Judith Fliedl is a performer who has pivoted from standard violin repertoire with a light seasoning of new music to a career balance that’s the other way around.
The Austrian, who is taking part in the Music Current festival in Dublin this week, always loved playing contemporary music. “But then you had to play a normal concert, and in the middle there was the contemporary piece so that the audience doesn’t leave. You had to play Brahms before or afterwards and Mozart beforehand.
“I did love contemporary music, though not as much then as now” – “then” being her time studying at the Mozarteum university, in Salzburg. She found it “weird” the way the repertoire balance was tilted towards the past.
The turning point came just before the Covid pandemic, when she got to work with Austria’s leading new-music ensemble, Klangforum Wien. “I studied with them and I totally fell in love, not only with the music but the whole approach to music making.
“It’s not only playing contemporary music, which can mean so many things, but the confrontation, the responsibility to create a concert, get in contact with the audience, and also the composers.
“It’s a different world, and I think, yeah, that’s totally where I belong. I’m extremely happy to be able to play so many concerts, work with so many different composers.
“I’m the biggest fan of contemporary music. And I see it as my mission to spread it to the world. So for six years now I’m completely in the new-music scene. So I’m playing new-music concerts maybe 80 per cent of the time, and then for the other 20 per cent I do some classical concerts.”
One of the big attractions of new music is that most of the time you can make direct contact with the composers.
“I would have been interested to get to know Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms. Who wouldn’t be? You get to create something together with someone. For me that seems more like getting in contact with what music can be. It’s a living process.
“And there’s a funny story. I didn’t meet Mozart, but a few months ago I got the chance to play on Mozart’s concert violin. Oh, wow! Somehow I have the feeling that I got to know him a bit. It was the violin he used to play when he was living in Vienna and wrote very famous pieces.”
The 1764 violin was made in Treviso by Pietro Antonio Dalla Costa, and when Fliedl played it in New York she decided that she “needed to play contemporary music on this violin, something which I think has not happened that often. So I decided to play a piece by Beat Furrer,” his 1993 Lied, slow, spaced out and meditative in a Morton Feldmanesque way. “A very beautiful, interesting experience as well,” she says.
Furrer, a composer and conductor who was one of the founders of Klangforum Wien, will be in Ireland for Louth Contemporary Music Society’s Coming Together festival, on June 19th and 20th.
“One of the many things I learned from doing so much contemporary music,” she says, “is to play old music in a different way, too. It is, as I said, a living process. It is something you create in the moment and you have to be very much aware of that.
“I totally adore playing classical music, but there are so many boxes you have to tick, so many things people tell you about how it should be, sometimes without even knowing why. So many restrictions.”
Some people assume that the pleasures of old music are greater than those of new music and that the demands of new music are much higher than those of old music. Fliedl doesn’t quite see it that way. For her, “new music means freedom. It means being individual. You can be who you are. There are so many possibilities of creating something. And that’s what music for me is about.
“So it’s actually the other way around. I have the feeling that new music is easier, even though you have to work to get into the new structures and the different styles of sound production. It’s like learning new languages. Of course, if it’s never been written before, it’s something totally new. I find that very fulfilling and exciting.
“In classical music you have to learn something which has been written and played for so many years already. Creating and being your own voice is sometimes not so important. But with new music you can really be yourself, put something meaningful into the world with your own different voice.”
What will she be doing at Music Current this week? She chooses to talk first about her workshop rather than her concert. The festival describes it simply as a workshop “on listening”. She explains that it’s about audience involvement, “creating new spaces together with the audience.
“I’m currently doing a doctorate at the University of Graz, about what listening really can be, feeling together, connecting together. Is the audience in a passive role or is it something else? I believe there is a big power in creating something together with the audience.”
She wants to engage with the challenges facing people who find new music “too intellectual”, who feel that they don’t know how to listen to it. “My main goal is to get to the emotional part of perception, which could be listening not only with your ears but with the whole body.”
And as an interpreter she wants to find out if and how the audience, or just a single listener, “can influence what’s happening with the music”.
She has done “one-to-one sessions with many different audience members, from 18 to 80 years old, from ‘I totally hate new music’ to ‘I adore going to Klangforum concerts.’ Everything was there.
“I found that intimate listening, closeness, creates a different space, a different room of perception. I can play music on my own. But if there’s someone else listening, if it’s you or my mom or someone I’ve never met, it will be different.
“That’s what interests me. And contemporary music is just perfect, because people have never heard it before. They don’t have a structure in their mind. They don’t have ideas of how it should be, it’s so open that it can be anything.”
The workshop, she says, is “about creating spaces together as human beings. And what I’ve been finding out is that contemporary music was not a problem any more of perception but actually a way of connecting and getting in dialogue with each other.”
Fliedl has been doing her research for three and a half years; she expects to finish her doctorate in October. But only the doctorate, not the research. “I think I’m going to be a researcher for hopefully the rest of my life.”
Her hour-long solo concert opens with a late-20th-century classic, Jean-Claude Risset’s Variants, from 1994, which uses what the festival website calls “classic live electronic instruments and effects” and Fliedl says is “a super delicate, virtuosic piece”.
The “radical new technological interventions” of Benedikt Alphart’s Ultraviolin, which is receiving its world premiere, will see her play a duet with “ultrasounds” created by the composer. Gráinne Mulvey’s Echium Pininana (Tower of Jewels) is written for violin and synchronised “tape”. Belma Beslic-Gal’s Nowhere Plain (Utopia Planitia) has electronics and synchronised video. And Alexander Schubert’s Weapon of Choice has “real time” interaction through a motion sensor and video.
Weapon of Choice, which was written in 2009, creates special challenges because of its age. A motion sensor on the performer’s hand generates the video imagery. “It’s a great piece,” says Fliedl, “but it’s a bit complicated and tricky because it’s already a few years old. So it has to be done with old computers and stuff like that.”
It may be a solo concert, but there will actually be more key people off the stage than on it, making sure that the technology works smoothly. There are credits for Fergal Dowling (electronics), Fergal McKeown (sound), Chris Keogh (video projection), Aidan Whelan (lighting) and Paul Lynch (stage management).
Judith Fliedl’s On Listening workshop is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, on Wednesday, April 8th, at 3pm; her concert is on Thursday, April 9th, at 6pm. Music Current runs from Wednesday, April 8th, until Saturday, April 11th