World News

The railroad is going on the offensive acoustically: at the Hermannstrabe S-Bahn station, junkies and drunks are to be chased away with atonal music.

Sheet of music by Arnold Schonberg, creator of atonal twelve-tone music Photo: dpa

Atonal music is quite special. The notes like to hang individually in the air, there are no familiar sequences of sounds. A dissonant chord can stumble in at any time. Or a sequence of notes that ends at some point, but arrives nowhere.

Grocery shopping is not much fun. For some, it’s pure stress – for autistic people, for example. Yet stores could do a lot about it.

For autistic people, supermarkets mean sensory overload; shopping usually ends with screaming, hitting, running away and knocking things over Photo: dpa

Katja Cragle’s four-year-old son Emil likes to go shopping. He often asks her about it. But shopping with him is not so easy. She always has to put him off or come up with excuses. Emil was diagnosed with autism last fall. "Taking him shopping basically ends in disaster," Cragle says over the phone. "It only takes about a minute, and he’s yelling, crying, hitting, knocking things over." The problem is supermarket sensory overload, which overwhelms people with autism: bright lights, too loud, too many people, too much clutter.

The queen is back. Beyonce Knowles released an album last Friday – which has sold more than 828,000 copies so far.

Feminism and self-promotion: Beyonce at the Super Bowl in February 2013. image: dpa

Overnight, Beyonce Knowles released an album – without interviews, without promotion. The industry makes the product and we, the listeners, produce the hype for free. "Beyonce" sold 828,000 copies in the first three days.

Master of drones and flickering: U.S. musician, filmmaker and artist Tony Conrad is dead.

Always in a hat: multimedia artist Tony Conrad Photo: CC

He was a giant who liked to wear a hat on his head. His work is also gigantic, unparalleled in its versatility and effectiveness. Tony Conrad was a composer, musician, filmmaker, performance and video artist. His work oscillated effortlessly between highly academic work and experimental pop.

The path across genre boundaries produces pearls: Lady Gaga dances with a jazz senior; Scott Walker revels with the US duo Sunn O))).

Cross-generational and cross-genre musical liaison: Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett. Image: Steven Klein/Promo

With the desire to transgress, Lady Gaga achieves brilliant results. When it comes to the visual, the theatrical variety of presentation in her staged imagery, the 28-year-old American exploits this level more shamelessly than any pop star before her. If only to present a selfie to her 42.5 million followers on Twitter day after day: So this is what I look like in a see-through white tube dress while waiting in an airport transit zone. Excuse me?

Radio Bremen has staged "Nothing New in the West" as a radio play for the first time. An unusually late tribute – which dispenses with any topicality.

Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize: Erich Maria Remarque in Davos in 1929. Image: German Federal Archive/Wikimedia Commons

The central artifice of the audio production of Erich Maria Remarque’s "Nothing New in the West" is the splitting up of the main character: "Life has turned us into thinking animals," says narrator Paul Baumer. And a slightly different Paul continues, "It has imbued us with dullness." That he is jaded by the horrors of World War II is not to be heard in this thoughtful passage. Patrick Guldenberg speaks no less than three Pauls in the radio play from different rooms – the character breaks down into the aspects of his personality.