Programme

Kwadrofonik will open the festival with its flagship production entitled A CONCERT OF SONGS, featuring soprano Barbara Kinga Majewska. This is an organic musical show with a cogent dramaturgy, the concept of which was developed by director Yulka Wilam. The project premièred in June 2014 at Warsaw's Teatr Nowy during the Installactions festival. This year, the musicians will present a newer version.

A recurring theme in discussions among the musicians, composers and concert director was the issue of ‘songs’ – does such an ‘outdated’ form have any chance of adequately expressing something current, something universal? We talked a lot about pop music, which has completely dominated the ‘sonic landscape’, having ousted the old-fashioned art song with its own ubiquitous song style, as the flagship form of pop art. We talked about the limitation and rebirth of language – which language should we use to write our (art?) songs in the first place, what is to be their message? During the talks, we touched upon Wittgenstein; contemporary divas: Beyoncé, Amy Winehouse; the poetry of Witold Wirpsza; the post-rock songs of Mark Hollis; the Red Hot Chili Peppers; overtone piano for eight hands; 17th-century opera libretti; Baroque ciacconas. We talked about how to work with Basia Majewska, how to think about her classically-trained voice; Basia told us that she doesn't believe in academic superstitions regarding vocal hygiene and, if need be, she will whisper, breathe heavily, scream, sing… Ola Gryka didn't want to say anything about her piece; she just sent the following note: L. Wittgenstein Philosophische Untersuchungen; echophrasia; A Turing machine; L. Caroll; Schrödinger; Zusammenhang; singularity; 1_1, 1_0, 1, 0.

In this studio, which is dedicated to the recording of radio plays, one can find various objects which serve to illustrate various situations and events with sound. Here, it is possible walk on a sidewalk, a floor, wooden and stone steps, and even dry leaves. One can also open and close doors, drawers, closets and secret hiding places, play the piano, write on a typewriter, and produce sounds from unusual instruments. We will be guided by our ear, which will lead us to a place where one hears rustling noises, street sounds and the growling of animals, as well as snarling, buzzing and beeping machines. We will also visit the sound engineer’s room, where we will mix found sounds into our own crazy music.

The workshops will take the form of a happening. They will be led by composer Sławomir Wojciechowski and guitarist Krystian Rogoziński. Entry at any time between 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM. Both young and old are invited. Both children and parents. Everyone will find something for themselves!

Reservations accepted starting 1 August at the following address: mikrofonik@kwadrofonik.com.pl

The festival is an occasion for meetings and discussions about music. The first of these will be devoted to perception strategies in new music. We will consider how audiovisual culture changes the way we listen to music. Is there still such a thing as an ideal reception/audience? What influences our listening and can it be ‘composed’? What purpose is served by the theatricalization of concerts?

The Lutosławski Piano Duo’s concert program contains an hommage to minimal music. Hidden under the guise of limited means is a diversity of music. It covers a range of compositional techniques – as in the works of György Ligeti, who utilized Terry Riley's ‘figure transformations’ and Steve Reich's ‘phase shifts’ and combined them with his own technique of micropolyphony, in which complexity of sonic texture is obtained through the layering of many repetitive motifs. Sometimes the richness of music comes not from the quantity of sounds played, but from the intensity of the resonances induced – as in the compositions of Tomasz Sikorski, a cult Polish minimalist, or the pieces of Georg Friedrich Haas, in which the musical material is not just the sounds played on the keyboard, but also the overtones – a total of 176 different frequencies! Obtaining such a complex sound with relatively modest pianistic resources is possible thanks to the original tuning of the instruments, to which the concert's title refers. The other extraordinary thing about of Haas' composition is that the two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart are played by just one pianist.

