Augustin Maurs with Diego Andrés Moscoso and Constantin Engelmann
(voice-s, percussions, electronically generated sounds, and other ghost instruments)

The term syncope comes from Latin syncopare as “to contract a word by omission of middle sounds” but also “to faint away”, “to swoon”, from Greek synkoptein “to cut up”. Among musicians, syncopation is known as a missing main beat causing a shift in rhythmic accent. 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2 becomes …2,… 2,….2, … a sudden interruption with the potential to overtake itself, syncopation has the ability of bouncing on what has been taken away.
This interplay between voice-s, electronically generated sounds, percussions and other “ghost instruments” explores syncopation as a rhythmic pattern and as a music-historical leitmotif, but also as a state of being and as a political allegory. Throughout a repeated cycle of different “musical time zones”, it also questions how the term was used, perceived and assigned to specific musical features, many of which of non-western origin. The evening traces the echoes of different syncopated motifs; bits of languages, bits of sounds, middles taken away leading to historical, geographic and semantic gaps. “No”, “now” and “own” mingle strangely, the history of clapping hands meets the history of applause, and a voice breaks into an impossible song. These often generative, yet collapsing musical processes also form the basis of an introspective inquiry. What has happened to us? Syncopation may appear as a possibility to outline what is missing, to take it by both ends, and eventually to overcome it by performing it. It triggers the ecstatic, bodily consciousness of music making as a way to silence the world, calling for renouncement for the sake of continuity.

syncopation exercise

bounce on loss

fall in bliss

again and in any order

Augustin Maurs
With Quentin Tolimieri, piano
And Til Van Der Vloedt, percussion

OUT OF TUNE is a parodic concert based on songs that have been used, abused or performed by autocrats and politicians. Although not a singer per se, Augustin Maurs steps into the role of a cabaret singer, challenging the very act of singing in an attempt to free the songs from their political appropriation.

OUT OF TUNE has been presented at the Ljubljana Biennale 2019, at the Grüner Salon Volksbühne Berlin and at the Steirischer Herbst Festival 2025

favourite song exercise

sing your lover’s favourite song

sing your neighbour’s favourite song

sing your ruler’s favourite song

arrange

Augustin Maurs

With Elisa Storeli

THE PERPETUAL CANON is an inquiry into the notion of canon initiated by Augustin Maurs in Berlin studios and presented for the first time at KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin in 2021. In the course of different collaborations and manifestations, the project looks into the historical developments of the term and explores its musical and non musical resonances until today. The outcome unfolds as an ongoing suite of pieces and practices, a quest for other kinds of musical response-ability. https://kanonqanuncanon.hotglue.me/

Augustin Maurs
In collaboration with Volve Vokal choir and Sigurd Øgaard (organ)

The project Nothing More explores the voice as a resource of expression and transformation, from phonation and speech to singing and political vocalness. The title echoes the book of Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, in which the philosopher argues that if the voice does not contribute to making sense, it is nevertheless an “excess of meaning”, and “the very texture of the social”.
Nothing More was commissioned by Bergen Assembly 2022.
It consists of a mixed media installation presented at the Gyldenpris Kunsthall in Bergen and a piece for choir and organ premiered at the Bergen Cathedral as part of the opening days of Bergen Assembly 2022.

More info here

Ice, Coal, Smithson and the Voice – a report

Svalbard is a place so terrestrial that it feels like another planet. Longyearbyen, its main inhabited area and the “world’s northernmost settlement”, counts a population of 2000 humans, reportedly surrounded by about 3000 polar bears, and probably at least twice as many roaring snow scooters. A few days after my arrival, we were surprised by an unseasonable heat wave with temperatures above 0 degrees Celsius, and the (here quite disturbing) sound of nocturnal rain. Within 24 hours, the icy valley turned into a lagoon, the snow tracks into impassable muddy streams (there are hardly any roads in Svalbard), with high risks of avalanches forbidding us to go anywhere.

During this forced immobility, I was invited to discover the residency workshop and its authentic manual presses. I experimented with the word “bore” in its double meaning, as Robert Smithson liked to emphasise it, ”to dig” and “to be bored”. I thought again of Smithson’s non-sites, the alphabet-rock and his “language heaps”, where the etymology of a word becomes like sedimentary layers. Almost like a reminder that the most untouched parts of the earth remain those where indigenous languages are spoken. Some days later and as some kind of echo, a geologist from the UNIS University, spoke about her work in Smithson’s terms, almost word for word. Geology is like a book, coal and ice in particular, formed in static environments, are like archives spread out in time and space, in them, we can read (or hear, I thought) the past and the future.

>

When the cold returned, we were able to visit Mine 7, the only still operating mine in Svalbard. An eight kilometres drive on vehicles worthy of science fiction films, straight into the mountain, inside a rock that is over 60 million years old. Once on foot, one walks bent over or crouched on the knees. The walls are shiny and black, sometimes covered with limestone to prevent fires. The danger, palpable, is mixed with a feeling of uterine security, the rhythms of the machines, the bumps and noises finally lulling us. And the tight social tissue interconnecting the miners appears as another vital resource – knowledge, gestures accumulated and materialized over generations. When the excavator (a giant wormlike machine weighing several thousand tonnes) proceeds to the production area a few metres from us, the earth shakes, almost obediently, and the coal is driven away.

