TEHO TEARDO presents Music for Wilder Mann

Composer Teho Teardo’s music attracts and is attracted by other art forms, creating in Music for Wilder Mann, a novel relationship between traditional and electronic musical instruments. Here he expands his soundtrack repertory for cinema and theater by entering into dialogue with Charles Fréger’s photographs, published in the book Wilder Mann: the Image of the Savage. Music for Wilder Mann offers the experience of collapsing into a chaos of emotion, sinking with the sounds in dialogue with the images.

The Wilder Mann images, the startling photographs of humanized beasts collected in Fréger’s book, which has become a classic in its own right, evoke an uneasiness accompanied by Teardo’s music. Fear and fright augment our curiosity to keep looking at these futuroid beings from our dark past, their animal skins and teeth, horns and antlers, whatever the ferocious feature of bears and boars, monsters and demons that sets off terror. The focus of the collaboration between Teardo and Fréger was to explore by means of music and photography the savage, an angel or a demon embodying desires and defects. For there is a need to discover the roots of our hopes and concerns that are intimately tied to our primitive, archaic instincts, which are still within us, barely audible above the noise of modern technology, the barrage of words and images, and the waves of data overwhelming us. An anthropological exploration of our need for the savage in us.

The photographs illustrate a disturbing, yet still recognizable throwback to an ancestral era far from today’s reality. This is not nostalgia for the past, however: the Wilder Mann figures, these futuroid ancestors, are pagan folk; the electronics and the strings are not bothered with the temporal passage from the dawn of time to the present. The music is free to be what it wants to be anywhere; it is an emotional account from elsewhere, an atavic remnant that resonates between the synthesizers and the strings.

The Music for Wilder Mann concert is a special event presented with the instrumentation originally conceived for the entire album: two cellos, a viol, and Teardo’s electronic instruments seek to enter into dialogue with a different kind of image, Charles Fréger’s extraordinary photographs. There is a musical piece for each photograph of a towering figure, a symbol of our innermost fears, whose meaning varies with our gaze. At a certain point in the concert, thirty percussionists strike cymbals and gongs, sending the sound frequencies upwards to the heavens.

Admission with Museum ticket