Die Lange Nacht Der Museen

What an amaz­ing idea. What a night. When you have a crit­ical mass of museums, evol­u­tion occurs. The emer­gent creature is an exper­i­ence rather than an exhibit. The Haus der Musik was great, very hands on and taught me things I did not know about chro­matic scales versus scales that sound like they’re ascend­ing infin­itely due to sonic tricks and finally a demon­stra­tion that very clearly let me hear (and see, with visual rep­res­ent­a­tions of both sine­waves and fre­quen­cies) exactly what dis­son­ance and con­son­ance are, how fourths and minor sev­enths and other inter­vals func­tion and why a beat occurs when two fre­quen­cies are too close to each other. The stuff about ima­gin­ary sounds was amaz­ing as was the stuff about root notes of the male voice not actu­ally being trans­mit­ted by a phone but rather filled in by our brains which can’t hear the har­mon­ics without adding the root. And that was just one ROOM. I also got to listen to the sounds of Jupiter, Nep­tune and cosmic radi­ation as recor­ded by Apollo mis­sions, and only THEN do you get on to the composers. 

I went to the Jewish Museum (Vien­nese Jews and music; I had no idea how many of the major com­posers were Jewish; after all Mahler does­n’t sound like a Jewish name), the National Lib­rary (OH MY GOD! Globes of the sky from 1480 show­ing demons and griffins, walls of leather-bound tomes, antique books with glor­i­ous illu­min­a­tion and a spe­cial dis­play about the rela­tion­ship between Vienna and Prague using the extens­ive col­lec­tion of doc­u­ments and books in the lib­rar­y’s hold­ings includ­ing illu­min­ated descrip­tions of medi­eval courtly dip­lo­matic mis­sions), the Tech­no­lo­gical Museum (like Sci­ence­Works and a his­tory of tech­no­logy museum rolled into one; totally LOVED the his­tory of media floor, with print­ing presses and tele­graphs and an old mail coach and mov­able type and vari­ations on type­writers that never really took off and finally under­stand­ing why off-set print­ing is better than the old way and seeing how a Lino­type changed everything and play­ing with a model of a Dif­fer­ence Engine and on it goes; the heavy industry floor full of huge shiny oiled pis­tons; a room full of music play­ers through the ages, bizarre as we get through the 60s and 70s to the 80s and to now), Kunst Halle Pro­ject Space which was show­ing “Sex in the City”, four women artists includ­ing TANA and Annie Sprinkle (sat down and watched lots of cool Annie Sprinkle porn with com­ment­ary then wondered why every­one was stand­ing over in that room… oh, hello, that’s the real Annie Sprinkle doing a per­form­ance), the Museum Mod­erner Kunst (with a pop art and fluxus spe­cial exhib­i­tion… I didn’t really even know what fluxus was before ars elec­tron­ica but I now real­ise I saw a bit of it at the Centre Gorges Pomp­idou when I was in Paris and I quite like it)… oh man. There’s more but those are the high­lights. Didn’t make it to the Inter­na­tional Esper­anto Museum which was run­ning crash courses, or the Papyrus Museum or the actual Globe Museum next to the Lib­rary (480 globes of the world from all eras…).

The thing goes from 6pm till 1am. Most of the venues have music events and drinks. There was an italian wine tast­ing at the Tech­no­logy Museum which was superb. I didn’t make it to the Liecht­en­stein Museum on time but they had an orches­tra con­duc­ted by Jordi Savall. There was a coffee machine exhib­i­tion at the Tech Museum so I had to go and tell the guy who my father was. He freaked a little. “I’ve got his book’ He then turns to the next people wait­ing and in rapid German explains that some of the col­lec­tion we’re look­ing at was actu­ally bought from my father (at least that’s what I think he said).

Party back at the Museum­sQuart­ier till all hours and then coffee this morn­ing with a much-recovered Markus (he’ll be join­ing us here under the moniker pixelwm any second now) before head­ing off to the train to Cesky Krumlov.

And now I’m esconced in the best little hostel, windy stairs in an ancient mer­chant’s house right in the old centre of town, great little bar down­stairs, good music, nice seem­ing people. My only regret is that Krys­tal isn’t here to share in the fun.