Let's celebrate the substitutes!   2021

Opening speech for 4th Tehran International Electronic Music Festival

(Persische Übersetzung unten. Video hier)

Dear friends of Yarava Music Group,
Dear students of Tehran University and elsewhere,
Dear guests of the fourth Tehran International Electronic Music Festival —

It is a big honour for me to be invited to give this opening speech. Thank you very much, and I hope you don't mind that I take this opportunity to think about some subjects, related to culture and this festival in these Covid times.

It is one year now that we face a situation which some of us experience and describe as a nightmare. Some lose their jobs, others get sick or even die, and we all cannot meet in person.

As long as we are alive, we react twofold to difficult situations. On the one hand we feel with the ones who suffer, we are on their side and try to help them as good as we can. On the other hand we try to figure out what we can learn because of the situation and its restrictions. We try to understand what we experience in this situation, what it shows us about ourselves, and we try to figure out how we can find our way in the difficulties, for the sake of life. So I try to figure out what we learn about ourselves, and what we can do, in this Covid situation. I will focus on five items, from my point of view, and you will judge whether it coincides with your own experiences, or not.

The first thing we learned, we learned again by this new infective disease, is that life is fragile, and that death is a companion of life. As a general knowledge, this is nothing new at all. But if I am not mistaken, Covid tore down the haze of security for many of us, facing them with the reality of perhaps losing their health or even their life. Fear can come out of it, but also attention and a new sense for the particularity of life. Whatever it be for this person or for that one — I strongly believe that the question about life as related to death is a central question of culture, and I think Covid reminded us on it, whether we liked it or not.

Secondly, we learned that we live because of contacts, through contacts, and for contacts. A contact means to share the same space. A contact means to feel the body of the other person in this space, to hear the breath, to look into the eyes, to see how different the eyes shine, depending on the inner movements. A contact means to feel these movements, and the mood behind them. Real contact means to have a motion in common, a shared development, be it to more distance or to more closeness. Real contact exactly means this shared motion, and once it happens, we feel happy and satisfied. We came to a new experience of it, because we were asked to thin out our physical contacts, and we felt the consequences.

The third thing we learned is that art, and in particular music, is very much related to this contact. In a musical performance, we share a space. The musicians live on the contact to the audience. The audience wants to feel the musicians, they want to be in the music, and once this happens, they gain a particular contact to themselves. This is the miracle of a concert, as the descendant of a ritual, and we miss it so much.

The fourth thing we learned is that we all live and belong together, whether we want it or not. We belong together when we live in the same street. We belong together when we live in the same city. We belong together when we live in the same country. And we belong together when we live anywhere on this planet earth. We felt and feel it in a new way not only because we can infect each other with the virus, but also because we have to find solutions. We. All. Together.

And the fifth thing we learned is that we have to live with substitutes. To meet online is a substitute for a real meeting. It is good to have the substitute, and to feel, how much is missing, compared to the full reality. We should appreciate the substitute, because each substitute adds something. It opens new aspects of the thing for which it is a substitute.

This online festival is a substitute, but it offers the opportunity for people anywhere in the world to join. To join, to connect, and to feel what is missing, compared to the real contact, in presence. And perhaps art as a whole can be seen as a substitute which offers new experiences of the world, and of ourselves, pointing to another reality behind it, and feeling the distance to it, as tension, as pain sometimes, as companion in any case.

When I first heard about this online festival, this wonderful substitute for a festival at place, this wonderful gift in this time of isolation, I was wondering whether a dream already came true. The dream that not only Iranian students come to Germany, to study composition and classical piano, but that also German students come to Iran, to study composition, too, and santur or oud, which are in the same way classical instruments. So this was my first thought: That I might have slept, and this time is already there! — Well, now I think that I have to wait perhaps some more years, but for sure this festival is a kind of substitute for this future, as in this moment, and in the upcoming week, people in Greece, in Italy, in Germany, in both Americas, and probably also in the east, in China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines are now looking at Tehran, as the middle and the centre.

Let us not forget those to whose hard work we owe all what we can do here. Please forgive me that I will only mention three of them here. Sara Abazari as artistic director of the festival also represents the University of Tehran as most important collaborator of this festival. Mehdi Jalali, Yarava's restless locomotive, has pulled and pushed the train to this next station, again. But most thanks must go probably to Amin Khoshsabk who dedicated himself in the past weeks and months to this festival, to make all this possible.

Real culture does not mean to produce heroes and stars with big money and propagate them with refined marketing strategies. Real culture means that creative, curious and open-minded people get together, to show each other what they did, hoping to give something to the others, and to experience their reactions. I always felt that a festival like this one is much closer to this real culture than many events which get more attention because they are better funded and propagated. And I am sure that this festival will become one more successful event in the series of inspiring shared culture we experienced in the past years, despite all difficulties.

Enjoy!

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