Contemporary classical and improvised music (not necessarily related to jazz) have always intertwined and affected one another closely. The greatest twentieth-century composers never shied away from working with improvisers, as clearly shown in the collaborations between Krzysztof Penderecki and Don Cherry, or John Cage and Herman Poole Blount – one of the century’s greatest jazz innovators, better known as Sun Ra.

The concert Muzyczka/Solitude of Sounds, held as part of this year’s Sacrum Profanum Festival, brings the seemingly disparate musical worlds together once again. The first part builds a foundation for the space for improvisation, featuring works by one of Poland’s finest composers of the 20th century: Henryk Mikołaj Górecki. They are interpreted by artists who surely need no introduction to Sacrum Profanum’s audiences: Adrien Lambinet, Raphael Rogiński, Kamil Szuszkiewicz, Mikołaj Pałosz, Kuba Sokołowski and the event’s Music Director Evan Ziporyn have shown many times before that there are no musical boundaries which can hold them. In the second part, Tomasz Stańko – legendary Polish trumpeter and one of the most important European jazzmen working today – starts a dialogue with electroacoustic music. Poland’s contribution to the creation and development of this genre remains undervalued, even though Eugeniusz Rudnik, one of the most important composers of the electroacoustic style, has been a major inspiration for Richard David James, better known under his artistic pseudonym Aphex Twin. Rudnik’s Nocturne resounds during the concert’s finale, preceded by Solitude of Sounds by Tomasz Sikorski (Poland’s first representative of Minimalism) and Serial – the only work created by Tomasz Stańko with the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio. The works are rarely performed live, marking the concert as a unique event before it even happens.

The selection of artists appearing at the Theatre Hall of the ICE Kraków Congress Centre hints that the audience will witness an extraordinary and highly inspiring performance. Of course we shouldn’t be presumptuous, since improvisation isn’t just a beautiful and satisfying artform – it’s also a risk taken by musicians each time they come together to create a musical here-and-now. The audience choose to take the risk with the musicians, in a sense taking up the challenge and its rules. Just like there can be no concert without artists, music cannot exist without listeners and mutual communication, revealed as a blurring or eliminating of the invisible line dividing the stage from the auditorium, which can seem impossible to cross. The concert features artists who have shown time and again that they are more than capable of meeting this challenge. We will find out for ourselves on 1 October when the final sounds fall silent at ICE Kraków, but even then each and every listener will perceive what they heard differently. And here lies the key to the beauty of this music: we all hear the same notes, but we all listen and experience them differently; we all join the artists to build this here-and-now in our own ways.

SOURCE

Rafał Zbrzeski
Lizard Magazine/Off Radio Kraków/Radio Kraków