SOUND AND IMAGE is an original project by Ensemble Garage from Köln, an artistic concert experiment comprised of acoustic and multimedia works, mostly by composers of the younger generation, posing questions concerning the perception of music: which aspects of it are real, and which are imaginary? The word ‘image’, contained in the title, refers not only to the pieces' use of video, but also to listeners’ creating their own visions of the music. These visions can be stimulated by composers in various ways, for instance through verbal commentary. It is well-known that writings about art – in this case, about music – shape, and thus modify, a work’s reception. This concert puts the listener's perception to a singular test, provokes reflection on the nature of music, what music is, what its real message is, and what criteria guide us in the evaluation of contemporary music. The (de)mystification lying at the heart of the project is supposed to enable the listener to attain a deeper and more conscious experience of the music. The originator of the SOUND AND IMAGE project concept is composer Brigitta Muntendorf, co-founder and artistic director of Ensemble Garage.

The honorary patron of Ensemble Garage's concert is Rolf Nikel, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany.

In this studio, which is dedicated to the recording of radio plays, one can find various objects which serve to illustrate various situations and events with sound. Here, it is possible walk on a sidewalk, a floor, wooden and stone steps, and even dry leaves. One can also open and close doors, drawers, closets and secret hiding places, play the piano, write on a typewriter, and produce sounds from unusual instruments. We will be guided by our ear, which will lead us to a place where one hears rustling noises, street sounds and the growling of animals, as well as snarling, buzzing and beeping machines. We will also visit the sound engineer’s room, where we will mix found sounds into our own crazy music.

The workshops will take the form of a happening. They will be led by composer Sławomir Wojciechowski and guitarist Krystian Rogoziński. Entry at any time between 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM. Both young and old are invited. Both children and parents. Everyone will find something for themselves!

Reservations accepted starting 1 August at the following address: mikrofonik@kwadrofonik.com.pl

Percussion duo PIKIP’s concert program is wrapped around the idea of the emergence and disappearance of perception. Marcin Stańczyk follows the scholarly theories of Władysław Strzemiński, a Polish artist who researched the phenomenon of afterimages. He transfers the ghost image retained on the retina to the musical realm, composing a work from phantom sounds. For this purpose, he uses electronic media which blur the lines between reality and fiction. For Wojtek Blecharz, on the other hand, the resonance of sounds is represented by gestures which are simultaneously a neurotic externalization of trauma. [...] look how I disappear look how I disappear look I'm disappearing look look – in his commentary to the work Blacksnowfalls, the composer cites Sarah Kane's Psychosis 4.48. The disappearance of sounds is the disappearance of the senses. What remains is a discreet choreography of the hands. In K'an, in turn, the meaning of this choreography refers to magical gestures from the I Ching. Somewhere among them, Wojciech Ziemowit Zych obsessively explores sonoristic gestural language: clusters, glissandi and repetitions are the most distinct and elementary stimuli of sonic perception. Behind them, however, is a whole universe of audible chiaroscuros.

In the Norwegian group Asamisimasa’s concert program, the refined sound-world of new music meets with the world of noise, interference, plastic melodies and the banal sounds of everyday life. For Simon Steen-Andersen, these are noises from the interior of the piano, arising from the preparation of the strings, as well as sounds distorted by extreme amplification. For Øyvind Torvund, white noise, snare drum rolls, crashing cymbals and sampled explosions combine with maudlin phrases played on an electric guitar, colored with the sounds of a harmonica and a ’cello. The composer has taken inspiration from the sounds of New Age synth music and ‘idyllic computer game music’. Matthew Shlomowitz, in turn, uses banal sounds in his music that can be heard every day in diverse non-artistic contexts. The title of the concert refers to a series of pieces by Shlomowitz scored for various instrumental ensembles and combining abstract structures with pop music and field recordings. The festival will host the world première of the next, now seventh part of the cycle – Private Music in Public Spaces (2014). This peculiar motley of contemporary, heterogeneous acoustic reality decidedly contrasts with Lawrence Crane's composition – a minimalistic meditation, based on one ‘banal chord’, which he plays outside of all context.