Of Anarchy in Music

The exhibition’s title "Of Anarchy in Music" is both deliberately anachronistic and viewed through the lens of a new relevance. It is borrowed from a little-known essay by the German-Russian composer Thomas von Hartmann, a friend and collaborator of Vassily Kandinsky, published in the Blaue Reiter Almanach, which was edited by Kandinsky in Munich in 1912. This anthology brought together reflections and proposals from artists, composers, and poets around the idea of destruction and the breaking down of outdated art systems. A proponent of atonality and microtonality, Hartmann argued for the relevance of "cacophonic sounds," asserting that "any combination of sounds, any sequence of tone combinations is possible" as long as it responds to an "inner necessity" for the artist, disregarding the codes inherited from classical harmony. Beyond this manifesto from early 20th-century modernity, the inspiration from anarchist ideas runs through history, across all regions of the world, and today finds new resonances.

"Of Anarchy in Music. More Journeys in Sound" follows a main thread related to this political model: the idea that any organization, any arrangement, is temporary and constructs its own transitory rules as a strategy to transcend dominant structures. To think of an emancipatory form of organization, as suggested by anthropologist David Graeber, could call for a "microtheory," meaning "a way of addressing the concrete and immediate questions that emerge from a project of transformation." 

The eight parts of this exhibition revolve around questions posed by the sound medium, whether they relate to the transformative powers of technology, the re-examination of inherited musical forms and cultures, or acoustic investigation practices and the way they aim to challenge the legal domain. Today, artists move fluidly from concert to installation, from field recording and sampling to generative AI, from conceptual protocols to unprecedented forms of staging and storytelling. Without attempting to categorize their experiences, the rhythm of these eight parts remains an open score.