Stefan Fraunberger

The music and art of Stefan Fraunberger draws on the language of things to focus the in-between. His work spans composition, installation, writing, solo and ensemble performance, as well as works for theatre and screen.

Stefan Fraunberger engages with the possibilities of material and liminal qualities. His exploration of biospheric counterpoints and uncanny agencies relates various instruments, actors, techniques and sciences to generate future-oriented perspectives beyond nature and culture. Stefan creates, translates and investigates fields involving augmented church organs, electro-acoustic realms, hammered dulcimers, voices, horns, pre-modern writing and structural recycles of aged frescos depicting hereafter: The drama of states becomes a response to present alienations.

“Quellgeister” is a long term research project into the unique character of derelict pipeorgans in Transylvania’s abandoned fortress churches, left obsolete by the exodus that followed the fall of Communism in Romania. In the long-term, my aim is to investigate the various transformations that human-built ritual machines undergo once left devoid of human presence, as they are slowly changing their interior material composition, developing a spirit and climate beyond systemic demands. Since 2008 I am in the midst of the testing-phase. 

Each number of "Quellgeister" refers to a different deterriorated pipe-organ in a different transylvanian village. The instruments bear their very own characteristics, oddities and well-fermented tunings. So far i have realized three albums - investigated, recorded and performed at the chosen organs. A work observing the language of things in regard to it's current state and process.

Quellgeister is the name of the musical cycle that the Austrian composer and artist Stefan Fraunberger has been developing for 25 years - all on dilapidated pipe organs in the abandoned fortress churches of Transylvania. Once built by ethnic Germans who fled the country during communist rule, the ritual machines were abandoned to the wilderness like stranded spaceships. On their corroded stop actions and with their perforated bellows, Fraunberger plays music that is as much about material transformation as it is about the collapse of opposites in our dawning epoch. After the crash is before the round of blissful spirits: Kuruzenaufstand, the fourth part of the Quellgeister cycle, will be premiered at the donaufestival.