Olympia 1972 and the musical avant-garde
A look back at the music program created for and around the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich causes astonishment. The people in charge give space to contemporary music. It is quite natural and apparently normal to rely on the avant-garde. This extraordinary musical framework program for the 1972 Olympics has almost been forgotten. The architecture with its transparent, glass tent roof is remembered as a sign of a new, cosmopolitan, modern and democratic Germany, as a counterpoint to the stone Berlin Olympic Stadium of 1936, and the shocking kidnapping of the Israeli athletes, which ended with the death of twelve people, is burned into the memory.

In the Olympic summer of 1972, contemporary music fills the entire city of Munich, Mauricio Kagel plays "Exotica" with curious instruments from the Münchner Stadtmuseum, Karlheinz Stockhausen invites people to his "Sternklang" in the English Garden on starry nights, John Cage, Morton Feldman and Josef Anton Riedl, among others, are heard. Performances will take place throughout the city, and Krzysztof Penderecki will set the text of the Ekecheiria Agreement ('truce agreement') of 884 BC to music at the opening ceremony:
Hold fast to the old custom
Preserve your land
Stay away from war
And give a sign to the world
of brotherly friendship,
When the time of the quadrennial games approaches

50 years later, in the summer of 2022, Munich celebrated the anniversary of the "cheerful" Games, but also remembered the tragedy that so abruptly destroyed the Olympic truce.

For the central anniversary festival in Munich, entitled "Festival des Spiels, des Sport und der Kunst" (Festival of Games, Sports and Art), Neue Klangkunst by Mariko Takahashi and Stefan Winter were commissioned to create a sound installation around the Olympic lake with eight sound sculptures. This work, titled "The Games Must Go On," recalls the still controversial call by then IOC President Avery Brundage who refuses to stop the games because of the assassination attempt.

Takahashi and Winter commission Japanese composer Fumio Yasuda to re-score Ekecheiria as part of "The Games Must Go On" to reflect the events of 1972.

In this context, Fumio Yasuda composes the recording work "The Games Must Go On" for six voices of the Exaudi vocal ensemble conducted by James Weeks and polyphonic movements for bass clarinetist Gareth Davis. Joining the voices of Exaudi (Cressida Sharp: soprano, Lotte Betts-Dean: mezzo-soprano, Jessica Gillingwater: mezzo-soprano, David de Winter: Tenor, Ruairi Bowen: Tenor, Michael Hickman: Baritone), Gareth Davis performs a six-part clarinet movement in Part I. In Part II, inspired by Japanese monk chants, a two-part clarinet movement follows, and Gareth Davis improvises a solo part to the composed vocal parts of Part III. Five clarinet voices follow in Part IV, the six voices are contrasted by four clarinets in Part V, and Part VI begins with a six-part a cappella movement followed by a three-part clarinet movement. The call "Never Forget" refers to the Ekecheiria Agreement, but also to the fatal event at Munich. Part VII ends with the six voices of Exaudi and an eight-part clarinet movement.
Between the compositions "The Games Must Go On" Gareth Davis improvises six sound bridges under the title "Ekecheiria".

"Ekecheiria for voices and bass clarinet" is conceived as a recording work and sound installation, not as a live performance work.

Founded in London in 2002, Exaudi is one of the UK's leading vocal ensembles. It is world-renowned for its performances of the radical currents of vocal chamber music, whether the avant-garde of the late Renaissance (Vicentino, Luzzaschi, Monteverdi, Gesualdo) or the music of the present day, working equally with complexity, microtonality and experimental aesthetics. Recent new music is central to the ensemble's repertoire, which has premiered many works by the leading composers of our time, from Sciarrino and Ferneyhough to Cassandra Miller and Jürg Frey, nationally and worldwide. A consistent feature of Exaudi's programming is the blending of contemporary music with medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music. In 2019, Exaudi released its first recording exclusively of early music works, Carlo Gesualdo Madrigali, on Winter & Winter, which won the German Record Award and was selected as one of BBC Radio 3's CDs of the Year.
Exaudi's numerous international engagements have taken the ensemble throughout Europe, often in collaboration with leading orchestras. Exaudi receives regular airplay on BBC Radio 3 and European radio stations, and has released seven recordings on the Winter & Winter label.

Gareth Davis, born in England, is an artist, composer and musician living in Amsterdam. He plays clarinets, the result of a more or less spontaneous purchase while window shopping in Covent Garden in London. The fortunate location of a wonderful (and, equally important, quite inexpensive) second-hand record store a few steps from the bus stop to get to school for seven years and the daily newspaper delivery led to a somewhat multi-layered, generally unclassifiable musical taste.
His activities range from sound art and contemporary classical music to rock, improvisation and noise, collaborating among others with composers such as Bernhard Lang, Peter Ablinger, Toshio Hosokawa and Jonathan Harvey, and as a soloist with orchestras such as the SWR Synphonieorchester, Warsaw Philharmonic and Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid, performances with groups and performers ranging from the Neue Vocalsolisten and the Arditti Quartet to improvisers Elliott Sharp and Frances Marie Uitti, electronic artists Robin Rimbaud and Merzbow, and multimedia work with artists such as Christian Marclay and Peter Greenaway.
Gareth Davis performs on "The Ninth Wave - Ode to Nature," released by Winter & Winter, nine compositions by Fumio Yasuda based on works by Ludwig van Beethoven.

Fumio Yasuda was born in Tokyo, where he lives and works. He studied classical composition at Kunitachi College of Music and soon found great interest in working with improvised music as well. Fumio Yasuda cites the late Romantic compositions of Franz Schmidt as decisive influences, as well as John Cage's border crossings. In 1995 he began his musical collaboration with Japan's most famous photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Yasuda's compositions for Arakinema combine Araki's imagery with soundscapes and music to create a total work of art. Arakinema is performed all over the world and causes a sensation in houses like the Wiener Secession, the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, various Art Spaces in New York and last but not least in Tokyo.
In the late 1990s, Araki introduced pianist and composer Fumio Yasuda to Stefan Winter. Since 2000, Yasuda and Winter have been working together, realizing recording art, sound art works, installations and art performances such as "On the Path of Death and Live" in New York and Munich, "Poem of a Cell" in Tokyo, San Sebastian, Haifa, Bordeaux, Munich, and "The Ninth Wave" in Tokyo, Munich and Istanbul. He has composed numerous film scores, including "Help Me Eros," selected for the Venice International Film Festival. As a composer and pianist, he performs with leading ensembles and is at home in both jazz and contemporary music.