The Great Wayfinders I–IX (Höhlenmusik)

The composer Marcus Schmickler, together with the artist Tim Berresheim, is developing a chamber opera that will be performed on September 20 and 21, 2025, as part of the double anniversary at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. The multi-part composition creates a kaleidoscopic resonance space for a digital paleontology and a sonic mapping of our present—the “digital Stone Age.”

The chamber opera The Great Wayfinders I–IX (Höhlenmusik) [Cave Music] investigates the meaning of digitality through the lens of speleological research, venturing a speculative gaze from the future back into our present. Together with the artist Tim Berresheim, the composer Marcus Schmickler crafts a narrative according to which we are still at the very beginning of a new epoch—the digital age. In centuries to come, this era may be recalled as the “digital Stone Age,” with its beginnings appearing rudimentary and primal.

The central figure of the piece is the “Wayfinder,” inspired by the Grimm’s fairy tale characters Hansel and Gretel. The libretto draws on motifs from Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel. Accompanied by caring yet strangely distant parental voices, the children navigate the “forest of unknown digital artifacts” using breadcrumbs. As they explore this unfamiliar terrain, they face various trials and learn a new language: that of digitality and machine learning.

For the chamber opera, Tim Berresheim generates a digital stage design created from data obtained through surveys of caves in the Danube Valley in Baden-Württemberg. These caves, now part of the UNESCO World Heritage, have yielded some of the oldest musical instruments ever discovered—some dating back as far as 34,000 years. The archaeoacoustic translation of the caves’ 3D scans is incorporated as a sonic environment within Schmickler’s composition.

The piece explores the very origins of musicality: Schmickler pursues an approach that combines experimental archaeology with musicology. The goal of his computer-assisted research is to simulate the archetypal sounds of the Neolithic and to reveal their psychoacoustic potential. The past is by no means silent; it is full of sounds that can be rediscovered through modern technologies. This approach also opens up new perspectives for understanding our own present—the “digital Stone Age.”

The chamber opera is performed by the Ensemble Musikfabrik, featuring a range of proto-futuristic instruments: from a replica of the “vulture flute,” one of the oldest musical instruments ever discovered, to shells, bullroarers, and bear bones, as well as instruments by the American composer Harry Partch. The Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart take on the roles of the protagonists. The piece also includes Schmickler’s distinctive synthetic computer music, partly developed in collaboration with the Institut fuer Musik und Medien Düsseldorf and the Next Generation Sound Synthesis project (NESS) in Edinburgh.

Commissioned by the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
Funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation
In cooperation with Ensemble Musikfabrik, Musik der Jahrhunderte

Tickets available at www.kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de