Familiar Material with a Life of its Own

Julia Decker (JD): You named your piece “MELENCOLIA” after the feeling of melancholy. How do you define melancholy: as a disease and a preliminary stage of depression or as the sister of genius? 

Brigitta Muntendorf (BM): The beautiful thing about melancholy is that it defies unequivocal descriptions, any attempt at a definition leads to simplification: it flattens it and robs it of its magic. I would describe melancholy as an attitude that allows us or perhaps forces us to observe and tolerate contradictions. A form of stasis that is nevertheless in no way pathological – like depression – but which leads us to a deeper confrontation with ourselves and with the world. If we attached greater importance to uncertainty, transience and contradiction in our thoughts and feelings, then we might be able to find a different form of living together on this planet. 

JD: You use texts from a range of centuries on the subject of melancholy: what apart from the heading does a 500-year-old text by the writer Robert Burton have in common with prose about football or the lyrics of love songs?

BM: Melancholy is an ancient phenomenon, but the forms in which it manifests itself and how people deal with it are constantly changing and tell us something about each respective society. In Burton’s day the term and practice of anatomy emerged in art, medicine and science, so in his “Anatomy of Melancholy” he attempts to explore the reasons for this unfortunate melancholy through observations of human behaviour. The writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint finds the moment of deepest melancholy in Zinédine Zidane’s head butt in the 2006 football World Cup: the last escape from a completed work. For me, a shouted love song represents that typical phenomenon of our time, where volume is increasingly used instead of sensitivity. In the media criticism written by Geert Lovink, which has saturated our entire concept, the creative potential of melancholy collides with the “designed sadness” with which online platforms keep their millions of users in a state of dependency. These are not contradictions; our reality is complex and multilayered and we have to deal with numerous parallel worlds.  

JD: In the copy about your piece, Albrecht Dürer’s engraving “Melencolia I” is described as “a symbol for the contradictions and the irreconcilable amid the human desire for salvation.” Why is music theatre so fond of returning to the idea of salvation?

BM: Our piece “MELENCOLIA” regards the desire for salvation with a wry smile, because the piece generates more chaos than order: musically it creates an entirely independent way of thinking, and it raises more questions than it answers. There is no salvation from melancholy, there are only loops, associations, chains of thought. And similarly, the evening remains in constant flux, and it plays with flowing transitions between highly disparate material in the form of images, video and music. 

JD: You have directed the work yourself together with Moritz Lobeck. How did you arrive at this collaboration?

BM: We have already done a number of projects together, for example “Covered Culture”, an audiovisual installation about the phenomenon of the anthem, based on the EU anthem with 100 choral singers and performers, which was presented in a range of museums and galleries in China, Japan and Korea – during the pandemic. We led rehearsals from Berlin, Cologne and Dresden, shot videos, co-ordinated get-ins and took part in openings: after all that, we knew we make a good team! As a cultural scholar, opera dramaturg and festival curator, Moritz Lobeck brings a wide range of contextual thinking with very different influences to our collaboration, which inspires me a great deal as a composer.

JD: Do you have an audience in mind when you are composing?

BM: I always find it great fun to put myself in the position of those receiving the work. I imagine an audience with the desire to cultivate associations and follow them. I imagine an audience that has perhaps arrived stressed from work and wants to immerse itself in another world. Or one that decided a long time ago it was going to expose itself to contemporary music for once. At the premiere at Bregenz Festival and last year at the Holland Festival, we had great success with very divergent audiences. What pleased me most of all was that despite the technology and AI, older generations could also appreciate it. Ultimately “MELENCOLIA” only has one requirement: to allow yourself to be carried along by odd associations and find yourself at some point in a setting where, for example, percussionists are playing computers while an angel conducts two violins in Baroque style – accompanied by a chorus of football fans.  

JD: Do you find people are reluctant to engage with new music? 

