There is No Repetition

Client

Held in Chicago, there is no repetition celebrated German composer Mathias Spahlinger’s 70th year with a 10-day residency and retrospective of his music and thought. The first of its kind in the States, the festival presented six concerts, a symposium, and brought together renowned musicians and scholars from Chicago, New York, Berlin, Zürich, and Basel.

Project

I was tasked with designing the program for this event, working closely with editors and our printer to produce this 32-page, 2-color document on a shoestring budget and tight turnaround time.

Repetition is a running theme through Spahlinger’s works and writing. Most obviously, this is done through repetitive material that is employed as a way of pointing out the impossibility of repetition. The typographic treatments employed throughout the program reflect Spahlinger’s concerns. Characters and words are repeated in different rhythms and patterns until they are stripped of meaning and become physical objects that accumulate new meanings and associations in their own right.