SONUS INCENSUS

Incense – sacred smoke – has been present in a wide variety of religious and spiritual practices since early antiquity. In Judaism and Christianity, in India and large parts of Asia, as well as in South America and Africa. Incense often fulfils a similar function: it sets a threshold, transforming the profane into a place of heightened awareness. Music and smell elude precise description, but appeal to memory and emotion more directly than words or images. They spread, overlap, disappear, leaving traces only within.

Cellist and improviser Maria Magdalena Wiesmeier has already explored this relationship between sound and olfactory space in earlier projects. Together with Maximilian Schnaus, the church interior becomes a laboratory: organ and cello create avant-garde layers of proximity and distance, of condensation and dissolution. The music of Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina serves as a compositional reference point.