From the opera for children Dragon Zoo, through four hour-long meditations and a series of improvisations, up to Steve Reich’s African inspirations — this is how this year’s edition of Sacrum Profanum ended.

At 11.00 am the whole families gathered in the ICE Kraków Congress Centre to see the performance for the youngest audience Dragon Zoo. The three person ensemble Dieserud/Lindgren showed the children an audiovisual, nonlinear story about three dragons making somersaults and belching blue smoke.

In parallel with the last dragon show, a series of sound meditations with Quiet Music Ensemble began. After a brief introduction, we learned that being silent in English, or rather being ”quiet”, has two possible meanings. One is the opposite of being loud, while the second means spiritual peace. Then we focused for a few hours on the second meaning. We started with murmuring composition by David Toop night leaves breathing, followed by a great example of microvariations in the style of drone sounds – Shadow Lines, a composition be legendary Alvin Lucier. At the end of the first part, we heard the succulent sounds of Grisaille no. 1, a composition written by Rishin Singh. Judging how quickly an hour passed, we managed to enter in the first phase of meditation, that is the concentration on the ”outside”, by focusing attention on the sounds which are ”here and now”.

After the intermission, we heard again Jennifer Walshe – the composer of Everything is Important, which was presented at the festival. This time, the Irish artist let herself be known from another angle: the Quiet Music Ensemble presented her absurd and quite singular stories inspired by ”mockumentary” films, i.e. the compositions Dordán and An Ghléacht. The guitar sounds mixing desert rock with Indian interludes, waving with blue flags and lights as if directing planes in the airport, recitations, and meditative ”OM”, were soon supplemented by video screening. The performers presented a story of an Irishman, who suffered from sound hallucinations and dug the tapes with recordings under the ground on important days on the calendar, because he believed that by this they would get the quality of connecting the listener with other dimensions… The artist almost managed to fool us to believe that such a person did actually existed. Later it turned out that the fake biography of that man was full of other surprising adventures, and the entire story tells us about craziness and shaman-style distortions which the residents of Ireland suffer because of a sunlight deficit. This last theme was further developed in Walshe’s second composition.

At the end of the meditation series, we listened to compositions created by Pauline Oliveros — a composer and promoter of the ”deep listening” technique, who passed away last year. The sounds echoed in the chamber hall of the Congress Centre, and we were fishing them (as the artist herself once put it). Oliveros’ techniques are strongly connected with Chinese philosophy which confirms what Jennifer Walshe stressed in one of her best known projects: ”everything is important”, there are no ”bad” or ”good” sounds. As you can see, all the themes of the festival narration perfectly merged.

At 6.00 pm, time has come for the Little Music series by Henryk Mikołaj Górecki. Evan Ziporyn, Adrien Lambinet, Kamil Szuszkiewicz, Mikołaj Pałosz and Kuba Sokołowski, as they admitted themselves, took an effort to reconstruct music ”from scratch”. The initial consonance soon turned into a juggling with instrumental roles, jazz improvisation which ranged from subtle to succulent sound. When playing Little Music IV – trombone concerto the musicians began to move around the stage, in bizarre poses or even lying on the floor. At one point, the prominent trombonist Adrien Lambinet sat down on a chair in the audience.

In the second part of the concert, Solitude of Sounds, we moved for a moment to the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio, Tomasz Stańko appeared on the stage, improvising to Tomasz Sikorski’s Solitude of Sounds. The expressive sounds of the trumpet many times pierced the audience’s ears. The artist played his own composition Serial I with the electronic background. It was a perfect introduction of Eugeniusz Rudnik, who became a legend for his skills in manipulating tapes. The composition, and in fact the dialogue of concrete recorded sounds with Stańko’s trumpet concluded the last but one concert of the festival.

The finale of finals, African Repercussions, proved that Steve Reich’s minimalism was greatly inspired by compositions created by Gideon Alorwoyie, a master of percussion and composer from Ghana, but also reminded us that in Africa music and dance are inextricably connected. Some relations are distant, some closer; as the concert progressed, Reich’s compositions (and in particular the rhythmical piece Drumming Part One) played by Gideon Alorwoyie’s Ensemble and Mantra Percussion, showed more and more connections with traditional African music. Four women danced on the stage to Alorwoyie’s pieces, and one of the drummers at one point not only played with his legs up, but even clapped his feet! People in the audience did not venture to take the challenge; instead they clapped their hands, enthusiastic shouts were also heard.

With this explosion of rhythms and positive energy left the Zone of Discomfort and so the fifteenth edition of the Sacrum Profanum came to an end.