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If this review contained a single sentence on every piece that was performed – let alone every lecture, discussion or open forum – from 14 to 28 July in Darmstadt, it would easily be book-length. Like, big book – maybe not Taruskin big, but definitely Rutherford-Johnson big. I have, for the most part, written about the bits that particularly struck me and tried to make sense of them both in themselves and in the context of the courses. This was especially difficult to do this year, because there really was no singular takeaway being presented, advocated or otherwise offered, which is quite remarkable, but makes narrowing down review material even more fraught. None of the pieces discussed below get the full description and analysis that they deserve – this is just a first attempt to make sense of things that happened.
Programmed Concerts
Nice Guys Win Twice
Jessie Marino's Nice Guys Win Twice was, naturally enough, presented twice; I had been given a ticket to see its second performance. Before I saw it, several people had mentioned to me that it was a topical piece, and one person told me that ‘it has a really definite political message’. Having seen the piece, I was completely baffled about what this person could have been talking about – there was certainly political material in the piece, but a message? Discussing Nice Guys Win Twice with a number of other people, I realised something extraordinary: not only did almost everyone have different interpretations of Marino's piece, all were totally convinced that they had discovered its real hidden message, like fan theorists watching Twin Peaks. For instance, I have heard at least three distinct interpretations of the clownfish which appears as a leitfigur throughout the piece: 1) that it represented how contemporary life is lived, so to speak, in a media-saturated fishbowl; 2) that it was a representation of President Donald Trump (it was orange; plus its inflatable iteration reminded some of the Trump-blimp that had flown over London a week prior); 3) that it represented a hermaphroditic biological cycle that exceeded a simple binary order. The latter fit in with my reading of the piece as essentially a multimedia idyll on contemporary themes – a...