Output details

"A party for Ernst Krenek"

Ernst Krenek’s music reflects many of the compositional styles of the twentieth century: romanticism; serialism; atonality; jazz and electronic composition. He was alert to the shifting aesthetic tides that swept around him and eager to pluck ideas that could enrich his own unique style of music making.

A party for Ernst Krenek was a research project – co-directed by Dinah Stabb – that presented aspects of Krenek’s eclecticism through a dramatic work that gazed back to an actual party hosted in his honour by Jane Manning whilst Krenek was visiting Britain in 1970.

The research had a number of goals that converged on a re-imagined but real-life party held at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London. The first was curatorial in nature in that a selection of Krenek’s works was performed during the new party so that guests – not audience - could experience his range of stylistic expression. The second aim placed Krenek in the context of other composers’ work thus echoing the original party to which Jane Manning had invited a number of contemporary composers. Performances of work by these colleagues, together with recollections by them of the earlier event, were therefore included in the entertainment for the new party. The third aim was to create an innovative form of musico-dramatic presentation, one that might be a model for the display of other composers’ works.

The dynamics of the research process were important, for the entertainment was not provided by “performers” but “hosts”. They thus all prepared their material together so that a shared familial ownership emerged that could be communicated to their guests. The process therefore saw the students and staff constructing, rehearsing and performing a new artwork that revealed the creativity of an unduly neglected composer using a format that was informal and entertaining yet scholarly and innovative.