‘I wanted to do something a little different, to approach distance in a different way.’
A collaboration between hcmf// and City, University of London, Hausmusik Kollektiv is a beautiful book edited by Claudia Molitor. During the first lockdown of the pandemic, when asked to contribute ideas that anyone can create, experience, perform or simply look at, artists responded with generous enthusiasm – and Hausmusik Kollektiv brings together 29 truly inspiring scores.
The book costs £20 and can be ordered here. All proceeds will be used to commission new works by artists whose livelihoods have been strained and whose opportunities to share their work have been curtailed by the pandemic. The new works will be produced by and presented at a future edition of hcmf//.
Listen to Claudia Molitor discuss Hausmusik Kollektiv with Robert Worby
In the midst of pandemic life, Claudia Molitor started making scores. Usually confined to one page of graphics or text, her new pieces breathed new life into the artistic world that had been lost to her through the year. Easily passed from musician to musician, Molitor’s scores encouraged homespun interpretation, digital collaboration and free-flowing exchange, setting off a chain of serendipitous new connections made through little more than a prompt in a PDF.
Of all our solutions to pandemic practice – to emphasising work, and lending opportunity to it – Molitor’s solution feels the most apt. Composers and performers have been looking for ways to cultivate their artistic livelihood online, trying to stay creatively motivated from a home office space and a lot of time at a laptop. Experiences have been stray, and the will to create has been as ephemeral as the digital platform on which the work is being placed. Within this miasma, Molitor’s one-page tech scores offer clarity. They affirm ideas that happen in just a moment, and encourage the brief, aphoristic things we imagine in the broken space of lockdown.