IN DIE SANCTI GERMANI ABBATIS is a synthesis of arts, a ritual, creating fascinating worlds of experience : Sounds at the limits of audibility and whispering floating in the room; the clenched physical presence of seven singers moving unrelentingly slowly through the audience; the divine beauty of the voice of a counter tenor; sound energy breaking in light explosions. Ancient liturgical gestures seem to influence the music, although created independently, with 1000 years of distance. Abstract light-sound-compositions open up undreamt dimensions of depth.

Never before a Latin Mass has been transformed into a multimedia work of art. Seemingly contradicting elements, from Gregorian Chant to music of the avant-garde, are interwoven in a subtle networking process into a new and higher unity. The compositions contained in IN DIE SANCTI GERMANI ABBATIS are communicating with each other, and IN DIE SANCTI GERMANI ABBATIS as a whole is communicating with works of other genres. A new genre is born : the liturgical opera or operatic liturgy, thus redefining the idea of the work of art.

If we want to take seriously the liturgical rules ( which is an important part of the artistic concept ) IN DIE SANCTI GERMANI ABBATIS can be represented only on Saint-German’s Day, that is the 21st of February, and only in the church of the Saint, who, as early as in 640, founded the Abbey of Moutier-Grandval. The paths of the singers/actors are calculated exactly according to the church’s geometry. A page of the famous „Bible of Moutier“, written about 840, today in the British Museum, is woven in the video, just in the moment, when the priest is singing the corresponding passage of Saint-German’s Liturgy. Thus the Gregorian Chant, written in the times of Saint German, the architecture of „his“ church, the newly renovated and enhanced organ and many other elements form together a multidimensional work of art, unseparably connected with this church.

The complexity of the technical realization is remarkable : the video content on the 9 x 9 square meters video screen; the great pipe organ, played by MIDI-files; the gestures of the singer/actors, guided by individual stage directions and individual computer created metronome click tracks, conveyed via W-LAN; the highly differenced interpretation of the Gregorian Chant according to the cheironomic gestures of the Magister Scholae; prerecorded audio-files and classical lightening ... all these things must be coordinated with absolute precision.

IN DIE SANCTI GERMANI ABBATIS is seizing on essential questions of our time, commenting, profound and subtle, lighting up unexpected connections, and designing, in an augmented artistic space, the vision of a new unity of tradition and avant-garde, rationality and spirituality, arts and society, according to Whithead’s famous principal « transcend and include ».

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Introduction

The organ
In Die Sancti Germani Abbatis
Symposium
Philosophical Concert
L’Orgue mystique
Sanctus
Trance
Ligne des Orgues

Concept