The Hunt for Sound Installations in Nuremberg

Musik Installationen Nürnberg has the unique honor of being the only music festival ever to have given me an actual allergic reaction. Presumably, this was entirely unintentional – yet somehow perfectly in line with the festival’s concept. Its subtitle reads: Festival für Raum Zeit Körper-musiken – a mysterious plural that points to a multiplicity of musical forms and expressions. As audience members, we were invited to meet the music with our bodies (!) as a spatial phenomenon.

There was a certain elegance to it, especially when the idea was punctuated by a quote from Wagner’s Parzifal

So we were told at the festival’s opening reception, held in a defunct department store – the first of many spectacular venues – where the aura of luxurious decadence still lingered, despite the empty shelves, cables hanging like jungle vines from the ceiling, and faded, unlit signs for Chanel and Calvin Klein.

Here it was explained that while concert-based festivals treat music primarily as a temporal art form, Musik Installationen Nürnberg explores it as something spatial. And while sound installations consist of inanimate sound-producing objects, the music installation is brought to life by human bodies interacting with the space around them – like a work of installation art.

To be honest, these distinctions felt somewhat arbitrary. Still, there was a certain elegance to it, especially when the idea was punctuated by a quote from Wagner’s Parzifal: »Du siehst, mein Sohn / zum Raum wird hier die Zeit« (You see, my son – here, time becomes space). We were, after all, in Southern Germany.

Harmonies in the parking garage

From the department store, we made our way to a multi-storey car park, where the first music installation took place: a three-hour performance by Swiss-born Austrian composer Beat Furrer and Dominican-born German choreographer Isabela Lewis. It began with a vocal quartet from the ensemble Cantando Admont slowly moving up through the garage toward the top floor, where the audience was waiting.

For a long time, the quartet’s voices were barely audible, heard only as brief, ghostly flashes from the lower levels. But when the elevator suddenly creaked open to reveal them, it was a moment of breathtaking beauty: their singing was heartfelt and sacred, almost medieval in its clear four-part polyphony and its circular, chant-like structure – and it was perfectly timed with the setting sun, which streamed in between the concrete beams, bathing everything in golden light.

The voices and saxophone traded places again and again, eventually merging into an abstract, modernist language of abrasive dissonance and ominous wails

Then, unexpectedly, a saxophone cut through the soundscape – a jolt to the system, given how alien both the instrument’s timbre and historical associations felt in relation to the monastic ars nova sound of the choir. The voices and saxophone traded places again and again, eventually merging into an abstract, modernist language of abrasive dissonance and ominous wails.

Despite the tight choreography – with performers constantly shifting formations around and within the audience – the music was repeatedly overpowered by the mechanical roars and screeching tires of cars being parked or retrieved. There was no doubt that the young man in the Tesla and the family in the enormous BMW (we were, as noted, in Southern Germany) had no interest in music installations. This seemed to frustrate the organizers, who tried more than once to ask drivers for consideration. But perhaps they shouldn’t have minded – the cars were, in the spirit of the festival, a reminder of something uncontrollable: space itself.

Led Zeppelin, wind machines, and an awkward waltz

The beautiful Baroque church of St. Egidien provided the setting for a performance piece by multidisciplinary artist and vocalist Lulu Obermayer, performed alongside two vocalists and an organist. The performers were granted much by the church’s overwhelming yet elegant architecture and the massive acoustic space, which turned every footstep into a prism of sound. It began promisingly, with intense white light, fog filling the nave, and trembling tone clusters streaming from the impressive organ. It seemed nothing could go wrong.

The audience was showered with thousands of feather-light down particles – the kind used to fill pillows

Yet the long performance was marred by a series of questionable decisions. The piece felt like an unstructured brainstorm on the word »church«, hovering mostly on the edge of tasteless kitsch. At one point, the performers took turns donning giant angel wings. Worse still, not only did they play Led Zeppelin’s »Stairway to Heaven« on the organ – they also solemnly recited the lyrics as though they were sacred poetry. It all felt both overthought and strangely careless.

Halfway through, the audience was showered with thousands of feather-light down particles – the kind used to fill pillows – spread through the church by huge wind machines. That was the moment I had an allergic reaction: my skin itched, my airways tightened, and my eyes began to water so much I could hardly see. (In the midst of this misery, I was also pulled up by one of the performers – randomly selected to dance an awkward waltz with him, a moment of humiliation I’ll refrain from elaborating on.)

I left when »Ave Maria« was sung for the second time

When the performance seemed to end after two hours, it simply restarted – apparently the plan was to keep looping until everyone had left the space. In my opinion, a major dramaturgical misstep. While this may have made the piece more »installation-like«, it robbed the audience of a necessary sense of closure – that vital »cut« which allows space for reflection. Instead, it came off as a conceptual gimmick and laid bare one of the key flaws of concept-driven art: that the most natural response to a work which so clearly displays its own conceptuality is to take it at its word and walk away once the concept is understood. Personally, I left when »Ave Maria« was sung for the second time.

Echoes in the sugar-water silo – and music for buttkickers

The next morning – after a much-needed dose of antihistamines – I ventured beyond Nuremberg, where composer and installation artist Maya Dunietz had created the festival’s most purebred installation in the raw, industrial space of a defunct yeast factory. Flooded with morning light streaming through towering factory windows, it was a stunning setting.

The work itself was deceptively simple: fifteen pianos were fitted with tactile transducers – so-called (and I am not making this up) »ButtKickers« – that emitted extremely low bass frequencies, making the instruments rattle, creak, and hum.

Around – and occasionally on top of – the pianos, the superb string ensemble Kaleidoskop performed long, mournful drones that filled the factory with an icy but strangely seductive atmosphere.

