The Goldberg Variation (Bach Clock)

 

 

We are pleased in collaboration with swedish composer Jesper Norda to invite you to the first ever full durational live performance of:

 

The Goldberg Variation (Bach Clock)

Photo: Jesper Norda

We are excited about organizing the first ever full durational live performance of swedish composer Jesper Norda’s piece The Goldberg Variation (Bach Clock) – for one, two or more pianists, 2012.

 

While the piece have been existing in different phases and medias, we now seek to bring the full and minimalistic yet comprehensive experience together – together with the audience we seek to explore the whole duration of the live piece, allowing time to wash over our bodies and listening experience.

Place: Bådehuset / Ancestral Modernism, Refshalevej 320, 1432 København K (Find your way)

Date: Saturday the 7th of October 2023

Time: 8:00 am – 8:25 pm

Composer: Jesper Norda

Tickets: We offer a slide price scale for tickets (150 DKK as standard, 50 DKK for people with lower income fx. students, and a pay-what-you-can option if needed). Buy tickets here.

Other:

  • we will serve simple food and drinks (making it possible to stay for the full duration)
  • bring warm cloth (we will have some blankets, but not too many…)

Listening Seminar on the 9th of October, from 2pm – 4 pm, same location.

See more information here (coming).

The project is supported differently by:

København Kommune Musikudvalg

Art Music Denmark & Statens Kunstfond

 

We are also very grateful for all the help Ying-Hsueh Chen have been able to offer with realising this project.

Listening Seminar

To explore further the aftermath of the performance; its slowness, potential listening practices, and ideas of musicality, we are together with Sound Studies Lab (University of Copenhagen) and Art Music Denmark hosting a panel discussion on the same location the following monday, 9th of October at 2pm to 4pm. Jesper Norda, Carolyn F. Strauss (Slow Research Lab, Amsterdam), and prof. Holger Schulze (Sound Studies Lab) will at the seminar dwell into each other experiences and perspectives and bring new wonderings forth to the audience, who will be able to share back thoughts and pose questions.

 

See more information here (coming).

About the work, Norda writes himself:

The Goldberg Variation (Bach Clock)- for one, two or more pianists (2012) is based on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg variations. But whereas Bach’s version takes around 30 minutes to play from beginning to end, this version is stretched to 12 hours and 25 minutes. Each note in the original score is struck at even intervals, every two seconds. The rythm is evened out, the dynamics are flattened: every sense of musical direction is gone. What remains is a solemn enumeration of all the tones that make up the original piece – a kind of clockwork.

/ Jesper Norda, 2016.

Listen to an extract of The Goldberg Variation (Bach Clock)- for one, two or more pianists (2012):

Accompanying the 12 hours and 25 minutes live performance is Jesper Norda’s video piece: 13 hours sunrise, 2012.

Supported by: