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Sacrum Profanum 2023

A thicket of sound in Nowa Huta

2017-09-30

The Friday night is the very essence of the festival, a meeting of three aesthetics: Eastman’s minimalism, Rădulescu’s spectralism and Walshe’s postinternet.
Crowds gathered at Ludowy Theatre around 7.00 pm, waiting the door to open. A few minutes after they took their seats, the master of ceremony comes out to announce “technical problems” and the resulting delay. We could hear a low sound from loudspeakers but no musicians appeared on the stage. The audience received the scores of George’Brecht fifth symphony announcing the work divided into three parts: ”before”, ”during” and ”after” listening. Then we became aware that it was a prank. After about 30 minutes the emcee returned and announced that the experiment with our participation had just came to an end. Apartment House musicians came out on the stage. The audience, mostly unaware of it, co-created the radical author’s interpretation of Michał Libera’s symphony. The performance, on the borders of music, provoked reflection on a conscious reception of music, or rather various modes of listening to it — this time, confused, we did not know if we should listen to get information or to prepare ourselves to sense it.

The next point on the programme was created by Robert Piotrowicz, a Polish sound artist and composer. His composition Mewo Pan written in this year, kept all of us absolutely intrigued. It all began with the dramatic gestures of Apartment House musicians (who a little mockingly imitated the conductor ), followed by the droning strings, robotic-electronic sounds of the radio playing out of tune, ending with distorted, inarticulate singing of a Polish text. Despite the dynamism f musical actions and a lot of musical ideas contained in it left enough space to breathe.

The last points of the event: Eastman / East Men in Ludowy Theatre were two compositions by one of the leading figures of this year’s festival: Julius Eastman. The Apartment House vocalist appeared on stage with a rosary to sing a brief prayer: Hail Mary. It was followed by an unpretentious and rather merry song, based on repetition -- Stay on it ending on a little melancholic note.

The hero of the evening remained the same, but we changed the venue: First, in the Łaźnia Nowa Theatre we listened to one of the best known Eastman’s composition, Evil Nigger. Some people entering the theatre might not know yet that Julius was a great composer, and at the same time an African American gay, but listening to this piece with its huge emotional load, they could feel that Eastman was an activist, a man shattered by fate. Evil Nigger, in the string version of Arditti Quartet, lasted 20 minutes, showing an array of emotional states ranging from worried embarrassment to an expressive, decided anger present in the leading motif of the composition.

Another element of the Festival’s essential part was the Polish premiere of Streichquartett Nr. 4, Opus 33: Infinite to be cannot be infinite, infinite anti-be could be infinite by Horatiu Rădulescu. In this version, Romanian spectralism could be associated with a huge swarm of sound. Closing your eyes and forgetting that we were in front of a string quartet one might sometimes have the impression that the sounds we heard are played by completely different instruments, such as the tuba, the flute, or even didgeridoo. The intensity of sound changed in time and in space, so some people in the audience looked back expecting to see an additional instrumentalist in the back of the room. This harmless illusion was a perfect way to introduce us to the postinternet world on the fluid border between the truth and the false, which was brought up by the last artist who appeared on Friday evening — Jennifer Walshe.

Everything is Important is the title of the project shown in Łaźnia Now Theatre. Twits, cosmos, instagram photos, race cars, simulated fights, potassium, E=mc2... everything is important. Together with Arditti Quartet, the Irish artist did not just play the concert for us but rather gave an audiovisual lecture – a brief manifesto of the ”new discipline”. It is not without reason that her name is now spoken by all enthusiasts of new music in Europe. There are few artists who explore the world that surrounds - the year and the now - so skilfully and critically. Jennifer Walshe played with reality, because as we once accessed the Web, now we actually stay in it. The artist’s purposefully overemphasised gestures and vocal expression, the text built from Internet entries (”LOL the hard problem with consciousness”), Walshe’s questions (e.g. “Who’s responsible for instagram ”inspiring” posts?!”), samples of Web recordings and Internet spam on the screen — all that put together with the quartet in the background was the very essence of the contemporary world. Walshe told us a story about ourselves.


Today at Sacrum Profanum:

Post-Indie Classical – Nowa Huta Cultural Centre – 6.00 pm

Romanian Spectralism – Teatr Łaźnia Nowa Theatre– 8.00 pm