In the Engine Room of Culture

Organisers usually guide the fate of the festival in the background. They control and coordinate the production, create the organisational conditions, negotiate with artists and agencies, form the interfaces internally and externally, and much more. In a conversation with musicologist Dr. Barbara Barthelmes, Ilse Müller talks about what has shaped her professional life and how political events such as reunification and the developments and changes at the Berliner Festspiele have affected her work and her life. What makes the conversation special is that at that point, Barbara Barthelmes had herself been an essential part of the Berliner Festspiele for many years. First, as a freelance writer, then as a music editor in the communications department, she was responsible for countless publications of MaerzMusik, Musikfest Berlin and Jazzfest Berlin. She wrote many texts and multimedia contributions, conducted numerous interviews and, as a researcher, lecturer and publicist, can look back on a wealth of experience in the field of (contemporary) music. At the beginning of the year, and shortly after the interview was conducted, a new phase of life began for Barbara Barthelmes. MaerzMusik – Festival für Zeitfragen 2022 was the first edition in a very long time without these two highly esteemed and formative colleagues, who remain present at the festival through this interview.

Barbara Barthelmes (Ba): Today, most people know you as the organisational director of MaerzMusik. How did it all begin?

Ilse Müller (IMü): I studied at Humboldt University in Berlin in the seventies, where I was musically active in the university choir and, thus, had many encounters with the music and theatre scene. Then the usual: Diploma, followed by research studies in musicology as part of a working group on "researching the judgement behaviour of diverse social groups towards music" – as it turned out, a somewhat questionable undertaking in many respects. The end was clear and unclear at the same time. A brief interlude at the Composers' Association brought me unexpectedly and quite directly into contact with orchestral and chamber music – not only with that of numerous GDR composers, but it also awakened my decided interest in the artistic productions of the Western avant-garde.

Ba: What came next?

IMü: With a small child learning the cello and a husband with a full-time job at the Komische Oper, I needed, most importantly, good time management and decided to continue freelancing. I found this to be an extremely creative time in every respect, with mainly editorial work for television: Music journals for the Dresden Music Festival, the Berlin Festival, and numerous concert recordings, among others, as part of the 750th-anniversary celebrations in Berlin (East). And above all, time for the family and our daughter's musical education, which was very important to us.
At the same time, I had taken over the editing of the programme books for the then already ten-day Music Biennials or GDR Music Days. I was also able to develop a new design for them with a committed graphic artist. We are talking about the GDR Music Days (since 1972) and the Berlin Music Biennale (since 1967), organised by the Association of Composers and Musicologists (VKM) of the GDR as alternating festivals for New Music in Berlin.

Ba: Can you tell us something about the time when the Music Biennale came "under the umbrella" of the Berliner Festspiele, i.e., the period between the fall of the Wall in 1989 and 1991?

IMü: I can only partially reconstruct and report on that. The programme for the 1989 Music Biennale already existed, and it took place with this programme. Planning for 1991 had probably already begun. Of course, the question was now what would happen to the festival? At that time, there were many initiatives and a small circle of musicologists, journalists and composers, including Heike Hoffmann, Gisela Nauck, Frank Schneider and Eberhardt Klemm, as well as composers such as Friedrich Goldmann, Friedrich Schenker and Georg Katzer. As far as I know from stories, they were in discussion and intensive exchange with Ulrich Eckhardt, the artistic director of the Berliner Festspiele.

In this phase of upheaval, Ulrich Eckhardt acted both as moderator and mediator. With all his years of experience in communication and diplomacy between East and West, he managed to politically "save" this festival at the right moment by taking it into the Berliner Festspiele association. Initially, on a fiduciary basis, he managed to organise a new programme and personnel orientation so that it would not be "thrown on the rubbish heap of history."

Ba: And was that a culture clash for you?

IMü: I didn't move from one institution to another. In the meantime, I was still active in the "new music scene," in a small group of people who wanted to release a new art magazine – intended as a productive new approach to the magazine "Musik und Gesellschaft." Behind this was a high demand for quality in content and external appearance, photography, and graphics. In the end, "MOTIV. Musik in Gesellschaft anderer Künste" (Music in the Society of Other Arts) was born – circulation approx. One thousand copies, black and white, with photo series and thematic focuses, current music and cultural studies contributions, reviews. All of this was graphically noble, printed, but, unfortunately, far too expensive. It had practically no chance of gaining a promising position on the (Western) distribution market of printed media at the beginning of the nineties, finding subscribers, etc.

Ba: Obviously, a change of perspective was in the air in society at that time. The "positionen," founded by Gisela Nauck and Armin Köhler in 1989, had similar ideas. And Helga de la Motte-Haber was addressing music and its relationship to the other arts as a chair at the TU in West Berlin at precisely that time.

IMÜ: The magazine's name was "MOTIV. Music in the company of other arts." That also meant focusing on dance, music theatre, jazz and another genre: classical and experimental photography. I then went to the festival with a bundle of booklets under my arm and asked if we could display them, offer them, in the ticket shop or at the festival weeks, today's "Musikfest." Those were my first steps towards the Berliner Festspiele, whose offices were then still opposite the Gedächtniskirche, in the "Bikinihaus."

Ba: What was their first reaction?

IMü: It was really an overwhelming experience for me. Many people experienced this reunification process as very painful. But I came to the Berliner Festspiele and was welcomed with open arms and a certain curiosity.

Ba: Do you look back on that time wistfully today?

IMü: No, I'm not nostalgic, but looking back, I appreciate that time enormously. It was a formative phase for me, certainly my most creative time and at the same time an enormous challenge, with an impressive confidence boost. Completely new working methods confronted me: lean, unbureaucratic, content-oriented, independent, collegial. The festival teams were small: the artistic direction of the Music Biennale was in the hands of Heike Hoffmann, and there was another position – mine – for the organisational tasks, the connection to the editorial office, press, public relations – as it was called back then. The cooperation worked on call and at eye level. I had to learn later that it takes a long time to get answers and that it can take forever until decisions are made. The fields of work were fluid to a certain extent, but it was clear who was in charge of what and no one interfered in other's competencies.

Ba: So you were responsible for the editorial work at the Music Biennale. Were you also involved in the organisation of the festival at that time?

IMü: In 1990/91, I was allowed to be in charge of editing the Festival Journal, initially on a freelance basis. But at that time, I was already able to work on the first book publication of the four-volume series accompanying the festival, "New Music in Divided Germany." The first volume, distributed by Henschel Verlag, was published in time for the 1993 festival and illuminated a decade of German-German history of the development of New Music.

In 1992, when Heike Hoffmann became the artistic director of the Konzerthaus but retained the direction of the Music Biennale, she asked me if I could take over and coordinate the organisation at the Festival. And with that, "the die was cast." Six months earlier, after a long "intensive probationary period," I took up the only half-time position on the Society of Friends of the Berlin Philharmonic board, and it was not easy for me to embark on a new path. But of course, I was now very interested – after all, it was exactly what I had been looking for: on the one hand, the content-related work up to and including the scientific and editorial collaboration on a book production – the three volumes "New Music in Divided Germany" – and on the other hand, the organisation of the Festival with all its facets.

Ba: What was your field of work?

IMü: In addition to editing, communication and organisation, I was also allowed to manage the budget. When we started in 1991, we were a third-party project and received our basic funding from the Stiftung Kulturfonds, the Capital Cultural Fund. There have been repeated attempts to include the festival entirely in the budget of the Berliner Festspiele. However, this was administratively difficult and succeeded with the transition to a one-year mode, as far as I remember.
Due to the complexity of the KBB, which was newly formed in 2001 through the Capital Cultural Treaty, the merger of the various houses (Berliner Festspiele, Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlinale) into the "Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH" and thus 100% financing by the federal government, but also due to the increasing digitalisation and increased division of labour of the processes, the activity profiles and leeway of the individual, organisational heads also changed. They became increasingly smaller and much more administrative.

Ba: Perhaps a word about the content of the Music Biennale after the fall of the wall?

IMü: In 1989/90, it was clear that things could not stay the way they were. New and unifying programmes had to be developed to broaden the focus, to open up, to attract new audiences and alternative venues, and at the same time to show what was available in the way of new music, current productions and lines of development: An enormous number of world premieres were initiated, composition commissions were awarded to young and established composers. That was one side of it. On the other hand, Ulrich Eckhardt suggested integrating a retrospective into the festival programme to clarify: We are now together in one country. Let's look back; what has each individual part of the country done? Where are the overlaps and significant differences – and not just in new music, but looking beyond the borders – in the visual arts, film, and society.
This perspective led to each subsequent edition of the Music Biennale, looking back at a decade of primarily German-German musical development: in 1993 at the 1950s, in 1995 at the 1960s, in 1997 at the 1970s and in 1999 at the 1980s. In 2001, these retrospectives converged in the united country and in the end, the four-part compendium "New Music in Divided Germany" was also available – from today's point of view, an essential source of documents, texts, visual materials, literature references from these decades, when there was neither the Internet nor Wikipedia nor extensive archives.

Ba: And the stimulus for this series came from Ulrich Eckhardt?

