We invite you to celebrate the art of listening with an outstanding personality: Cathy Milliken, an internationally acclaimed musician and composer who describes the alluring power of listening – sound, acoustic nuance and space in all its forms and in a wide variety of locations – as life-defining. In conversation with curator Paul Holdengräber and Hannah Arendt expert Samantha Rose Hill, both hosts of the Ways of Listening festival, Milliken explores the various facets of listening and makes them audible: from the dimensions of sound to the aspect of letting go while listening to questions of dialog in society. A celebration of listening in all its depth.

Cathy Milliken herself will perform the music for the evening. In a playful and amusing way, she will interpret selected poems by Gertrude Stein and Tomäs Cohen with piano and voice. The focus is on Gertrude Stein’s groundbreaking volume of poetry Tender Buttons (1914), which wittily poeticizes everyday things and also charges them with eroticism.

The event is part of the Ways of Listening Festival, in collaboration with DAI Heidelberg. You can find an overview of the full program here.

Speakers

Cathy Milliken is an award-winning composer, performer, and creative director. As a co-founder of Ensemble Modern, she has shaped the field of contemporary music. Her collaborations with artists like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Frank Zappa, as well as her work as a composer, reflect her impressive versatility. She is also passionate about social music practice. From 2005 to 2012, she led the Education Department of the Berlin Philharmonic.

Samantha Rose Hill is the author of Hannah Arendt (2021) and Hannah Arendt’s Poems (2023). She teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and the University of the Underground. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon and LitHub, among others.

The intellectual Paul Holdengräber was the founding director of Onassis Los Angeles. Previously, he led a formative cultural series at the New York Public Library, where he held discussions with renowned personalities such as Patti Smith and Werner Herzog.