Total Music Meeting
The Total Music Meeting was an annual, multi-day international artist festival for improvised music in Berlin. It was founded in 1968 as a counter-festival to the Berlin Jazz Days directed by Joachim-Ernst Berendt .
The aim of this alternative event was initially to show the developments in contemporary, free jazz in Europe. In addition to evening concerts with international artists, thematic workshops and documentary film matinees are now taking place. The claim to break musical conventions and boundaries as much as possible and to realize the experience of improvisation in music at a high level is already reflected in the festival name, Total Music Meeting.
The performances partly combine the various disciplinary arts. from the Feminist Improvising Group in 1979 to the appearance of the TTT group , which on special occasions around the world seeks to perceive tonality and painting as two sides of the same emotional impulse and in which, for example, AR Penck , Markus Lüpertz , Louis Moholo , Jeanne Lee or Peter Kowald performed together.
The interactive understanding of sound and space is in the foreground of the improvisations of contemporary " New Music " compositions, which have also been represented since 2001, and of the performances in which electronic game concepts also play a role. Some of these were commissioned by the Berlin Academy of the Arts .
Traditional world music is also occasionally represented at the Total Music Meeting when its representatives (or exceptional musicians) open up accordingly to improvisation. South African or Iranian musicians could be heard here as well as the Tuva-born overtone singer Sainkho Namtchylak .
While the festival could expect a subsidy from the Berlin Senate in the first few decades , since 2000 it has increasingly been dependent on private donations. It is also financed through the sale of original graphics , for example by Han Bennink , Fritze Margull , Helge Leiberg or Urs Jaeggi . After the Senate had only promised a grant of 3,760 euros in 2009, the 2009 festival was canceled.