It was brilliant – especially because the strange mixture of humming pianos and ethereal violins sounded like the ghostly echo of the industrial noise that must once have roared from the massive tanks and pipe systems that still dominated the space.

It was nothing short of spine-tingling

The piece reached a sublime climax when the musicians rose and led the audience into a giant metal silo – once used for sugar water – that now resembled a rusted version of the Roman Pantheon. There, they performed a short vocal piece, where each tone was prolonged to almost absurd lengths by the silo’s reverb, creating an overwhelming, avalanche-like accumulation of sound. It was nothing short of spine-tingling.

Presence and hippie games

Later that day, I attended the festival’s Diskurs-Stündchen – one of several small conversation salons where artists, curators, and scholars gave brief talks, meant to offer frameworks for reflecting on the festival’s works.

The first session featured musicologist Christoph Haffter, who presented on theorist Anna Kornbluh’s book Immediacy, Or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024). A vital work by a thinker I deeply admire, it critiques our era’s obsession with immediacy – that is, aesthetic experiences without mediation, abstraction, or storytelling.

Thus, the selfie is our time’s most emblematic visual form, the first-person narrator its dominant literary mode, and autoethnography – which privileges individual experience over universal insight – a prevailing academic genre. Artistic works like Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present, which promise unfiltered access to the artist, are wildly popular. But Kornbluh warns that immediacy leads to a form of dumbed-down identification, one that undermines critical thought and fosters the illusion of direct experience where none exists.

In Army of Love, artist Amir Shpilman presented a large, boring-looking QR code placed in the park area of Luitpoldhain

Haffter’s presentation was lively and well-delivered, and the following discussion was both rich and engaging. Still, the timing felt oddly ironic – for Kornbluh’s ideas could have served as a sharp, merciless critique of the very piece we were about to experience.

In Army of Love, artist Amir Shpilman presented a large, boring-looking QR code placed in the park area of Luitpoldhain – a site that, along with the nearby monumental Congress Hall, once hosted the Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg.

On this symbolic ground, we all scanned the QR code, which instructed us to dance in unison, play tag, and harmonize with sine tones played through our phones. In this way, the work offered us a feeling of total closeness – one not rooted in a shared artistic experience, but in the irrefutable fact that we were all physically present in the same place and literally asked to touch each other. How… immediate.

To say something meaningful about these topics would require far more than hippie-like party games

It was clearly sensed – from the symbolically charged location, from the exalted title Army of Love, from the text on the festival’s website, and from a series of questions we were asked to discuss in pairs before the QR code was revealed – What would you protect at all costs? When do you feel part of something bigger? – that Shpilman himself felt the work had something important to say about the individual versus the collective, about how community becomes fascism, about herd mentality, and about the group as constructed in opposition to »the others«. But to say something meaningful about these topics would require far more than hippie-like party games.

For example, it would require the work to accept that it cannot both benefit from the meaning enhancement that inevitably follows from its very specific historical context and at the same time claim to be a universal work that does not engage with fascism as an actual political phenomenon – which today is alive and well (not least in the form of the genocide taking place in Gaza). The work would have to abandon its belief that understanding can arise unmediated and directly from the audience’s immediate experience of collectivity. And it would have to dare to critically address a number of difficult, current, and controversial political issues: issues that the Israeli Shpilman might feel uncomfortable with, and which would likely cause the German festival to lose its government funding.

By contrast, the last work I managed to experience at Musik Installationen Nürnberg was nothing short of brilliant

Bending the arrow of time

By contrast, the last work I managed to experience at Musik Installationen Nürnberg was nothing short of brilliant. Here, the American poet and musician Moor Mother took over Kunstverein Nürnberg for a three-hour performance that extended from the exhibition Bending the Arrow of Time into a Circle, part of Moor Mother’s longstanding collaboration with artist Rasheedah Phillips in the duo Black Quantum Futurism, dealing with questions of memory and non-linear ideas about time.

Flanked by five musicians on bass, choir, trumpet, organ, and practically every imaginable form of percussion, Moor Mother created an improbably captivating musical universe, approaching the rich traditions of Black American music with adventurous and playful deconstruction of elements from gospel, jazz, and blues, weaving them into a dreamlike, almost ambient soundscape.

This sonic landscape – immensely detailed and dense like a thick smoke of stories and ghosts from the musical traditions it spoke to – formed an exquisite accompaniment to Moor Mother’s recitations, which with immense dramatic gravitas embodied the fire-spitting preachers of the American South with their ecstatic, evangelical conviction that righteous judgment will one day fall, and their lively musical cadence brimming with the spirit. »You’ve been a coward for too long / We are calling you back / Come back / Return / Come to the altar«, were the simple yet enigmatic words she hurled around with fierce abandon. One was both frightened and drawn in.

In fact, I still don’t really know what a music installation is

Elsewhere it sounded: »Titus, did you hear the bell sounding? Did you hear the drums sounding? Sounding, sounding, sounding, sounding / We are bending the arrow of time.« And later: »I want you to get ready for doomsday!«

Moor Mother’s combination of music and words was exceptional, magically straightforward, but it was also in many ways »just« a concert. As such, Moor Mother’s work pointed quite well to the festival’s primary problem, which was that it tended to trip over itself whenever it got too obsessed with not being just another music festival. The music was best when it – like in Moor Mother’s case – focused on »just« being music, while the installation elements worked best in Maya Dunietz’s piece, which in turn was primarily »just« an installation. The combination of the two never fully convinced me of its possibilities. In fact, I still don’t really know what a music installation is. And I never got to the lake to see the pink swans.

Musik Installationen Nürnberg, May 23–June 1. This review is based on the festival’s first two days.

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek