An Unstaged Opera
Kunstbau Lenbachhaus, München
December 2-7, 2025
The work An Unstaged Opera is a ten-channel composition that presents itself as an endless rehearsal—an idea for an opera that will never be performed. Its acts unfold through shifting variations of choral singing, poetic fragments, synthesizers, and piano, with each sonic element embodying its own presence within the space. Every rehearsal becomes a site-specific improvisation: architecture, audience, and multi-channel movement shape the sonic performance, while time and space act as materials that continuously redefine the work’s staging.
The Kunstbau’s distinctive architecture amplifies the piece, transforming the venue into a resonant body, where space itself functions as a projecting device. Two monolithic loudspeaker systems articulate the environment. Within this immersive setting, they evoke an atmosphere reflecting sacred architectures, where boundaries between electronic and human, ancient and contemporary, dissolve. The opera’s sonic dramaturgy centers on the sustained resonance of the synthesizer—conceived as a contemporary bordun—accompanied by micro-variations, moments of distortion, and percussive textures that shape the work’s acts. Drawing freely on modal qualities of medieval music, the electronic drone extends and deepens the choir’s polyphony. The open tonalities of the modal modes mirror the structural openness of the poem Towers, which serves as the libretto for the opera. In abstract and sensorial terms, the text explores bodily experiences of rupture, release, and fragile clarity, allowing language to unfold with a sense of timeless and spatial expansiveness.
An Unstaged Opera inhabits the threshold between rehearsal and realization—an ephemeral stage experiment in which sound, space, time, and perception interact. The work is inspired by the minimalist composition Tower of Meaning (1983) by Arthur Russell.
Lenbachhaus invited Sound and Experiment to develop sound pieces conceived for presentation in Kunstbau. Following the exhibition Dan Flavin – Untitled (for Ksenija), this project explores pseudo-durational form, iterative structures, microvariation, pattern, perceptual fringes, and compositional flatness, extending to acoustic simulation, room modes, excitation frequencies, and audible reflections. The works consider approaches to sound grounded in difference, repetition, and reduction, as well as process-based composition and its impact on listening and spatiotemporal perception. Instead of dramatic development, the pieces focus on apparent stasis, where change arises through structural logic.
Curated by Johannes Michael Stanislaus