BM: Above all there are preconceptions – but new music is not an absolute, it’s a spectrum. I have experienced some people who have difficulty with new music being able to find a way into my music more easily, which might be because I work a lot with references, with material that seems familiar to us, but which then in my music develops a life of its own, its own connections. I always see the “new” as an alteration of existing meanings.  

JD: Classical music has been dominated by men for centuries. How do you find being a female composer in 2025?

BM: A lot has changed in the last 20 years: female composers are receiving greater support, and awareness of the need for balanced representation and targeted funding for diversity has noticeably increased. But this development could stagnate or even recede, especially in the context of social and political shifts that question diversity and cultural openness – in the fields of music and technology. So there is still a need for female role models as well as institutions and festivals that programme and grant visibility to female composers working in art and technology but also working with major forms. 

JD: You work with Artificial Intelligence. At what point in your piece is AI applied?

BM: I recorded the voices of the flute and double bass players from the Ensemble Modern and then cloned them with the help of AI. Voice clones and digital voices have taken over our everyday lives as digital service providers. In “MELENCOLIA” these voices have a life of their own, they shout at us, are melancholy, poetic, desperate and also bored. I now do a lot of work with voice cloning, including using it live. I’m interested in not only by how voices can be reproduced but also how the most varied features of voices can be transferred to other voices independently of each other. I’m absolutely fascinated by the idea of understanding the voice as a “host” and not a “user”, which means that a voice can not only open up an individual, but a whole range of different social and cultural, and also digital and artistic contexts. 

JD: Screens, stage, drones and a choir: what sort of setting awaits the audience in “MELENCOLIA”?

BM: I am passionate about working with technology, but the aim is always that it should more or less disappear within the experience. In one respect the audience finds itself facing a front-on stage situation, at the same time, however, it is surrounded by up to 60 loudspeakers – in the middle of a 3D soundscape. There is a greenscreen studio on stage on which the musicians and choir can be incorporated into visual worlds, with “the making of” and illusions happening simultaneously. The members of the Ensemble Modern are on stage throughout the piece, alternating roles between performers and musicians. Before the piece begins, the audience can use a smartphone app in the foyers of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. The objects from Dürer’s engraving “Melencolia I” appear as animated creatures placed within the space – creating a kind of smartphone chorus as the overture to the piece. But despite all the technology that “MELENCOLIA” makes use of, it is very important to me always to see this as a means of communication and to use it that way. 

JD: As part of MaerzMusik 2025 “MELENCOLIA” will also appear on vinyl. How will you use this format

BM: When Geert Lovink and I met up for a drink after the performance of “MELENCOLIA” at the 2024 Holland Festival in Amsterdam on the bank of one of the canals, we had the idea of turning “MELENCOLIA” into a medley and linking it to his texts, which were a major source of inspiration for the music theatre piece. The result “MELENCOLIC MEDLEY” really is a genuine medley – it contains musical excerpts from “MELENCOLIA” and new arrangements with “sadness meditations” by Geert, which we drafted from his book “Sad by Design” and which he voiced himself. The most varied recordings, including live recordings of the world premiere at the Bregenz Festival, studio recordings at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, voice recordings of Geert on Signal and Zoom and the recording of “Daisy, Daisy” that was made with the Ensemble Modern as a teaser a year before “MELENCOLIA” premiered, are all combined together in this medley. It really can be described as a post-digital working process which I deliberately wanted to capture here on an analogue medium. For me, the specific sound of vinyl has an effect rather like an acoustic throwback. Many phenomena of the digital age often appear completely new when they are really modifications or intensifications of earlier processes. Vinyl as a medium reminds us that a lot of what are now seen as innovations already existed in some form in the past.

Brigitta Muntendorf is a composer. In her works she develops new concepts of radical listening, environmental storytelling and immersive theatre. She has been professor of composition at Cologne University of Music and Dance since 2018 and is artistic director of KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen from 2026.

Julia Decker is a journalist and prefers interviewing musicians, writers and scientists.