Hitchhiking Across Parade Square or the Pocket Philharmonic at the Museum of Modern Art

In August, thanks to the hospitality of the Museum of Modern Art, we invite you to a two-day multi-concert organized according to the concept of John Cage’s “Musicirk.” In a nutshell, it’s about everything, everywhere, all at once. Over the course of a few hours, without leaving the intimate plaza connecting the Museum of Modern Art (MSN) with the new TR Warszawa headquarters currently under construction, we’ll hear, among other things, classical West African music on the kora, cosmic oberek dances from the Kajok micro-region, hypnotic Igbo folk music transposed to the piano keyboard, and—dating back to pre-Prophet times—the rhythms of Arabic poetry, Hawaiian cello music, and deconstructed Beatles songs.

A completely fictional soundscape? Not necessarily. The invited artists—Hubert Zemler, Noums Dembele, Dariush Rasouli, and Mateusz Kowalski—live in Warsaw and perform their music here on a daily basis—whether it’s Iranian classical, Polish People’s Republic minimalism, or Japanese court music. This is a quite realistic—though, of course, subjective, and perhaps even somewhat wishful—soundscape of a European metropolis.

If you’d like, you can fully immerse yourself in selected micro-concerts, coming into close, almost physical contact with the performers. You can also explore them freely, catching snippets of sounds, fragments of melodies, and echoes of culture in a kaleidoscope of an audio journey. Finally, you can listen to everything, everywhere, all at once, composing your own music and your own city in your mind.

 

A detailed program of the event is available here.

 

Organizers: Automatophone Foundation, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw

Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund—a state-administered special-purpose fund—as part of the “Music” program implemented by the National Institute of Music and Dance.

The project is co-financed by the City of Warsaw.