{"id":5277,"date":"2020-12-06T13:22:57","date_gmt":"2020-12-06T12:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/atorod.pl\/?p=5277"},"modified":"2020-12-10T20:14:12","modified_gmt":"2020-12-10T19:14:12","slug":"writing-music-about-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/?p=5277","title":{"rendered":"Writing Music About Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

I liked to argue with Andrzej Ch\u0142opecki. Uncompromising and mischievous, but at the same time very insightful, the contemporary music critic would build his opinions on solid theoretical foundations. And once he had built them, there was no mercy: a true Monsieur Sans-G\u00eane, he was the male version of the outspoken laundress. When punching, he would punch you hard, when loving, he would love you more than life itself. Nobody dared dispute the value of works produced by his few chosen ones, for those by Pawe\u0142 Mykietyn. Yet when Ch\u0142opecki heralded the birth of a new star in the composing firmament and likened it to Krzysztof Penderecki\u2019s daring beginnings at the turn of the 1970s, his younger fellow critics felt defiant. Ch\u0142opecki discovered the \u201cunusual flow of an artist extraordinary\u201d in Aleksander Nowak\u2019s music. This was a subject of fiery dispute with his opponents. They wrote that Nowak shamelessly reached for old composing techniques, that his music actually lacked flow and that the face the undeservedly praised epigone of the \u201cStalowa Wola generation\u201d revealed in his pieces was not one of a postmodernist, but one of a common mountebank. I have once myself yielded to the suggestions coming from the \u201cprogressivists\u201d and mistakenly stuffed Nowak\u2019s compositions into a deep drawer labelled \u201ceven newer romanticism\u201d.<\/p>\n

What happened to the Gliwice-born composer\u2019s work that made us all suddenly change our minds? Quite possibly nothing happened to it. It was us who changed, or maybe just grew to appreciate the musical \u201clife-writing\u201d, as his method was aptly described by Andrzej Ch\u0142opecki. Since the beginning, Nowak\u2019s strategy has been about interweaving superficially banal fragments of everyday life with the universal mythical tissue of human existence. The composer refers to formative memories, listens to others, closely observes reality, cools down emotions and tries to establish a connection with the listener. As he has once himself stressed, he finds music to be \u201ca form of communication which does have individual \u00absenders\u00bb and \u00abreceivers\u00bb, but its actual message is transferred rather on the level of collective than individual consciousness\u201d. Every piece written by Nowak has a text behind it: the text, however, does not have to be a poem or a libretto assigning functions to particular voices in the score. Sometimes it is a song, a canticle recalled from the depths of memory, while at other times it might be somebody\u2019s note or a superficially banal anecdote. There is no parody or pastiche here, only deeply moving dialogue with the past, sometimes not distant at all and sometimes lost in the darkness of myth.<\/p>\n

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Aleksander Nowak. Photo: Dorota Kozi\u0144ska<\/p>\n

Nowak\u2019s composer\u2019s path started at the State Music School in Gliwice. It was there that Uliana Bi\u0142an, a Lviv conservatoire graduate, working as an accompanist, was helping the young guitar student make up for his shortcomings in harmony and ear training. While doing that, she brought to his attention treasures of 20th-century musical literature, first and foremost Messiaen and Shostakovich. It was her who encouraged Nowak to undertake his first attempts at forging thoughts and emotions into a score. It was thanks to her that he became sure of his intent to create structures in which each element \u2013 from melody, through rhythm, to texture \u2013 would start to speak to the listener with its own voice, win them over completely and on every level of communication.\u00a0 In 2001, Nowak started regular studies at the faculty of composition of the Academy of Music in Katowice, tutored by Aleksander Laso\u0144, a major representative of the aforementioned \u201cStalowa Wola generation\u201d. Laso\u0144 had always adored \u201cpure\u201d music and treated composition as a task of craftsmanship. He proved, however, a limitlessly patient professor for his, somewhat lost, new student. Laso\u0144 let Nowak search \u2013 first as if blindfolded, then gradually more consciously \u2013 for a path leading to his individual idiom: one of music sounding naturally, but composed from a multitude of unconventionally joined building blocks. It is narration bursting with quotations, self-quotations and crypto quotations, sonically glittering charades, musical riddles, sometimes unsolvable.<\/p>\n

Nowak\u2019s first successful attempt at his \u201clife-writing\u201d opened up a path to cooperation with the PWM. It was the Sonata 'June-December\u2019\u00a0 <\/em>for violin and piano (2005), the initial part of which is based on a quotation from a simple melody for a piece Nowak wrote as Bi\u0142an\u2019s student at high school. Conversations with Andrzej Ch\u0142opecki and Eugeniusz Knapik made him realise how far-reaching the horizons of contemporary music can be. Marcin Trz\u0119siok enabled Nowak to sail out to the high seas of musical aesthetics and helped to locate his work within a context of philosophy and history of culture. In 2006, granted a Moritz von Bomhard Fellowship, Nowak began 2-year studies in composition at the University of Louisville, tutored by Steve Rouse.<\/p>\n

It was, however, earlier that a breakthrough happened. In 2005, shortly before receiving his diploma from the Katowice Academy, Nowak realised a dream of his youth. He participated in a high-seas sail to Svalbard. A year later, a hundred years after Roald Amundsen\u2019s conquest of the Northwest Passage, the composer embarked on the Polish yacht \u201cStary\u201d and sailed by Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Shetlands, and the Faroes to reach Iceland. He financed the enterprise with the first installment of the \u201eF\u00f6rderpreise f\u00fcr Polen\u201d scholarship from the Munich-based Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung. The second installment was promised to him for completing a serious composing commission \u2013 a musical journal of the journey to the North Sea. After his return, having already begun his studies in Louisville, Nowak embarked on composing Fiddler\u2019s Green and White Savannas Never More<\/em> for male voices and chamber orchestra. The piece\u2019s premiere, at the Lviv Velvet Curtain festival in October 2006, was received with an ovation. Founded on irony and anxiety, the longing for Fiddler\u2019s Green \u2013 sailors\u2019 legendary realm, a land of perpetual gaiety, never-quiet fiddle and unwearying dancers \u2013 resounded also with a longing for a renewal of the form of the symphonic poem: in a coherent, yet multi-threaded shape, skillfully highlighted with a masterful layering of texture in the orchestra. It was also in the United States that Nowak wrote the Last Days of Wanda B.<\/em> (2006), \u201ca record of emotions accompanying the farewell and a set of still-frame memories, interwoven with remnant quotations from her favourite melodies\u201d dedicated to his recently deceased grandmother. The personal thread started to play an ever more significant part in the composer\u2019s work, at the same time quite unexpectedly intertwining with his new fascination, one with the form of opera, which continues until now.<\/p>\n

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Sudden Rain. <\/em>Photo: Bart\u0142omiej Sowa<\/p>\n

The chamber opera Sudden Rain<\/em> was Nowak\u2019s diploma piece crowning his studies with Rouse. It premiered in 2009, at the The Teatr Wielki \u2013 Polish National Opera in Warsaw. It was there that She, He and Something else \u2013 tropes accompanying all Nowak\u2019s subsequent stage works \u2013 appeared for the first time. The composer and the librettist, Anna Konieczna, put fragments of letters and notes written by a person with Asperger\u2019s syndrome together with a conversation of a married couple on the day of their wedding anniversary. She had been waiting for a proof of love, He gave her freedom, which She interpreted as a prophecy of parting. Something stood in their way: the Something was unawareness of one\u2019s own emotions and inability to express the heart of the matter beyond words and silence. It proved, for the first time, that Nowak was not in the least an epigone of the \u201cStalowa Wola generation\u201d, that he could juggle both tradition and the sound of the avant-garde, the latter being what his teachers had once rebelled against.<\/p>\n

At the next stage of his career, Nowak started composing what might be classified as exercises before a large, full-scale opera. These include: the Dark Haired Girl in a Black Sports Car <\/em>for chamber orchestra (2009), based on an anecdote about a woman seen in the traffic who \u201cdrove away after a moment, never looking in my direction\u201d; King of the Cosmos Disappears <\/em>for orchestra, threads and piano (2010) \u2013 about a schoolmate who called himself the master of the Cosmos and disappeared without a trace; Concerto for Guitar in Peculiar Tuning and Chamber Orchestra <\/em>(2012); and the Half-filled Diary<\/em> (2013) presented in this recording.<\/p>\n

