Spector Books Artist Talk “Songs & Clouds” / Thursday 20 December 2012, 7 – 9pm

Thursday 20 December 2012, 7 – 9pm
Spector Books Artist Talk “Songs & Clouds”

Olaf Nicolai Escalier du Chant (Songs) and Helmut Völter Cloud Studies (Clouds).

How can songs reflect political events? How does a song become a political song? The artist Olaf Nicolai invited eleven international composers to write songs that reference political events which were of current relevance to them. Without prior announcement, a total of 58 songs were performed as a-cappella pieces on twelve Sundays in 2011 on the central staircase of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Visitors to the museum found themselves as actors in a staged performance for brief instances of time. The publication Escalier du Chant presents excerpts from the songs and commentaries by the composers in the form of 58 music sheets; the accompanying booklet contains various photographs of the performances. Including songs by: Tony Conrad, Georg Friedrich Haas, Georg Katzer, Liza Lim, Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Enno Poppe and Marcel Beyer, Rolf Riehm, James Saunders, Elliott Sharp, Mika Vainio, Jennifer Walshe.

“Clouds are fleeting entities – studying them so as to correctly classify, name and read their forms was considered in the 19th and early 20th centuries an important step in coming to understand the secrets of the atmosphere. In its early stages photography offered scientists completely new ways of depicting clouds. They used cameras to make precise, lifelike images, which provided in turn insights into the interaction of clouds and the atmosphere.

Helmut Völter’s Cloud Studies presents six different stations of scientific cloud photography, from its beginnings in the 1880s to the images made by the first weather satellites in the 1960s. Each of the six chapters represents a very different scientific and photographic perspective of clouds.”

With an essay by Marcel Beyer; photographs by Albert Riggenbach, Ralph Abercromby, anonymous pilots of World War I, Ferdinand Quénisset, Philippe Schereschewsky, Philippe Wehrlé, Masanao Abe and the Tiros weather satellites; and excerpts from works by Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Luke Howard, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Clement Ley and others.

Olaf Nicolai and the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen
Pinakothek der Moderne Munich (Eds.)
Triple case with 58 music sheets, including 32 page booklet
German/ English
Leipzig 2012
ISBN 978-3-940064-65-
£ 78.50

Helmut Völter: Wolkenstudien. Cloud Studies. Études des nuages
272 pages, 132 photographs.
German, English, French
Spector Books, Leipzig 2011
ISBN 978-3-940064-99-8
£34.95

http://www.bokship.org/pom.html