IMü:  Yes, I think so. It indeed came from him and also from Heike Hoffmann. I also found this contemporary view of artistic development processes, events, socio-political connotations and discourses enormously important. Because the texts that are printed there, the critiques, the statements, preserve in their way a historical knowledge that can also disappear very quickly if it is not "recorded."
Of course, today, one can also look critically at these selections and perspectives and missing parts. And, of course, this compendium is also indebted to its time, in a sense a genuine contemporary document. Conceptually, one had to decide on a path. Otherwise, the whole series would certainly not have come about.

Ba: The way you describe it, was this situation of upheaval at the beginning of the nineties a happy constellation?

IMü: Yes, the fortunate circumstance was that the positive sides were in focus, even though the critical perspective also played an important role. You can see that in the selection of works by composers who had previously had endless difficulties. I'm not only thinking of Goldmann, Schenker, Katzer or Bredemeyer but also of not-so-well-known names, for example, composers like Christfried Schmidt, by whom even last year a really big piece could finally be premiered – more than 30 years later, incredible!

Ba: You experienced the Music Biennale and then MaerzMusik, first under Matthias Osterwold and then under Berno Odo Polzer. What has changed there over time?

IMÜ: In this context, it is interesting to first talk about the institutionalisation of the festival as a whole. In the beginning, it was a clear third-party-funded project under the umbrella of the Berliner Festspiele. The Berliner Festspiele was a limited liability company financed by the federal and state governments. In addition, the Stiftung Kulturfonds provided one million D-marks every two years in the nineties for the realisation of the festival, including the book production – a great and indeed not easy cultural-political decision. The Festival itself also provided the working basis, the structures for the realisation of the Festival. We could use everything available for the other festivals – the whole "trappings" up to the office space. Ulrich Eckhardt tried, again and again, to institutionalise the Music Biennale, i.e., to include it in the budget of the Berliner Festspiele.

After a lengthy search and negotiations at the turn of the millennium, there was a pretty spectacular change: the Berliner Festspiele was able to move into its own building. They moved into the former Freie Volksbühne in Schaperstraße. They thus took over their own theatre, which was not only to become their home but which had to be established, revitalised and, above all, played in the Berlin cultural landscape. It was located "far to the west" of the city, in Wilmersdorf, which seemed incredibly distant and unknown to many Berliners – another new task and challenge for all of us!
In 2001, Joachim Sartorius took over as artistic director of the Berliner Festspiele. With him, there were significant changes in the structures, personnel, and festivals as a whole and also in the establishment of the Festival for New Music as an annual event under the new artistic direction of Matthias Osterwold.

He was the name giver for the now annual successor festival "MaerzMusik – Festival for Contemporary Music." From now on, there were changed financing modalities that offered the prerequisite for more complex programming and opening of the festival contents with new formats and made it possible also to develop music theatre productions or technically very complex projects in cooperation with other theatres, festivals, also for example the Hamburger Bahnhof, the Neue Nationalgalerie or other partners. Last but not least, these projects would not have been possible without the support we received from the cooperations and partnerships with embassies, cultural institutions, broadcasters, and external venues in the city. Under the leadership and thanks to the committed partnership thinking of Matthias Osterwold, the "tight purse" was significantly improved.

Looking back, the artistic directors Matthias Osterwold and Berno Odo Polzer felt that the ten-day festival, despite all efforts to save money, never had sufficient basic funding for the upcoming programme structures.
This became abundantly clear when Berno Odo Polzer took over as artistic director of MaerzMusik under the direction of Thomas Oberender in 2015.
Now, the ten-day festival, which has since been called "MaerzMusik – Festival für Zeitfragen" (MaerzMusic – Festival for Time Issues), interwove three different programme levels, which above all gave discourse a comparatively large amount of thematic space, thus creating a "festival within the festival."
At the end of each of the ten days, the finale was "The Long Now," the project at the Kraftwerk Berlin, which invited a large dynamic audience on a 30-hour imaginary journey through time. The audience interest was enormous and wide-ranging. However, this pushed the previous festival boundaries structurally and organisationally and above all, financially. It was a great idea with various partnerships. Still, it was no longer possible for our small organisational team and our colleagues in the Festspielhaus from the overlapping departments to manage it alone.

Ba: To what extent have these changes affected your work?

IMü: The festival structure – ten days with two weekends in March – always remained the same, but the dynamically changing content over many years showed early on that a "one-woman operation" could not last. In any case, there was temporary staff support for the organisation and realisation in the office and for the supervision of venues and artists before the festival began.
In this context, Ina Steffan came on board many, many years ago. She was to become one of the most important colleagues and still plays a leading role in the team today. Her permanent employment required a tough struggle for contractually acceptable conditions.
Due to the enormous additional workload caused by new applications for funding from the Capital Cultural Fund, the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Siemens Music Foundation and other funding sources, as well as EU-funded projects and international cooperations, a large part of everyone's workload (despite the development of new organisational strategies by the KBB management) shifted to administrative tasks and the digital self-administration of the festival. And this could not be done without an expertly trained, experienced and motivated staff!

