IN Big Bang Wagner (華格納大爆炸), three artists from Taiwan and Germany celebrate the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth by not paying homage to the German composer.
“We are not interested in Wagner as an authority. Instead, we try to see what he was nourishing his work with. Where were the sources of his ideas? Since he thought so big and so fundamentally, he had a very fundamental source,” says Moritz Gagern, a Berlin-based composer who contributes an orchestral piece to Big Bang Wagner.
As it turns out, the source is Norse mythology. In his operatic works, Wagner often borrowed and transformed the myths of northern Europe, which, like mythologies in all human cultures, describe the creation of the world.
Photo courtesy of Taipei Arts Festival
“We started with Wagner but end up with an exploration of the origin of things,” notes writer, theater director and curator Jade Chen (陳玉慧).
For Chen, words are the prime origin of human things. She attempts to examine the possibilities of words and her relation to them by putting herself under the viewer’s scrutiny. She will type in front of viewers to give them a glimpse into what goes on in a writer’s mind. Her words, sentences and fragmented text will be projected onto the screen, alongside real-time interactions on Facebook.
Taking Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung as the starting point, German visual and performance artist Anne Tismer uses large handmade objects and movable sculptures to depict the Norse myths behind Wagner’s epic work. From Tismer’s viewpoint, the mythology is a collection of knowledge explaining natural and cosmic phenomena and the Big Bang theory.
Photo courtesy of Taipei Arts Festival
Meanwhile, at the open performance space where audiences are free to move around, Gagern makes his only explicit reference to Wagner by realizing the idea of an “invisible orchestra” that shuts out musicians from view. The Quanta Philharmonic Orchestra (廣藝愛樂管弦樂團) will play at the balcony on the second floor that’s not accessible to the audience.
The contemporary German composer says his work, like Tismer’s, is inspired by the Big Bang theory. The underlying structure of his music follows precisely “the physical process of the creation of the universe” in which matter spreads equally after the Big Bang. Galaxies evolve later, formed by gravity and other forces.
“Music is also a physical process … It is clear that it could also be a process where you start from the first element, where you have equal spread and no pitch. It is white noise, which means that all frequencies spread equally,” he explains. “I don’t have pitch in my composition until I reach the point in the story of the universe where there are suns, stars and galaxies. I start at the moment that you could say it is before music. But it is not because white noise is extremely important in music.”
Photo courtesy of Taipei Arts Festival
To Gagern, the white noise of air conditioners that he finds omnipresent in Taiwan musically reflects the creation of matter. Repetitive, steady, continuous and with no contrasting structure, the sound of a motor is similar to the noise of a planetary system, which is also a repetitive system, according to the composer.
But even though that white noise seems like the sound of the universe, an orchestra playing white noise is most similar to the sound of the universe. “The sound of the universe is even closer to the orchestra playing air conditioner because the universe is not a machine. It has lots of chaos,” Gagern says.
“It doesn’t mean I try to describe the sound of the universe. I take the idea in order to find initial musical element. For me in a way it works, because I am much more familiar with noise now than before,” he adds.
The production is in Mandarin, English and German with Chinese subtitles. A techno after-party will be held at the same spot featuring Lin Jing-yao (林經堯), a new-media artist and composer, making electronic sounds inspired by Wagner’s music.
IN 2002 Thomas Hertog received an e-mail summoning him to the office of his mentor Stephen Hawking. The young researcher rushed to Hawking’s room at Cambridge. “His eyes were radiant with excitement,” Hertog recalls. Typing on the computer-controlled voice system that allowed the cosmologist to communicate, Hawking announced: “I have changed my mind. My book, A Brief History of Time, is written from the wrong perspective.” Thus one of the biggest-selling scientific books in publishing history, with worldwide sales credited at more than 10 million, was consigned to the waste bin by its own author. Hawking and Hertog then began working on
It’s a fairly common scenario: A property has been foreclosed and sold at auction on behalf of a bank, but it remains occupied. The former owner may be refusing to leave, because he has nowhere else to go. Humans or animals may be squatting inside. Or — and this happens often enough that many foreclosure specialists have come across it — the stay-ons are gods. On June 1, 2020, ETToday reported on one such case in New Taipei City. Following the sale of a foreclosed apartment in Sinjhuang District (新莊), a second auction, to dispose of movable items left inside, was
Last week Vice President William Lai (賴清德) announced that he would be a candidate in the party’s presidential primary. As Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman, Lai is widely understood to have the inside track on the presidential nomination. Lai’s comments consisted of the usual DPP noise in national elections, focusing on China. “We must be united to strengthen Taiwan, stick to the democratic camp and ensure Taiwan’s security” in the face of increased Chinese “saber rattling” and “unscrupulous diplomatic bullying,” he said. He also made a vague nod to the economy, the environment (green energy) and supply chains. Whenever his name is
During the 1980s, sex symbol Lu Hsiao-fen (陸小芬) was known for her bold behavior and suggestive performances. But in in Day Off (本日公休), her first film role in 23 years, Liu, 66, plays kind-hearted yet stubborn hairdresser A-Rui, who struggles with social and generational change. Operating an old-school barber shop from her home, A-Rui has had the same customers for decades. “You’re in charge of all of our heads,” one quips. A-Rui prides herself on knowing exactly what each customer wants without needing to ask, and her shop is also a place for locals to socialize. She personally calls each