Can music also be expressed in words and images? The poet Nora Gomringer and photographic artist Andreas Herzau have collaborated with the Bamberg Symphony to create a fascinating anniversary publication. The result: over 150 packed pages giving visual form to sound. Published by Hatje Cantz.
Bamberg is its home, the whole world is its stage – the phrase sums up the Bamberg Symphony’s everyday experience. In March 2016, the Orchestra celebrated its 70th anniversary, and to mark the occasion it had invited the poet Nora Gomringer and the photographer Andreas Herzau to follow two years of performances in Germany, Europe and Asia.
The pair’s joint trips took them deep into the Bamberg Symphony’s universe and gave rise to an extraordinary publishing project. Andreas Herzau’s photographs afford intimate glimpses of the Orchestra’s daily routine and open a quite new, artistic angle on the ensemble, going beyond the purely documentary. Nora Gomringer’s distinctively individual voice adds a further layer to these searching images. The result is much more than a portrait of the Orchestra: Bamberg Symphony captures the aesthetic kernel of the phenomenon that is an orchestra, offering us a novel way to experience something we can’t actually see – music: it gives visual form to sound.