But that would be a new, different topic, which is complex and would really go beyond the scope of this discussion.

Ba: Even though you mainly devoted yourself to the organisation, you were always involved in the content. I often came into your office; music was playing, you had the scores, your files on the composers and the works were treasure troves for the editors.
What was an outstanding experience for you in your 30 years at the Berliner Festspiele?

IMü:  Oh, there was really a lot – it's hard to choose. My work was primarily linked to the development processes of the individual programmes. In each edition, the question arose anew: can we manage it all and how will the artists react?

I still remember the performance of Helmut Lachenmann's "Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied" at the beginning of the 1990s, for which the Arditti Quartet was flown in and for which the musicians of the Konzerthausorchester – at that time it was still called the Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester – said: "I will never again be assigned to such services, I won't do it. So there was a big protest, but it was a memorable performance in the end. Many years later, Lachenmann returns. The constellations are completely different: the Berlin Symphony Orchestra is now called the Konzerthausorchester Berlin; it is enormously rejuvenated, the musicians are motivated, sitting on the edge of their chairs. Lachenmann sits next to them on stage and rehearses with them, sometimes demonstrating playing styles on the violin himself, "showing" exactly how his sounds are supposed to come about, and in the end, it's an incredible experience for everyone – it was "air," what we did there. These are great experiences, not only with the music but also in contact with the artists.

Another example was the complex cycle of works by Mark Andre. In 2009, we performed all three parts of the full-length work "...auf..." as a trilogy with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (various, changing groups of musicians in the great hall of the Philharmonie). In Donaueschingen, there was the premiere of the third part, which I attended. At the end of the Donaueschingen Music Days, we were sitting at the table with the composer Mark Andre and Reinhard Oechsler, the manager of the SWR Orchestra. I said enthusiastically, "If we could finally manage to put the whole thing together and perform it on one evening in Berlin in the Philharmonie, that would be a matter close to my heart. Of course, Oechsler and Andre agreed, especially since the Philharmonie would offer completely different spatial-acoustic possibilities. We then discussed this with Matthias Osterwold, who had also already thought in this direction. There was a congenial, incredibly moving, complete performance two years later.

I am also thinking of the impressive performance of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's "Requiem for a Young Poet" in 1995 with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden, various internationally renowned choirs and soloists in the Konzerthaus Berlin, where we converted half the hall, which was by no means standard practice at the time. Visitors queued across the Gendarmenmarkt for tickets at the box office.

A little later, there was the "Music Box" with and created by the ensemble L'ART POUR L'ART: a large converted truck with a platform on the long side for the musicians – in the middle of the Gendarmenmarkt. Like in a "music box" from the sixties, you could put money in and then have a small piece of music of up to three minutes played live – a very different kind of project.

The premiere of the complete cycle of Dieter Schnebel's spectacular "Symphony X," which he conceptually expanded and completed by another 45 minutes in 2005 for his 70th birthday, will undoubtedly remain unforgettable – again a work conceived specifically for the space, performed in the Philharmonie with the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin, the Latvian Radio Choir Riga, the Experimental Studio of the SWR, four soloists and speakers.

The beauty of my work was undoubted that so many things were tried to come together and in the end, it became one big whole.

I was often at rehearsals during the festival from early in the morning until the evening. From the production side, you then get to see how the music gets ready to be performed in the first place. It's about bringing the score to life. This involves many things – quite pragmatically: What is the space like? Which instruments have to go where? How do the acoustics work, the harmony, the communication of all? How is the light? Can the musicians see well? There are so many things ... That's what makes the work "in the machine room of art" – to bring to life the music.

Ba: Whenever I see you in a concert, I see you accompanied by musicians, ensemble leaders, composers, curators. You know them all, and they all know you. It's never just professional networking; there's also a lot of friendship.

IMü: Well observed! Yes, even before I came to the Festival, but here, in particular, I was always able to do something, work on something that moved me, interested me, was my passion and has remained so, simply what makes up my life – in which my professional, artistic and private life came together. Of course, it didn't always work out to bring everything into harmony – who can do that?

But all in all, I consider it a great gift – these many years in harmony with music and with all the great people who invent it for us and make it resound – and to be able to experience it together with a great team of Festival colleagues.

The interview has been conducted in December 2021.