Sounds can open new spaces, connect us, beam us into space, into past moments, into fantastic locations, sites or venues.

Minimal Music has an interesting parallel to our current situation and the repetitive everyday life in the home office, especially due to its repetition and the extended concept of time (the pieces range from a few seconds, hours, days to weeks). We invite you to enter the diverse sound worlds of minimal music and interpret a piece of your choice from our Minimal-Music Playlist visually in the form of a stop-motion or animation film. Use your instruments, like sketches, collages or sampled footage, etc. But, please create your own narrative, assemble an images for your scenographic motion pictures – find your own rhythm, a beat of images, a flow of motion, which is hidden or sleeping (inscribed) in your supposed static environment at home or on your way to your studio.

As a basis for your visual interpretation, a sound analysis of minimal music is elementary for a new interpretation, in which sound and moving images in connection with the translation of the current situation enter a new connection.

Let the current situation, your thoughts, doubts and utopias flow into the story and motion within your revitalized images powered by the interpretation of the chosen piece of music. Let the minimal music inspire you to maximum spatial visions.

Minimal Music is a collective term for various music styles within New Music that developed in the United States from the 1960s. The name was coined by Michael Nyman at the beginning of the 1970s based on the term Minimal Art, which comes from the visual arts. Minimal Music processes influences from Asian and African music, (free) jazz and certain forms of rock (psychedelic rock) to minimal techno. She largely ignores the conventions of composing that existed in Western culture until then.

There are a number of stylistic features: compared to art music, minimal music is of a rather low harmonic complexity: it mostly moves within a modal tonality and uses dissonances very sparingly. The rhythmic element is strongly emphasized in minimal music, it is strongly repetitive: A simple basic pattern is repeated over long periods of time with only slight, often hardly noticeable variations, the piece then results from the simple stringing together of the variations. If a pattern is played simultaneously with slightly different speeds, the so-called phase shift effect occurs.

The workshop is lead by Prof. Uwe R. Brückner, scenographer and lecturer of Studio Scenography & Exhibition Design, in collaboration with scenographer Martina Ehleiter, animator Nina Christen and sound expert Ramon de Marco.