Ensemble KNM Berlin: reading music – repeat

Sat, December 12th 2026, 7pm concert
Sun, December 13th 2026, 3pm – 5pm screening with live interventions

The starting point for reading music - repeat! is the experimental decade between 1965 and 1975, when Fluxus, performance art, and installation art shifted the boundaries between music, language, action, and space. Scores became texts, texts became performance instructions, and everyday actions became musical material.
repeat! builds upon this spirit of openness. Historical works and new artistic positions meet to ask: Where does language end and music begin? How does an instruction become an action, a space become a resonating body, or memory become sound?
Alvin Lucier is re-examined through two new works: Juliana Hodkinson’s “On the line” takes “Love Song” as its starting point, while Jonathan Heilbron’s “Place Fragments” draws on “Memory Space”. Gavin Bryars’ “Private Music” serves as the basis for KNM’s “…because of the god in her”. Bryars is one of those English minimalists who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, forged closer ties between society and avant-garde music.

With Klaus Rinke’s “Inhalation I” (1971), the program leads directly into the realm of performance art. Rinke—whose work engages deeply with water, time, and physicality—formulates instructions for action that the musicians reinterpret as a musical experimental setup. Ana María Rodríguez brings the exploration of resonance into the present day. In “Gold and Silver”, the performance space itself becomes a resonating body: a fragile feedback phenomenon unfolds, repeatedly reshaped by the ordering power of the gong—a sonic ritual poised between fragility and structure.
“repeat!” touches upon an age-old question: that of creativity and production, of change and repetition. We long for both, constantly oscillating between these poles—between the desire to create something anew and the need to repeat what is already known.

Works by Gavin Bryars, Jonathan Heilbron, Juliana Hodkinson, Klaus Rinke, and Ana Maria Rodriguez.

Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.