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NEW: TRIO MAGISTERIUM - - Tales without words: Music, magic and puppetry
With: Jean Jacques Lemêtre, music / Abdul Alafrez, illusions / Lea Duchmann, marionettes
Tour in spring 2024

Magical marionettes play instruments, a magician amazes with poetic tricks and the master of never-seen instruments from all over the world create for some feather-leight moments a world full of music, magic and eye-twinkling wit: pure pleasure!

Moondog - Homage to the blind musician, composer and poet Louis Thomas Hardin also known as Moondog
Production of a box presenting a video with partly historique, partly actual film recordings, 2 records and a CD

Encounter with a mastermind of music based on material upon his musical, philosophical, historical and scientific impulses - witnessed by a musician and friend.

The life and work of Moondog, born Louis Thomas Hardin in Kansas in 1916 and who died in Münster in 1999, are as extraordinary as his appearance:
For decades, the 'Viking of the 6th Avenue'-long hair and razzle-dazzle beard, wearing a cape, sandals and horned helmet, holding his spear- stood in New York on the corner of 6th Avenue/54th Street, beating a hand drum, playing a zither he invented, selling poetry and becoming a tourist attraction. The Hilton Hotel reportedly listed his address as "across the street from Moondog" in advertisements.
In 1974 Moondog disappeared from the USA, reappeared as a street musician in Hamburg, Hanover and Recklinghausen , found a musical home in Oer-Erkenschwiek, later in Münster, and made a late career with recordings and radio and festival appearances.
At first glance, he could be mistaken for a crank or a beggar, but the homeless man was a musician, composer, poet and philosopher who proved Bach wrong in composition, consorted with Toscanini, Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein, the New York Philharmonic and Charlie Parker, for whom he wrote his best-known song, "Bird's Lament." Charlie Mingus and Allan Ginsberg performed with him. For Paul Simon he was an icon, Janis Joplin sang his songs, Philip Glass and Steve Reich saw in him their "leader wolf "...

Concert: From Paleolithic to present Music and instruments from the beginnings till today
Instruments are among the oldest evidence of human culture. Around 4000 years ago, people were already using the ivory of mammoth teeth for instruments, as for eaxample those found in the Hohle Fels cave (Schelklingen/DE).

The concert with a selection from Lemêtre's pool of around 3000 instruments collected all over the world or self-invented and built conveys a sensual and practical impression of man's inventive spirit in his need to express himself and communicate with sounds - from the mammoth flutes of the Stone Age to the today's guitar with 3 hands ...

Berlin - Die Sinfonie der Grossatadt / Symphony of a Metropolis -
Silent movie concert: Music- and Sound-Collages - LIVE improvised

Eyes and ears of the people of today, focused to images from the past...
That is, "old pictures" interpreted and complemented with sounds, also non-European of today, played live with a selection from Lemetre's fund of more than 3000 instruments, collected all over the world, as well as self-built, which, at the same time, are used as a live improvised ambient sound..

The exciting keywords here are: Theatrical music as film music, rarely seen and heard instruments, whose not only tonal but also visual appeal stands alongside the film images; instruments from other cultures, that now belong to the German musical landscape but did not exist in Germany at the time the film was made, Turkish, African, Asian. Instruments and those from the Near and Middle Orient.

Le Conte de Tchernobyl / The Tale from Tschernobyl
Text: Claude Morand / Music: Jean Jacques Lemêtre
WP: 1995 Frankreich

On April 26, 1986, one of the 6 reactors of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded.
Claude Morand was allowed to visit Tchernobyl and the ghost town of Prypyat shortly afterwards and to talk to Oleg, who was 15 years old at the time. From what he told her, "details that could not possibly be invented" she formed her "Conte de Tchernobyl".

Morand's "fairy tale" ends with the question of whether the world will be able to contain forever the quadrillions of becquerels slumbering in the sarcophagus of Tchernobyl, which "like all slumbering 'dragons' always close only one eye in their sleep"?

Today, 36 years later, this question is more topical than ever - and by a hair's breadth found, and could still find, a terrible answer through Putin's war against Ukraine ...

" Simple, but not simplistic: a precise language, inspirung, associative, open - into which everyone can bring his own imagination, his subjectivity. "

Babel Orkestra - Multimedia-Performance
The languages and dialects of the world as a global orchestra of our planet
WP: 2012 / Montréal, Canada

From a unique phonographic collection of 1800 languages and dialects, that he has gathered in 15 years, Lemêtre has composed Babel Orkestra.
A phonetic language poem that circles our planet from north to south, from east to west, wandering through all still spoken living and dead languages, also including the 'poor' and the 'green' languages, as well as universal art languages and the regionally narrow idioms of primitive peoples.
The voyage into the heart of languages begins at the beginning - at the first breath, the birth of the first sound, of a word, of the first cries - and ends with the modern languages, that have only recently come into being, or even invented or imagined.

The creative process is based on the idea of going from the infinitely small to the great, and works with sounds and tones of life with the text of Genesis about the Tower of Babel, with the different voice and speech techniques of the peoples, with very rare or even disappeared languages.
Like the colors of different instruments of an orchestra, the speech sounds combine and complement each other to a musical and rhythmic composition complemented by video and light installations.

Music of the 5 continents - Voyage Visuel Musical autour du monde

Conversation concert with an individual selection of original instruments from Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia and own constructions.
Concert and short seminar in the same time:
Lemêtre gives an improvised concert, in which he explains and plays rare, partly unknown or even only in some copies preserved
traditional instruments.
The goal is not to present "folk music" true to the original, but to convey something of the essence of a culture through the sound character of the instruments, to get closer to the feelings and thoughts of the people who built and used them.

A special attraction is the "concert after the concert", in which visitors can play the instruments themselves, often resulting in spontaneous improvised music-making.