ALBERT MAYR. Time Aspects

Museion Passage – a free-admission space dedicated to highlighting the museum collection and its ties to the local area – opens an exhibition that pays tribute to the South Tyrol artist, musician and composer Albert Mayr on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.

Museion has chosen to mark Albert Mayr’s 80th birthday by focusing on aspects that are central to his extraordinary art-music work, with an exhibition in Passage, on the ground floor of Museion, where he will be celebrated with a range of his works from the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s preserved in the museum collection.

Mayr has composed electronic music and written articles and theories on the need to rethink our relationship with time, beyond its role within music. At the heart of his work, in fact, we find a wide concept of music in which daily life and its sounds play an important role.

His poetics are based on “time design”. On one hand, he treats the development of “time tabeling” – that is to stay, the creation of timetables or time plans – as a creative discipline. On the other, he investigates the perception of sounds, and their repetitions, pauses and overlaps, in a concrete, spatial environment. In this way, he interprets the structure of time as music and extracts the aesthetic qualities from the sounds he finds there.

One of the most important examples of Mayr’s approach, that is included in the exhibition, is his 1984 film, Von Zeiten und Leuten. Am Beispiel Sarntal.  (Of times and people. The example of the Sarntal Valley), commissioned by RAI Südtirol. In his film, Mayr records time-defined sounds and rhythms that characterize the lives of the valley’s inhabitants.

The exhibition also presents the 2021 documentary film Dall’Alto Adige all’universo dei suoni (From the South Tyrol to the Universe of Sounds) by Claudio Chianura, that includes interviews with Mayr and the colleagues and critics who have accompanied his work.