so that hardly any dance productions of recent times resort to a collage of prefabricated music recordings, but commission a composition themselves. At least in this way, electroacoustic music, which otherwise enjoys rather little popularity, finds access to a wider audience.

The special thing about this kind of dance music is that it doesn't want to be heard as a sound-only event; it actually only makes sense in interaction with the other media. It goes without saying that you have to compose differently for this interplay than if you only have the music in your head. How different, how exactly different, is what Uli Aumüller tries to find out in conversation with a number of Berlin composers. And some of this music evokes dance in the head, so it's enough to switch on the radio to be there.

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