That moment returned like a leitmotiv, taking different forms during my stay. The extraction of the combustible archive becoming the melting library, when visiting an ice cave. It was no longer the “black diamond” but the scales of time, tone and colour. From pearly white, oxygenated (recent ice), to translucent blue and pure transparency (old ice). A truly wonderful place, fleetingly invaded by our little group of helmeted fireflies, artist-tourists, winter-seekers, who came to see the snow and the ice, to feel the cold, “before it disappears”.

>

What are we doing here? The exceptional opportunity of having been invited to Svalbard is tied with the need to ask this question. The inability to change our lifestyles, even at 78 degrees north latitude, where we find all the necessities imposed by global consumption, such as tropical fruits and organic products wrapped in plastic, air humidifiers or the constant coming and going of tourist convoys. But as one co-resident pointed out: if we were activists, we wouldn’t be here.
However, the war that is thundering on our doorstep reminds us of the urgency. This hideous land grab, which, in Russia, one is not allowed to name, and which hides another one. What exactly should it be named? In the face of the unspeakable, formal mutism is a voice that breaks through, as shown by this Russian demonstrator, arrested as she was holding up a blank sign. Mladen Dolar says that the voice goes beyond what it expresses, that it is a lever of thought. A ressource? Maybe, ubiquitous like coal, both solid and airy, only definable through the circumstances that surround it.
Again, questions of words and sites, of non-words and non-sites. I came to Svalbard to look for possible relations between raw ressources and the human voice. In line with my transdisciplinary premises, I attempted to draw links between subjects and areas, like between geology and music. As if we could enter and leave these disciplines, as if we could extract and deduce from them when it suits us, as if we could actually escape from them. Is that research? In the end, it was not about entering a stuff that I didn’t know about, but rather realising, how much I am part of it. That we are in geology as much as we are in music, in an ongoing flow of memories and anticipations. In the impossibility of separating ourselves from the timbre of our voices, or from the dynamics that inhabit our movements. I had to travel this distance, to walk on this millions of years old ice, to make this tiny but primordial shift.

The starting point for this score (actually a series of scores) was a found document, the “Transcription of the Phonogram of a Schizophrenic”, a music sheet transcribing the recorded chanting of an anonymous psychiatric patient in Germany in 1899. The piece brings the document through different and delirious states of notation, performance and capture – from the lost ‘phonographic mise-en-scène’ undertaken by the patient to its inscription on the white walls of the gallery, which has become virtual. The transcription is no longer that of an isolated, anonymous patient, but of schizophrenia herself; the world, me.

Where we have no ground, we dance. The tarantella, a traditional dancing mania from South-Italy originally embedded in a therapeutic ritual meant to heal the envenomation of the bite of a spider, the tarantula. Suffering from restlessness or apathy, the (mostly female) victims of the bite would fall in a frenzied dancing trance provoked by the throbbing music of the tarantella, played by violins, guitars and tambourines. The ritual could last several hours or even days before the participants were brought back to normal life. Augustin Maurs takes over the typical triple time rhythm, the heightened repetitions and the shrill vocalisations of the tarantella to rearrange them for another uncertain now.

Gropius Bau Berlin
Villa Sarasin, Genva
Index, Stockholm
Kunst Werke, Berlin

Conceived for the monumental Beishan Broadcasting Wall in Taiwan, a former propaganda “loudspeaker wall”.  The piece is based on a selection of quotes on silence and muteness – in the vein of John Cage’s notorious statement “I have nothing to say and I am saying it”. It deals with the sonic affects of propaganda and the often related traumas through the question of “what cannot be said”. Non-professional singers sing the quotes in their native language, one by one and through simple and short a cappella melodies.

more

An open collection of sonic traces – found, heard or remembered sounds or musical motifs, hastily written down in the wish to be kept, or in the attempt to be forgotten. The incompleteness and futility of the transcriptions makes their musical rendition uncertain. Sounds re-emerge, modified and remote from any kind of fidelity.

more

ArtQ13 gallery in Rome,
As part of the Dilijan Arts Observatory (Armenia) and as Part of the exhibition “Hello World” in the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum Berlin, curated by Clementine Deliss

(exhibitions and performances)

vibrato exercise

say wa

sway wa

sing wa

say wa wa

sing we

swing we

sing wawewawewawe

vibrate

Dilijan Transcriptions

Voici ce que nous avons vu, transcrit, transposé
(ce à quoi nous avons échappé): 

des palissades de pierres roses, des antres de ferraille, des graines de plastique vert, des excavations sonores, des machines parlantes, des arbres fruitiers,
29 mètres de papier carton roulé sur des notations plastifiées,
des taxis hurlants du Rabiz,
des circuits imprimés par des milliers de mains diligentes,
des caisses en bois aux séparations binaires,
des toilettes communes en faux marbre sans séparation,
des portes qui se verrouillent toutes seules,
des vieux à la coquetterie et á la désillusion intactes.

