It is the essence of music that makes the installation artwork "Music on the Water" by Ilya Kabakov & Vladimir Tarasov on the Salzau Castle Pond so unique. Exactly 10 years ago, both realized the idea of a "visual sound field" in Salzau and since then, a strange, a magical attraction emanates from this jetty on the water, which seems so unfinished and artless. Kabakov himself said in the book to "Music on the Water" that for him sounds create an "energetic field, a special ambience" - music is experienced as an event in space. "The tones are distributed within this ambience, and everyone takes a wandering place on its energy map."

What awaits the visitor? The building - a jetty like a landing stage - appears unfinished, time seems to have stood still. A half-timbered scaffolding is erected, the walls are missing, a stone throw would not hit any windows. Inside and outside are in good hands, this place hardly offers any protection. Steel wires span the roof framework and everyday tools such as knives and forks and metallic bars are suspended from them. The wind passes through the bridge and makes the objects hitting each other sound softly.

In all these years I have hardly ever experienced a festival summer in which this place did not attract visitors day after day and invite them to stay. A melancholy mood emanates from him, he takes us away from the "inescapability from the constraints of everyday stress" (Thomas Deecke in "Music on the Water").

But it took until the festival year 2005 for JazzBaltica artists to discover the place for their music. This was initiated by Siggi Loch, who had been a constant visitor to the installation for some time. And he knew about the magical atmosphere of the early morning hours of "Music on the Water". It was exactly Monday morning at 5 am on 4 July 2005, when Lars Danielsson, Christopher Dell and Nils Landgren marched to the end of the festival and its nightly session in the castle, through the empty castle garden to the jetty - past locked camper tents - and set up their instruments in the just rising morning sun. There were few guests at the beginning, when the first hesitant tones sounded - almost reverential and restrained - like the tenderness of the morning dew. This was accompanied by the twittering of birds, the protest of the swans on the pond and the sound of the morning wind in the mesh of knife and fork over the three musicians.

Probably seldom has music found its way back to the source of its origins - it was an irretrievable moment of "sounding silence". Kabakov and Tarasov would certainly have enjoyed this sound-filled room as the "main character" of the installation they wanted.

JazzBaltica itself has never ended on a more beautiful note than this early morning in the Salzau castle park.

Rainer Haarmann, Artistic Director JazzBaltica