Digital Day 2024: Lucas Fels and Anssi Karttunen in a video interview
How will we work with sheet music and notation in the future? To mark the nationwide Digital Day on June 7, 2024, the HfMDK's research department asked cellists Lucas Fels and Anssi Karttunen to give a video interview about their "CelloDocu" project.
Digital Day is taking place for the fifth time this year and aims to promote digital participation in Germany. Digitalization is to be explained and brought to life with numerous activities. The Digital Day is backed by the "Digital for All" initiative - a broad alliance of 28 organizations from civil society, culture, science, business, welfare and the public sector. This year's focus is on developments in the field of artificial intelligence.
The Germany-wide Digital Day aims to bring very different aspects of digitalization to life. For the third time, Hessian universities have put together a varied program to make digitalization a tangible experience for everyone. The digitalization measures at Hessen's universities have proven their worth and have become an integral part of day-to-day business. The universities in Hesse are using the potential of collaboration to their advantage, have moved even closer together and are shaping the digital transformation of the university landscape together in cooperative projects. Regular exchanges about successes - but also about challenges - and the transfer of knowledge have become an integral part of this cooperation. Hesse's universities are once again joining forces for Digital Day and offering exciting formats that, true to the motto, not only inform but also inspire and encourage all interested parties to get involved.
In this interview, the two musicians Lucas Fels and Anssi Karttunen talk about what drives them in their research and the difficulties they encounter.
The title of their digital research project is "CelloDocu". The starting point was the observation that in many cases, in addition to the very sparse playing instructions they give for their pieces, composers hardly record much that is absolutely necessary for rehearsals - and if they do, it is often inadequate.
Fels and Karttunen's aim is to create their own audio-visual documentation and use it to build up an archive of extended playing instructions. Composers, celists and musical thinkers can be seen and heard. Aesthetically different works and attitudes are traced "by hand" by trying them out on the cello and making notations comprehensible. Practical ways of reading and playing that have emerged from experience as well as approaches to academic disciplines concerned with music help on the way to individual interpretations of the pieces. The archive with these digital playing instructions, "CelloDocu", is to be made digitally accessible.
In conversation: Lucas Fels, Anssi Karttunen
Interview: Arevik Beglaryan, Bernhard Siebert
Recording and editing: David Schmitt
In English with either English or German subtitles.
Duration: approx. 30 minutes.