Ultima 2018: Migration – People and Music in Flux
By Rob Young
Around 250 million people – 3.3 per cent of the population – are currently in a state of migration somewhere on our planet. More humans are now on the move, displaced by war, climate change, poverty or in search of a better life, than at any time in history. Global displacement is at a record high.
To be in a state of migration is to be in a state of change. The desire to abandon home is usually triggered when the conditions at home become intolerable for some reason. Change causes migration, and the act of migration causes change at the destination. Societies may be pressurised, or enriched when outsiders become a part of it. But they cannot escape being altered by the process.
Ultima 2018 responds to the current question of migration with a programme that both addresses the problem of migration directly, and incorporates displacement in a more abstract sense. Composers and artists across the whole cultural field are confronting the issue, and our opening day begins by asking the audience to nomadically follow a series of events from Marie Skeie’s flexible map of Fortress Europe drawn in coins, to Savina Yannatou’s Wandering Stories, whose colourful songs and movements are taken from direct experience of the refugee camps on Greek islands.
Migration takes many forms, both internal and external. We can observe it as instinctual behaviour in animals, birds and fish, as they seek the ideal conditions for life. Humans seek the same, but mass movement is usually the result of external pressure. War has always made the ground unstable. In the 1940s, German dada artist Kurt Schwitters took refuge in Norway and later in the north of England to escape a Nazi regime that classified works such as his sound poem Ursonate as ‘degenerate’. Ultima will present this work in a European premiere of the 2017 version by South African multi-artist William Kentridge. Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects that are most often framed in narrowly defined terms.
At the same time as Schwitters, Iannis Xenakis was fighting alongside the Greek resistance movement against hostile Italian forces; he later fled illegally to Paris where he evolved into one of the most groundbreaking post-war contemporary composers. More recently, Lebanese free improviser Mazen Kerbaj has relocated from the war damaged city of Beirut – where he has become the figurehead for a committed scene of radical artists – to Berlin, whose status as a refuge for young artists, it could be argued, is similar to that of Paris in the early 20th century.
The content of pieces by Savina Yannatou, Eva Reiter and Lasse Thoresen during Ultima directly reflects the displacement experience, and examines cultural difference, from a number of different angles. Whether it’s musical settings of voices of the fleeing boat people who wash up on the shores of Greek islands, or the hardships of Iranian women under repressive religious regimes from the 19th century as well as the present day, some of the causes and effects of a historically troubled region are represented.
In a globalised world, some make an active choice to become a migrant. Mika Vainio, the Finnish electronic musician and sound artist who died in 2017 aged 53, left his home in Turku to become a nomadic musician, living in Barcelona, Berlin and, at the end, Oslo. He took his extreme techno frequencies all over the world including locations as remote as Easter Island, both solo and with his Pan Sonic duo.
At the other end of the sonic scale, Chinese soundtrack composer Tan Dun has travelled in both space and time. Although intentionally known for his soundtracks to films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, his core compositions draw sharp lines between ancient and modern China, referencing China’s prehistory juxtaposing antique folk instruments with digital processing. Like anyone born before the early 1980s, Tan Dun is a ‘digital migrant’ – growing up in the pre-internet world – but to that he adds the fact of having immigrated from the Maoist era of communist China to the economic and cultural tiger of the 21st century.
Similar acts of imaginative time travel – emigration through the fourth dimension – can be heard within Ultima in, for instance, Kari Slaatsveen and Christian Eggen’s collaboration with the Oslo Sinfonietta, The Idea of 2018. Our own present day is viewed from the imagined perspective of a century into the future. Bent Sørensen’s thoughtfully programmed concert marking his 60th birthday with Det norske kammerorkester takes us through a daily cycle, weaving his own morning and nocturnal music with pieces by Haydn and Mozart. Experimental group Lemur wander through the architectural replicas of Oslo flats in the National Museum, sounding out living spaces from successive decades.
Whenever the status quo is infiltrated by alien influences, nothing can stay the same. That is the inescapable fact about immigration, and it applies to equally to art and culture as well as to societies. Multiculturalism stimulates musical hybrids. Composer Jon Øivind Ness infects the formality of classical music with the anarchy of pop, while Erlend Apneseth electrifies traditional Norwegian folk in a shotgun marriage with improvised rock.
Jan St. Werner of Mouse On Mars has swung between music scenes for 25 years, equally comfortable in pounding club environments, concentrated sound art spaces, or the scholarly worlds of STEIM and the Fine Arts Academy in Nuremberg. The stated aim of international ensemble Zeitkratzer is to revitalise contemporary music by injecting elements of noise, electronica, jazz and non-classical avant garde techniques, and finding outside collaborators known for their disrespect for tradition.
Zeitkratzer’s fearless spirit forms part of this year’s Ultima finale, where the star of the show is the pioneering American artist Laurie Anderson. She provides the perfect example of a digital nomad, migrating between sonic art, chart hits, spoken word, film and multimedia performance.
From her early epic stage work United Statesto The Language of the Future, the ongoing project that she’s bringing to Oslo in a new version, Anderson has discovered entertaining formats for thinking across time, space, history, geography, gender and politics. Hers are as much wandering stories as those in the songs of Savina Yannatou, and a reminder that movement, and the embrace of constant change, is a quality that humanity should never be afraid of.