Verena Barie (Germany) - Recordari

Audio Foundation is pleased to welcome back to Aotearoa recorder player, electronic composer and LTK4 (Cologne) member Verena Barie. Verena brings a unique concert of contemporary compositions for recorders and electronics, featuring works by New Zealander Marcus Jackson, pioneering 20th Century composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and more.
For the second half of the concert Verena is joined by LTK4 director Rochus Aust.

Synopsis: recordari

In a concert in Klaipéda (Lithuania) I was announced as a player of “Magnetofonai” (cassette recorder) - translated from the English ‘recorder’, which is seldom identified as the instrument Blockflöte / Flauto Dolce, but mostly as the recording device. This charming misunderstanding inspired me to conceive the solo concert program “recordari” (remember, record), bringing together my artistic practice as a recorder soloist and electronic musician together.

The element memory/recording is illuminated in various forms in this program. In my arrangement of FOURsix (Cage), field recordings from the countries of the composers Pistorius (South Africa) and Jackson (New Zealand) can be heard via a sampler instrument (programmed by Barié) and thus form a temporal and cartographic bridge between the genre of new music composed from today and before I was born. The fourth player is a sound installation with organ pipes and balloon pumps (senza manuale), which I created in 2021 / 2023. In SPIRAL (Stockhausen) short waves are used, which can carry long-distance signals to the other end of the world. The soloist receives, imitates, transforms the given events from a short-wave radio with any instruments/voice. It is important to me to stage these pieces of graphic/numerical, therefore more conceptual, notation with pieces of classical music notation, which my contemporaries Pistorius and Jackson chose. In addition, “old” and renowned new music will be presented to the audience as a unit with the “latest” new music through the medium of the recorder - an instrument many listeners might have played themselves already.

The realization and production of this program is funded by the German Orchestra fund (Deutsche Orchesterstiftung, #MusikerZukunft) and the concerts are made possible by the export funding of the ministry of culture and science northrhine-westphalia (Exportförderung des Ministeriums für Kultur und Wissenschaft NRW).


Program: recordari


Porcelain extended (2024)
Markus Jackson (*1994, Neuseeland)
Original: Porcelain extended (2020), for two recorders and one performer
reworked (2024) with electronics by Verena Barié

SPIRAL (1968)
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007)

Dancing with the inner silence (2020)
Wilma Pistorius (*1991, South-Africa)
with electronics by Verena Barié

Set 2 - FOURsix
John Cage
Verena Barié, Rochus Aust, Fieldrecordings, Senza Manuale

Set 3 - Duo Barié-Aust

Biography: Verena Barié

Verena Barié (*1994) is a globally active recorder player, media artist, composer and curator. After completing a classical bachelor's degree with a major in recorder, she completed the master's program in Live Electronics at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam as well. The recorder brought Barié to the intersection of music, new media and performance art early on.

Living in Cologne since October 2019, Barié works as co-curator at LTK4 – Sound-Based Arts Cologne. Since 2021 she is an active board member of the Cologne Society for New Music e.V. and shapes the cultural life of Cologne's independent scene through musical and artistic events as well as cultural and political commitment.

As a curator and conceptor, the main interest in her project space LTS4 x Licht.Ton.Sicht (since 2021) is to bring artists from different generations and art fields together and to prioritize learning from each other. Barié has a keen interest to extend the art of discourse from the creative society to the audience. In addition to her solo work, Barié is an active ensemble player, including since 2017 the renowned Renaissance double sextet THE ROYAL WIND MUSIC (NL) and since 2020 the experimental sound-artistic 1. GERMAN ELECTROPHONIC ORCHESTER (DE). With composer and live electronic musician Sjoerd Leijten (NL/BE), she forms “chirp.crush”, a duo that crosses borders between experimental audio books, radio and sound art.

In addition to numerous CD and cassette publications, Verena Barié can also be heard live on Deutschlandfunk and Bayrischer Rundfunk and dutch radio and has appeared on television in Holland, Germany, Finland and Mexico.