Virus #3.6 – Twilight Zones

Elisabeth Schimana’s “Virus” series is an expedition into acoustic perception, a sounding out of the responses of our brains in the span of milliseconds, a plea for the precise acoustic moment.  

The music in this series is based on compositions that use a live-generated electronic body of sound as an audio score for acoustic instruments. Scattered around the room, the musicians are asked to interpret or imitate the electronic sounds on their instruments simultaneously and as precisely as possible. 

In the commissioned work “Twilight Zones – Zonen der Dämmerung”, the composer Elisabeth Schimana, whose Institute for Media Archaeology is based in St. Pölten and who works worldwide, will for the first time be utilising the organ and, together with cathedral organist Ludwig Lusser, explores the possibilities of this instrument in St. Pölten Cathedral. 

“Virus #3.6” deals with the question: Where are we now? In zones of dawn, of change, of twilight – are we moving into the night or into the morning? Will the autocrats destroy existing democracies, or are we reinventing ourselves and moving into a future with a different economic system, a fairer global distribution and an overcoming of autocratic systems? We sense the zones of dawn. 

Apart from liturgy and repertoire, three remarkable personalities of the most diverse musical provenance work on the queen of instruments in the upcoming series “Orgel Experimentell” (organ experimental) and jux­tapose the baroque interior of the St. Pölten Cathedral with contemporary culture.