Sound without haste

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On June 14, the orchestra studio will be transformed into a special sound space: students and teachers from Tokyo University of the Arts will bring the ancient Japanese court music Gagaku to our university - a music whose roots go back more than a thousand years and which still fascinates today with its strange beauty, ritual tranquillity and luminous clarity.

Gagaku literally means "elegant music". The musicians sit on the floor, the gestures are sparing, almost ceremonial. A single note from the shō, the Japanese mouth organ, opens up the space; flutes, double-reed instruments, lutes, zithers, drums and gongs join in. The result is not a dramatic progression in the Western sense, but a floating flow of sound made up of color, breath, silence and minimal shifts.

Anyone listening to Gagaku for the first time enters a different musical time scale. This music does not hurry, it does not explain itself, it does not demand quick approval. It invites you to set aside your own listening habits for a moment and engage with an art in which every note is given space. Especially in our accelerated present, this sound has an almost subversive effect, as an invitation to a presence of silent attention. The fact that a Gagaku group from Geidai is a guest in Hamburg is a rare opportunity. The Tokyo University of the Arts is the only state university in Japan where this traditional art is taught in this form. This evening is an encounter with music that stands between ritual, memory and the present. It is an acoustic window into another aesthetic world.

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Registration is required and can be done via eventbrite.