After a year of cooperation with Georgi Gospodinov, a Bulgarian poet, prose writer and playwright, the Space Opera <\/em>(2015) was born. It is a story of the first manned journey to Mars, told from points of view including that of a stowaway accompanying the two astronauts \u2013 a fly who had wandered into the spaceship\u2019s capsule. The music Nowak built around this narrative is difficult, woven from heterogenous and fascinating chords, rich in its orchestral layer, sensual in the vocal parts, with clever references to the legacy of 20th-century titans, primarily that of the not-so-obvious-anymore Stravinsky. Nowak set out to construct his own mythical universe: in his first \u201ctrue\u201d opera, he created a vision of an apocalypse of disregarded beings, reaching beyond the anthropomorphic way of representing nature.<\/p>\n

Working on Ahat-Ili – Sister of Gods <\/em>(2018) with libretto by Olga Tokarczuk, based on her novel Anna In in the Tombs of the World<\/em>, Nowak persuaded the writer to make Ninszubur, Inanna\u2019s mortal confidant, the primary character of the story. Each of the five main characters was assigned a separate element, while each of the elements was assigned its own microharmonic structure. The world-governing rule was rendered with a mysterious twelve-tone chord, which appears at the onset of the composition and later reappears like a leitmotif. Ninszubur, the confidant\u2019s monologues correlate with a cello melody referencing a Sumerian hymn, which survived to this day in the Persian dastgah-e nava <\/em>melodic pattern and in a related Arabic maqam.<\/em> The flawlessly written music in this opera, planned with a great sense of dramaturgy, seduces us with a subtle and unobvious beauty, supported with an uncommon sonic imagination \u2013 proved in fragments such as the duet of the countertenor Dumuzi and the contralto Ereszkigal, where Nowak juxtaposed two voices of similar ranges and tessituras, yet a completely different timbre.<\/p>\n

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Marek Mo\u015b and AUKSO during rehearsal of Ahat Il\u012b <\/em>in Gda\u0144sk, 2020. Photo: Dorota Koperska<\/p>\n

Nominating Nowak for the prestigious \u201cPaszport Polityki\u201d award, I wrote that I was doing it because of his \u201ccreative independence and an original musical perspective on the world\u201d. I added that he was most worthy of the award for Ahat Il\u012b<\/em>, which \u201crestores faith in the future of the opera\u201d. Nowak won the award, which is all the more important, as he emphasises himself, in light of the fact that he had not won any composition competition before. A few months later, he announced the premiere of another piece, Drach<\/em>, a fruit of his cooperation with Szczepan Twardoch, the author of the novel by the same title. The first performance took place over the three evenings of the Auksodrone festival at the Mediateka in Tychy, in October 2019. Nowak called his new piece for soloists, strings and looper dramma per musica<\/em>, thus reaching for the roots of the operatic form. Twardoch distilled the essence out of his Drach<\/em>, making personified emotions the protagonists and leaving but very few remnants of the plot and dramaturgy of the original in place. Nowak framed the composition into three short \u201cchapters”, set on a few parallel planes. The narrative \u2013 as the ever-reborn Drach \u2013 develops in a circular manner, from a prologue using the harpsichord tuned to a meantone temperament, where the first musical suggestions of a \u201cperpetual return\u201d appear, through singing supported by a harmonically distorted accompaniment, to \u201cromanticising\u201d culminations and returning to the baroque part symbolising the primeval beginning.<\/p>\n

In the near future, about which Nowak \u2013 very aptly \u2013 says \u201cit is difficult to foresee, but possible, with a certain probability, to assume\u201d, we are in for at least two important premieres of his compositions: \u201ePrawda?\u201d\u00a0 [Truth?] Symphony No. 1 <\/em>and Syreny [Sirens] <\/em>\u2013 \u201emelodramma aeterna\u201d, yet again with libretto by Szczepan Twardoch. It is probably high time we agreed with Ch\u0142opecki, even if it is in the afterworld. Nowak\u2019s music seduces with a quality that our ireful and distrustful generation has scorned for long years \u2013 it is simply beautiful.<\/p>\n

Translated by: Miko\u0142aj Witkowski<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I liked to argue with Andrzej Ch\u0142opecki. Uncompromising and mischievous, but at the same time very insightful, the contemporary music critic would build his opinions on solid theoretical foundations. And once he had built them, there was no mercy: a true Monsieur Sans-G\u00eane, he was the male version of the outspoken laundress. When punching, he … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-mangusta","4":"post-5277","6":"format-standard","7":"category-miscellanea","8":"category-posts-in-english","9":"category-prasowka"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5277"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5286,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5277\/revisions\/5286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}