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How Germany’s ‘Orchestra of Change’ Inspires Action
Sipping a beer, electronic musician Hannes Teichmann looked around the darkened Apollo Hall, a soaring, gilded room in Berlin’s regal Staatsoper, or State Opera. Beneath enormous drop crystal chandeliers, 30-somethings in crop-tops, spangled disco shirts and gold-rimmed eyeglasses milled around, or conferred on bean bags inside a large, semi-transparent tent. Teichmann, a longtime fixture of Berlin’s underground techno scene, smiled. “For me, it’s like a club,” he said.
Certainly, the evening — part of a series called “Sustainable Listening” — was a departure from the Staatsoper’s regular program. Instead of chamber music or introductions to new opera performances, tonight the Apollo Hall hosted a political scientist’s talk about consumerism, capitalism and how we as a society must re-conceive work (among other things, we should do less of it, so we have more time for socializing, hobbies, volunteer work and politics, and feel less of a need for “retail therapy”), if we are going to stop harming the environment.
The “Sustainable Listening” series combines music and message. Credit: Frank R. Schröder
To help the message sink in, not just intellectually but emotionally, members of the house orchestra stepped in. Between ideas about unpaid household labor, the impact of AI, and “bullshit jobs,” they played throbbing drums, melancholy string instruments, and even a typewriter. Hannes and his brother Andi, known collectively as the “Gebrueder Teichmann” (or Teichmann brothers), sampled the sounds in real time, creating live electronic grooves.
For audience member Dina Rossbach, a psychologist, the mixture of music and message worked well. “Certain sentences from the lecture, with the music — they’re echoing, in a different way, for me,” she said. “It was poetic,” agreed her friend Michaela Aue, host of a meditation podcast.
In its second season, the Berlin Staatsoper’s “Sustainable Listening” series is just one of hundreds of projects launched by members of Germany’s Orchestra of Change, a grassroots, classical musician-led initiative whose goal is to use the emotional power of music in creative ways to protect nature and the climate. And, the musicians emphasize, we might just find that living more sustainably can be beautiful, fulfilling and fun.
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