Improvisation Weekend, 11-12 February 2012

Lovers of classical music and jazz will be in for a treat at this year’s Johannesburg International Mozart Festival. According to its underlying theme, “quasi improvisando”, the JIMF and the Goethe-Institut South Africa present an Improvisation Weekend, a series of informal concerts, workshops, presentations and open panel discussions. 

Improvisation affects a huge variety of music and is reflected in the works by baroque composers, Mozart and his contemporaries, in scores of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, as well as in jazz and traditional African music, to name only a selection of genres and styles of music that will be explored in a performance-based setting throughout this weekend.

The events on Saturday, 11 February, will take a look at various historical and cultural contexts of improvisation, while the agenda on Sunday, 12 February, is not only to offer a critical discussion of the individual aspects, but to bring together through the technique of “Soundpainting” the separate strands towards the creation of a “new” music. All workshops, discussions and performances will culminate in a jam session concert on Sunday, 12 February 2012, at 16.00h at the Theatre of the University of Johannesburg. The performers/speakers include musicologists Chats Devroop and Marc Duby, JIMF-2012-composer-in-residence Paul Hanmer, JIMF-2011-composer-in-residence Mokale Koapeng, musicians Pops Mohamed and Tinashe Chidanyika, composer Clare Loveday, cellist Hans Huyssen, lutenist Uwe Grosser, the percussion duo Magda de Vries and Frank Mallows, as well as a group of young jazz pianists participating in a workshop with Paul Hanmer.