New Music Orchestra / Deus ex machina - NOSPR

In many cultures sound is considered to have given the primordial origin to all things (cf. the Hindu mantra Om). Yet in everyday life we rarely grant it the right to exist first, entirely by itself, and in its own right. We simply must know its source to tie it to a person or an object. Nearly eighty years ago, Pierre Schaeffer tried to challenge this habit and even coined a specific term ‘acousmatic music’. Despite that, the habit lingers. We still prefer to listen to someone or something rather than just listen.

To whom, then, do sounds in music belong? To the composer, who imagined and notated them? To the conductor, who determines the moment of their emergence (in Alexander Schubert’s Points Ones, by gesture alone, without the mediation of the ensemble)? To the performer, who releases them from the instrument (even one as unusual as the quasi-laboratory hybrid constructed specifically for a new work by Marta Śniady)? To the instrument itself, or perhaps to the machine operating it, as is often the case in the work of Lisa Streich? After all, the piano and the violin are also machines – old-fashioned, yet beautiful. And what of humans? Perhaps it is not we who set sounds in motion, but rather they that actuate us…

Michał Mendyk

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