Romaeuropa Festival 2018: Avant-Garde Music Marathon at MAXXI

The Romaeuropa Festival 2018 featured a sound marathon at the MAXXI museum reconstructing the path of musical avant-gardes. Pianist Fabrizio Ottaviucci performed works by Cornelius Cardew and Alvin Curran, using the piano as a drum, double bass, and orchestra. The Edison Studio group (Luigi Ceccarelli, Fabio Cifariello Ciardi, Alessandro Cipriani, Vincenzo Core) presented a live audiovisual concert for Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," focusing on the film's formal structure and montage, with the film restored by the Cineteca di Bologna. Tempo Reale performed "Simphony Device," using everyday appliances like blenders and washing machines as instruments. Ryoji Ikeda presented "Datamatics (version 2.0)" with real-time software-generated sounds and visuals, and later performed "Music for percussion" with the Eklekto group, a 45-minute piece of minimal sounds. Franco D'Andrea and his octet demonstrated jazz's dialogue with contemporary music. Angélique Kidjo closed the festival with a concert reinterpreting Talking Heads' "Remain in Light" through African music. Matthew Herbert performed a jazz-fusion concert addressing Brexit. The festival ran from summer to early winter, covering theater, dance, music, new media, and video art.