Programme notes of the first concert of Twentytwentyone which was held in Jauna Muzika festival in Vilnius' Contemporary Art Center, 2006/04/22. concert's program included works by James Tenney, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Cornelius Cardew, Vytautas V. Jurgutis, Tomas Grunskis and Arturas Bumsteinas. See photos from this concert.
20, 21 – though these numbers do not represent the average age of this quartet‘s members, they actually refer to the certain transitional period from what we know as 20th century, with its modernistic (in the neutral sense of this word) outlook, to what is happening right now, as well as what may happen tomorrow. Performance by this ensemble could be called concert as exhibition, or a retrospect of graphic musical notation extended with the graphical materials of non-musical origin, that are read as musical script and, through collaborative efforts, transfered into the sphere of sound.
In addition to those compositions that are included into the program we should also mention a few that are not: Kurt Schwitters‘ Ursonate, Eric Satie‘s Vexations, illustrations from a geometry book, Vytautas Germanavičius‘ Galaxy, La Monte Young‘s Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, Terry Riley‘s In C, Robert Smithsons' A Heap of Language, emergency evacuation plan of the performance space and Jackson Pollock‘s paintings...
Concert's program:
James Tenney
Having Never Written a Note For Percussion 7'
This is a piece created in 1971 that comes from the composer‘s postcard serie, that consists of particularly laconic scores written for solo instruments. According to the composer, each score from this serie should be interpreted as Zen Buddhist koan – a short story which paradoxical meaning and its contemplation should result in spiritual enlightenment. Having Never Written a Note For Percussion is written for a solo percussion instrument producing one long tremolo sound that starts out soft and gradually increases in volume to produce the loudest sound possible before descending again to the quietest sound. An electro-acoustic version of this piece was recorded by the well known American rock band Sonic Youth in 1999 and released on their album Goodbye 20th Century. In the context of this concert Having Never Written a Note For Percussion will be something like a concentrate of the ensemble‘s aesthetic values, as well as the 'tune-in' of four computers before the other much more complicated opuses.
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Studie II 8'40''
Studie II, written in 1954, is the first ever notated electronic music opus. The score of this piece begins with detailed instructions that present the order of the processes and technical parameters used by the composer to record the original (and the only one) 3 minutes and 20 seconds long version of Studie II. The score itself (which constructivism reminds us of Piet Mondrian‘s canvases) is very precise in the way it represents both the horizontal and vertical acoustic events and the parameters of their pitch and dynamics. In order to play this piece exactly as is suggested by the author, one would have to use the original electronic sound generation devises and manipulation equipment that are now the items of the exhibition at the Cologne WDR Radio museum. This version of Studie II performed by four laptops is deliberately slower than the original, reminding us that a musical text (as any other text) is just a start-off point from which the performer is free to express his own subjective interpretation (having in mind that subjectivity is not used as a synonym for chaos).
Cornelius Cardew
Treatise 16'
Subjectivity is a synonym for Treatise. This piece, written from 1963 to 1967, is one of the most famous and most often performed graphical notation scores, consisting of 193 otherwise unrelated pages that are united by a single dominant symbol at the bottom of each page – a double staff (an allusion to the reduced piano score?). Although the author has later indicated that the score‘s horizontal space does not literally correspond to time, but because of this mentioned piano staff the score will be read in the traditional manner - from left to right. Treatise is a collection of graphical notation symbols without any further explanations or comments how they should be interpreted when they are transferred from paper into the sphere of sound. How should one interpret a line, a dot, or a circle?... You can only create your own answers to these questions by setting your own rules or, in other words, a model for collective action, which can remind us of a futuristic vehicle (p.50), or a spaceship (p.134), carrying its crew through “the mess of potential sounds that permeate this planet and its atmosphere”.
Vytautas V. Jurgutis
Expansia 15'
Expansia was written in 1997, also at the same year IBM‘s Deep Blue computer defeated the world champion Gary Kasparov in a chess tournament, the French composer/performer Jean Michel Jarre played a concert for the audience of deaf children in Katovice (Poland), NASA‘s Pathfinder successfully landed on planet Mars. This score by Vytautas Jurgutis is meant for computer realization and without a doubt it represents the European graphical notation tradition to which we ascribe such names as Stockhausen, Ligeti, Xenakis... The precisely indicated frequency fluctuations and the „zoological variety“ of graphical symbols are closely coordinated with eachother not only in the works of the mentioned composers, but also in this score by Jurgutis, which acts as a summary of what we know about graphical notation in general (and if this summary is not a manifesto, then it is, at least, of great importance to the author himself). Expansia is the only composition in this concert which score is not demonstrated to the public. This is done for two reasons: the first reason is that the piece is not performed in the score‘s indicated order, but freely moving from one fragment to another, where each musician is able to select any graphical moment that he likes and repeat it as many times as it suits the general improvised version of Expansia; the second reason – we would not see anything new that we have already seen in the scores of earlier performed pieces.
Tomas Grunskis
Morphology of City 10'
The Morphology of City (2005) graphical score is the same material that author uses to illustrate his lectures on city morphology and anthropology. In these illustrations the city of Vilnius, its centre and its individual parts are all depicted using different scales. Here we see the main morphological elements of the city in different aspects. Some illustrations have been modified/transformed to the point of abstraction, however, they all use the one visual medium – detailed aerial photographs of Vilnius taken from a satellite. This is often the most suitable way to visualise the changes and transformations of a city‘s form and structure. The acoustic version of this lecture on city morphology and anthropology is a journey within a local space while looking at the abstracted map which is amplified with the use of field recordings of the different cities of the world (sourced from the www.soundtransit.nl internet archive).
Arturas Bumšteinas
Renaissance in Music 7'
1400... Leonel Power, John Dunstable, Gilles Binchois, Guillaume du Fay, Johannes Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht, Josquin des Prez, Heinrich Isaac, Jean Mouton, Pierre de la Rue, Nicholas Gombert, Adrien Willaert, John Taverner, Christopher Tye, Thomas Tallis, Andrea Gabrieli, Jacob Clemens non Papa, Cipriano de Rore, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlandus Lassus, Wiliam Byrd, Tomas Luis de Victoria, Giovanni Gabrieli, Carlo Gesualdo ...1620.
Texts © A.Bumšteinas
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