Insects, Totalitarian Regimes, and Homemade Pipe Organs

24/6/2025 | Forfatter: Aarhus Jazz Festival | Fotograf: Gabriela Urm

Frightening marching music from totalitarian regimes transformed into captivating, poetic melodies. A concert inspired by small creatures and beetles in the middle of an exhibition filled with crawling insects. And an organ built from pipes salvaged from Danish churches, playing in harmony with the magnificent organ of Aarhus Cathedral.

Aarhus Jazz Festival 2025 focuses on unique concert experiences. The kind where you don't just listen, but where you also discover new horizons, as the concerts may influence your perception of time and place.With a series of concerts that we have chosen to call New Horizons, we invite the audience into special spaces where music takes on new meaning and gives you experiences you have definitely never heard before.

This year, we will be working with some of the city's beautiful exhibition spaces. In the magnificent city council hall at the KØN museum, we will present the award-winning and groundbreaking composer and saxophonist Maria Faust with an eight-piece wind orchestra. In her new project Marches, she has taken the grim and monstrous march music of totalitarian regimes and turned it on its head, making it slow and beautiful. She calls it a reworking of the horrors of war and the experiences of civilian victims. The project combines music, poetry, and political reflection, reminding us that the rhythm of marching all too often accompanies destruction. The venue where the music will be performed has a history that is particularly fitting for the project. Until 1941, the building was the city hall.It was then taken over by the police, but in 1944-1945, the German security police, the Gestapo, had their headquarters in the building after their former headquarters at Aarhus University was bombed. During this period, the windows were boarded up and barbed wire was placed around the building. Before the concert, you can hear Maria Faust talk about the project with Marie Norman Nyeng, Aarhus Jazz Festival's artistic director.

At Kunsthal Aarhus, we present “Swarms and Solos” by local American composer Wayne Siegel, a pioneer of both electronic and classical music. In an encounter with two improvising jazz musicians, he creates a sound universe in the middle of the art hall's current exhibition, “Bugs and Metamorphosis.” The exhibition features a number of prominent artists who all work with the term “bug”, which can mean both ‘error’ and “insect”. They do so metaphorically, technically, and as an artistic method. Throughout 2021, Wayne Siegel composed a new piece of music every week, inspired by insects he found in his garden.He has also created music that is shaped in real time by the movements of the stars and local weather data. Kunsthal Aarhus' exhibition provides a unique setting for the concert, where Wayne Siegel will be accompanied by trumpeter Kasper Tranberg, and Julie Kjær on flutes, saxophone, and bass clarinet.

In the impressive space of the Cathedral, British star organist Kit Downes meets Australian musician and instrument maker Calum Builder. In the magnificent church, the two artists reexamine the possibilities of the organ, bringing along a very special instrument. A few years ago, Calum Builder began salvaging pieces from discarded Danish church organs, which he has used to build his own organ. Kit Downes, who releases music on the highly renowned record label EMC and has an extensive international career, will play the Cathedral's grand organ, while Calum Builder will play his own home-built organ. Together, they create a musical journey where the old and the new merge in vibrating tones and shifting harmonies.

CONCERT OVERVIEW - NEW HORIZONS

11/7 15:00 Artist Talk: Wayne Siegel 

11/7 16:00 Wayne Siegel 'Swarms and Solos' feat. Kasper Tranberg & Julie Kjær 

12/7 13:00 Artist Talk: Maria Faust

12/7 14:00 Maria Faust Sacrum Facere: Marches Rewound & Rewritten

13/7 20:00 Kit Downes & Calum Builder: Organ duo