BL!NDMAN [hybrid] x Zwerm

Carlo Gesualdo is known as the enfant terrible of the Renaissance: as famous for his adventurous madrigals as he is notorious for the murder of his wife and her lover. Traditionally, his work has been interpreted as the expression of a tormented genius. BL!NDMAN  [hybrid] and ZWERM unravel this romantic myth. They sketch a new portrait of Gesualdo as a talented aristocrat, a spider in the patriarchal web of power, violence and privilege. What’s more, they present his music alongside that of female contemporaries who, each in her own way, helped shape an innovative madrigal culture. Maddalena Casulana, for example, was not only a remarkable singer, lutenist and composer, but also wrote astute texts about men, women and music. The nun and multi-instrumentalist Vittoria Aleotti also celebrated life and love in groundbreaking compositions. My Heart Cannot Die offers a many-voiced, modern-day response to the flexible madrigal repertoire, placing instrumental arrangements into dialogue
with musical noise and critical text projections. How did we – and how do we – view women in music? And what should we do with the oeuvre of a composer who, in addition to beautiful madrigals, also has a murder to his name? A pertinent thought experiment about then and now.