How do we make music in times of lockdown? How can we come together as an orchestra despite being far apart? And how do we provide our audience with a full concert experience whilst following hygiene regulations? Guided by these questions, the Stegreif Orchester sought out a new, lockdown-appropriate way of making music. The result was a series of three digital concert evenings hosted in the winter of 2021.
From five separate locations, we played simultaneously, performing a concert whilst connecting over state borders and venturing into a completely new concept of the concert hall: we joined together in a digital 360° room, in which the audience was able to move around in real-time.
Special technical equipment made it possible to transmit sound latency-free i.e. without delay, which allowed us to make music together online. Video artist Lucas Gutierrez created a separate digital world for each evening in the form of a 360° video: a big city, an idyllic natural landscape, and a utopian, surreal inner world. The five musicians were placed in each of these rooms via live video, so that the audience could look around and turn towards individual musicians by moving their smartphones or their mouse.
Even though it was a wonderful experience to be able to make music together in a virtual, digital space for the first time - we still do prefer performing live :)
