Alexander Kluge

THE UNIVERSE SLEEPS ON ITS IMMENSE EAR

“Is the tear or the telescope the better augmentation of the eye?”

“The impossibility of not crying.” This ability to fluidify something that has solidified within me is the basis of all music.

The Prague astronomer Johannes Kepler sought the “music of the cosmos”. He used just mathematics and knowledge of the planetary orbits as the basis for his notation in his Harmonices mundi. TONSPUR 93 features the original sounds of the planets Uranus, Saturn, the ex-planet Pluto and the giant Jupiter, measured as waves by NASA and the ESO probes as these giant bodies break through space-time. Related to this is the sound of John Cage’s piece As Slow As Possible, which is played so slowly on an organ in the Burchardi Church in my hometown of Halberstadt that it lasts for several centuries. You can also hear Ein andalusischer Hund (an Andalusian dog) by Josef Anton Riedl, recorded in 1962 at the Siemens Studio for Electronic Music, a tango by Shostakovich, Weh dem, der keine Heimat hat (woe betide he who has no home) by Peter Weibel, Lamento auf den Tod eines Maulwurfs (lamento on the death of a mole) played by Musicbanda Franui, a funeral march from an opera by Georg Philipp Telemann and the funeral march Immortal Sacrifice, which once accompanied the dead heroes of the Bolshevik revolution.

The stars and mourning!

Sounds for the eyes and ears!

— Alexander Kluge

Image: © Alexander Kluge • Filmstill with Stable Diffusion from the film “Fortuna auf ihrem Wolkenwagen”

TONSPUR 93
ALEXANDER KLUGE
THE UNIVERSE SLEEPS ON ITS IMMENSE EAR

28.8.—25.11.2023
Preview • 27 August 2023 • 17:00
The artist will be connected by telephone

TONSPUR_passage
Micro Museum for Sound
Museumsplatz 1 • 1070 Vienna
daily 10 am to 8 pm