2004
Exhibition
«From Point A to Point B »
Connections and Passages in Music, with a Trailer on Musical Traffic
An Exhibition of Reproductions from the Paul Sacher Foundation
3 to 12 November 2004
From 3 to 12 November 2004 the «Trans-it»
International Music Festival of the ISCM mounted concerts in various
cities of Switzerland. Delegates from all over the world, members
of the Swiss chapter of the ISCM, and interested concert-goers were
transported between the venues by a "sound train." One
carriage on the train carried an exhibition entitled «From
Point A to Point B ...: Connections and Passages in Music, with
a Trailer on Musical Traffic.» The exhibition consisted of
color reproductions of manuscripts selected from the rich holdings
of the Paul Sacher Foundation. The theme of the festival was reflected
in examples of the many ways that composers have confronted the
subject of transportation, including Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231
(1923) and György Kurtág's «Scene at the Station»
from his Kafka Fragments (1985-7). Other groups of documents reveal
aspects of overt or covert ties to historical models or starting
points, such as the allusions to Beethoven in Richard Strauss and
Mauricio Kagel, tributes to Schoenberg and Webern by Luigi Nono
and Henri Pousseur, or approaches to the classical string quartet
in the music of Béla Bartók, György Ligeti, and
Heinz Holliger. The exhibition was open to visitors on location
during its stopovers in Lugano, Winterthur, Basle, La Chaux-de-Fonds,
Biel, Lausanne, Geneva, and Aarau.