Wąsik / Szymański / Mykietyn / Adams / Does Music Like to Repeat Itself? - NOSPR

‘A contemporary composer moves between gibberish and banality. There is no middle ground, nor can there be’, observed Paweł Szymański in 1997. At the time, his remark was interpreted in the context of the 20th-century tension between the demiurgic avant-garde and the postmodern – at times unreflective – reuse of the tried-and-tested solutions of the past. Yet this opposition seems to have a far more timeless dimension. Perhaps it was the distinguished Austrian composer Bernhard Lang, a great admirer of Szymański, who articulated it in the most universal terms by emphasising the interplay between change and repetition: of phrase, rhythm, sonority, form, convention, memory and cognitive patterns. ‘The same’ versus ‘the other’. Today, this sounds as unsettling as it is profoundly true – for that is precisely how our minds work. The 20th century first turned repetition into a taboo (serialism), only to transform it later into a fetish (minimalism). In the early works of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, almost literally nothing happens – but when something finally does, it is as though we have been transported into another dimension. In Preludes by Paweł Mykietyn – an aesthetic heir to Szymański – and in China Gates and Phrygian Gates by John Adams – heir to Glass and Reich alike – far more happens, although we remain within the microcosm of only a handful of motifs, rhythms and sonorities. Szymański’s Two Etudes, by contrast, evolve incessantly, as though with every chord and every breath of an ornamental phrase they were changing both key and metre. Yet beneath this relentless momentum we sense something enduring and ancient. Perhaps it is simply a deconstructed Baroque fugue. Perhaps it is far more than that. Could it be that music in the twenty-first century still offers the most compelling reconciliation of eternity and the temporal?

Michał Mendyk

Concert duration: approximately 80 minutes

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