
Photo: Urban Ruth
“Music is still incomprehensible to me“
For the first time, pianist, conductor and composer GREGOR A. MAYRHOFER is shaping this festival season as part of the artistic management. He explains to us why music is the greatest of all arts to him, why he isn’t afraid of AI and why we have to take risks at HIDALGO.
Interview: Philipp Nowotny
Gregor, what does music mean to you?
For me, music is the most exciting thing that humans have ever created. It is amazingly unnatural because it doesn’t have a specific benefit. We don’t even know exactly where it comes from. The mating behaviour of our ancestors? Did families and groups express their belonging with music? But music is a form of reflecting the world and the experiences in it as well.
Nothing touches us as much as music, right?
In me, it has caused things that I don’t know from any other context, whether it is sports, board games or even theater visits. What happens is still incomprehensible to me: You’re sitting there listening to something and suddenly you’re unbelievably emotional, moved to tears, full of distress and grief, full of fulfilment and confidence, full of energy and drive. It can’t be explained. Music creates an access to our selves that is still mysterious.
Are you searching for such touching moments in your work as a pianist, conductor and composer?
In a wider sense. In my opinion, you can be touched by something in an emotional way, but intellectually as well. For example, you can be moved by a different way of thinking. Music is like the quantum physics of emotions: It suddenly opens an incredibly exciting and sometimes barely comprehensible cosmos in which perception, thinking and feeling elide.
In concerts, the effect of experiencing music together is added.
We become a part of the music together which is especially fulfilling for me, too. That is why I’m also confident that my profession won’t be replaced by AI: Nothing affects as much as being in a room with people who are creating music and art at that very moment.
What hopes do you have for your first festival season at HIDALGO?
I’m hoping for areas of tension in which music and other artforms connect and clash at the right moment in a contrasting manner. Personally, I also love concerts that are only about the music without anything distracting you from it. But at HIDALGO it is all about connecting different layers to create an even greater experience.
What about that appeals to you?
Actually, these two directions: the connecting and the contrasting. With the HIDALGO Kollektiv, we have a pool of exciting specialists—we can bring music together with choreography, newly written texts but also with culinary. At the same time, they’re all people who think differently from me and therefore open new ways of thinking for me as well. That can surprise me and hopefully surprise our audience as well.
Artistic experiments also come with the risk of something not working out, right?
The risk has to be part of the calculation. As an artist you need to prepare as best you can. But if you plan and determine everything, you limit yourself and then it can never go through the roof.