Exhibition from 12 October 2022 to 25 March 2023
Flutes, books, posters, medieval instruments, letters, pictures – and in the middle of it all Johny Fritz (*1944). There is a method to what appears to be the indiscriminate collecting zeal of an individual. Johny Fritz’s personal collection sheds light on his multifaceted life and work: As a collector, he maintains an extensive collection of instruments, focusing on all types of flutes, including rare reconstructed medieval and Renaissance instruments.
Fritz’s interest in the French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925) makes up the bulk of his collecting activities and is expressed in a unique and very personal engagement with Satie and his social environment. The result is a collection whose centrepiece is Satie’s personal letters to his friends Valentine Gross, Jean Wiéner and others, which are now being presented to the public for the first time.
The 35 or so works from Fritz’s pen are strongly oriented towards musical modernism from France. Both as a composer and as a musician and collector, Fritz is involved with the LGNM (Lëtzebuerger Gesellschaft fir Nei Musek) and moves between mysticism and experimental music, between old and new, thus uniting apparent opposites that penetrate into his main pedagogical activity as clarinet and recorder teacher.