The New Music Showcase starts in exactly one week. Its 35th edition is subtitled MUSICA FALSA I MUSICA VERA. The festival will open next Tuesday with the experimental psycho-acoustic clarinet duo The International Nothing by Berlin clarinetists Kai Fagaschinsky and Michael Thieke. They will present their latest project Just None of Those Things to listeners. The showcase will offer a total of six concerts at Besední dům and an unconventional project at the Stone Colony (Kamenná kolonie) in Brno.
“This year, we turn our attention to the space between composition and improvisation, with the aim of defending the “authenticity” of all good and convincing music, no matter how it was created. All the projects that make up the festival program are in the field of still improvised but already composed, or still composed but already improvised music. Some of them were commissioned by the festival or created in close collaboration with it,” says Daniel Matej, the festival’s program manager.
The opening will belong to The International Nothing duo of Berlin-based clarinetists Kai Fagaschinsky and Michael Thieke. They will present their latest project Just None of Those Things to listeners. “This renowned duo has released five albums and their concerts have a justified reputation for being incredible artistic experiences. We will hear another unique concert in which music is created through improvisation, but gradually takes on a more or less stable shape,” Matej points out.
Wednesday’s concert will focus on graphic and otherwise “open” scores. The international group Prague Improvisation Orchestra will perform works from the New York school (Brown, Wolff), as well as from the Czech-Slovak underground (Adamčiak, Grygar, Steklík), which will be complemented by compositions by Burkhard Stangl and Petr Vrba. “A lot has changed in the seventy years since the first wave of graphic scores appeared. A very fruitful golden middle path has emerged between traditional forms of composition and improvisation. Simply put, the concept of improvisation has been stretched to infinity, so theoretically almost anything is possible. Compositions using these different options have become very widespread and even commonplace. “The so-called perfect musician of our time is proficient in many spheres,” says George Cremaschi, double bassist and co-founder of the orchestra.
Annabelle Plum and Žaneta Vítová are working together on music for experimental voice and accordion. Their Interference project is based on their joint debut album, where the musicians express fragility and harshness at the same time, transporting the listener to the world of distant Africa and back to the Czech meadows and groves, all with a strong theme of ecological appeal. “We can look forward to an unusual sound-poetic painting meandering between the everyday and intense emotionality,” Matej notes.
The Here and Now project will debut on Friday evening, commissioned by the festival and performed by the Pavel Zlámal Contemporary Ensemble. A seven-member ensemble of classical, contemporary and jazz players will perform a series of open original compositions, collective and controlled improvisations. “The building block of the work is each of the players present, their musical and improvisational skills, where the compositional process is musical organization in the present tense. This organization is partly based on a prescribed score and partly on interactive collaboration, intuition and conductor signaling. Hence, the music is not only the result of rehearsed or composed phrases, but also of musical ideas created on the spot, relationships and contexts that emerge,” Zlámal describes the composition.
Saturday’s concert, entitled In situ, will bring together three prominent figures of contemporary improvisational music. Each of them first as a solo performance and then in a joint composition / improvisation commissioned by the festival. Austrian trumpeter Franz Hautzinger is one of the stylistic creators that has been influencing the development of improvised music for three decades, just like phenomenal British trombonist, composer and improviser Hilary Jeffery, who lives in Berlin. Portuguese trumpeter Susana Santos Silva, based in Sweden, represents the youngest generation of improvising artists. Nonetheless, her music is already extremely mature, full of imagination and new sensibility. The Besední dům hall will be filled that evening with quarter-tone trumpet, alpine horn, trombone and trumpet.
BCO expands the reality of the Stone Colony. BCO expands the reality of Besední dom. This Sunday project will symbolically connect the two places and the “two Czech nations” living in Brno in the middle of the 19th century. “On the one hand, that which could afford to order the services of Theophilus von Hansen, and the other that worked to death in the factories of Brno. They didn’t meet much, although everybody was using the term ordinary people back then,” explains Viktor Pantůček, program manager of the Brno Contemporary Orchestra. The Stone Colony by Michal Nejtek was co-commissioned by the orchestra and the festival. “I have the impression that music, and new music in particular, is only meaningful if there is some life-giving emotion hidden at its heart, some spiritual background that can nourish and feed disparate shapes and material. Two laborers’ songs are woven into the piece, whose expression and meaning are contradictory, and out of this tension grows, I hope, a new quality. The composition is dedicated to the Brno Stone Colony and to all those who hope for a new and better tomorrow," Nejtek describes his composition.
First, a fanfare rings out from Červený Kopec, a brass band setting to music the laborers' song Boys from Starák”, sung by the flamenders in the brick-makers’ pub. In the subsequent somewhat mournful song, Hour by Hour, woodwinds, drums and recordings scattered around the colony join in. Listeners can wander through and shape the song in their own way. “The ordinary reality of a Sunday afternoon is expanded by a musical experience, something that used to be here and is no longer. We would like the musicians to play from the windows or rooftops, so we are asking the residents of the colony to symbolically open their doors,” Pantůček says.
Nejtek’s composition will also be performed at the evening concert in Besední dům, and will be accompanied by four other compositions. First, Edgar Varèse’s Hyperprism, whose premiere a hundred years ago is said to have ended in disgrace. “It’s designed for winds and a large squadron of percussion, and it goes beyond the three dimensions we’re able to follow. We’ve read about a number of compositions being excellent without having heard them. This one is allegedly a flop, and it’s definitely worth a listen. It is different, spontaneously improvisational, although strictly notated,” Pantůček says. The following piece titled JMF for DM was composed by Daniel Matej in an ensemble for various instruments, and will be performed in Brno in a version for an instrumental ensemble without an obvious soloist. “It is a verbal score, which completely lacks traditional notation and all instructions for the action are expressed in verbal instructions," Matej says.
“The final piece of the evening and festival is Workers Union by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, which requires the performers to play to exhaustion, as though working on an endless factory line. It is written for a free array of loud instruments and its basis is a strict rhythm stratified into closed units," Pantůček explains.
All concerts start at 7 p.m. at Besední dům.
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