Transformer l’oubli en passé (mais pourquoi)? C’est aussi nous mêmes qui nous sommes apparus, autres. Faiseurs de perspectives, par peur de finir trop prés, nous avons retrouvé nos superstitions, entendu des voix, des bruits, des chants. Nous avons brandi nos prothèses, toujours au risque de nous séparer du savoir. Et nous avons trébuché dans l’utile, jusque dans les retranchements de notre propre inutilité.

 (For Impuls Kondensator journal, Dilijan, Armenia 2016)

Music by Augustin Maurs
With The Last Ensemble
Ricardo Frenzel Baudisch (tenor), Katharina Schrade (soprano), Sarah van der Kemp (soprano), Yuka Yanagihara (soprano), and Ni Fan (percussion).

Commissioned by Saâdane Afif on the occasion of his exhibition “Das Ende der Welt” at the Berlin Natural History Museum.

The Last Ensemble: Martin Åkesson, Audrey Andrieu, Katharina Beckmann, Nina Berclaz, Cornelius von Bernstorff, Oliver Coleman, Sarah Darwin, Helga Dittmann-Pätsch, Guillaume Doerflinger, Philothée Gaymard, Cornelia Hiller, Hervé Humbert, Sam Kennedy, Cosima zu Knyphausen, Katharina Kritzler, Rüdiger Mangel, Sigrun Meyer, Alberto Piu, Antonio Piu, Cathia Ruf, Marilena Stano, and Renate Wolf.

video

Cadence – “flow of rhythm in verse or music”, from old Italian cadenza „conclusion of a movement in music“, from Latin „to fall“, sometimes used literally for “ an act of falling”.

video

If music is traditionally organized through quantifiable time parameters, it is also the evidence of the unquantifiable essence of time. Appearing in the 19th century, the notion of “tempo rubato”, Italian for “stolen time”, precisely evokes the rhythmic freedom taken by the interpreter, the transitory and unmeasurable essence of the musical act. As a musical union between time and space, the “rubato” is inherently singular and irreproducible. It opposes synchronization, which is precisely what enables music to be reproduced.

The exploring of this idea of “rubato” transforms the exhibition rooms in a lively space, a space of encounters and experimentations in continuous movement trough the combination of an electronic soundtrack and live playing. An assemblage of scores is at the disposal of the musicians and the visitors. This notational inquiry consisting of invented signs, stains and quotes, almost casual poetical events, though denies the actual use of music notation, but rather  brings about a reflexion about “given” and stolen time, about music and playing.

Curated by Anna Cestelli Guidi.

more

In cooperation with RAM – radioartemobile.

A Study on Stains

The stain is usually associated with the undesirable. It is the stigmata of the flaw. But in spite of its arbitrarily existence, it can sometimes be indistinguishable from the sign – especially in the musical notation where the note is represented with a dot.
Augustin Maurs’s transdisciplinary work plays on these boundaries between definite meaning and randomness. The process is both graphic and sonic. Partly familiar, partly anonymous, his “found melodies” carry the imperfection of memory, the deformation and the indifference of time.
Scattered in different places of the Villa Sarasin, the musicians play in individual time frames, guided by external phenomenons, such as moving objects, or the sudden presence of a person in a room. Stain and Sign interact. The idea of “playing together” is altered.

With the Ensemble Matka

listen

A commentary on Schubert’s “Winter Journey. Ongoing series of concerts and workshops. And Cornelius von Bernstorff, Dagobert, Julian Damovsky, Pinar Kaya, Raswan Mohamed, Geneviève Orjollet, Florian Pfeifer, Luca Plachy, Fatmagul Yaman, Olivier Grienenberger, Christian Marien.

With Michael Wilhelmi (piano) Aaron Synder, Lorent & Francois Ardouvin (voices and texts)
Verena Harzer (Dramaturgy)
Directed by Augustin Maurs

With the kind support of  Hauptstadtkulturfonds, INM (Initiative Neue Musik Berlin), Deutsch-Französisches Jugendwerk, Schloss Bröllin e.V. – international art research location, Outreach – Mobile Jugendarbeit Berlin,  Collectif Fusion, Villiers le bel, Stiftung Genshagen (Berlin Brandenburgisches Institut für Deutsch-Französische Zusammenarbeit in Europa).

documentation

Composed by Augustin Maurs, in collaboration with
Yuka Yanagihara, voice, Michael Wilhelmi, piano and Alex Babel, percussion

Miniature opera based on the epic verse novel “The Tale of Kieu” by Nguyen Du (1765–1820). Departing from the character of “Kieu” – a young artist who is forced to sell herself to survive, the piece deals with the entanglements between dispossession and fiction. It travels through different composed and improvised musical archetypes staged and performed in almost complete darkness.