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Acousmatics and Interactive Music Festival

Pro Arte Institute, with support of the Ford Foundation
St. Petersburg, Russia, May 30-June 3, 2005.

Reviewed by Mikhail S. Zalivadny
St.Peterburg

It is the second electro-acoustic music festival organized in St. Petersburg by the Pro Arte Institute. The festival called together several creative bodies engaged in this field of music, such as the Theremin Centre, affiliated with the State Conservatoire in Moscow; the re-organized Laboratory of Computer Music Technologies at the St. Petersburg State Conservatoire; and the Centre for Music and Technology from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland; as well as individual artists from these cities.

Being broader in proportions and more numerous in membership than the previous conference held in May 2004, the new festival was concentrated mainly on ‘pure’ music and some related sonic arts, with very few exceptions (among the latter——an ‘interactive opera’ Mother Tongue: The Main Word by Vladimir Rannev, with video part by Georgy Bagdasarov, St. Petersburg). The most characteristic forms of these arts in the festival program were collective improvisations on the basis of electronic note-book (‘lap-top) ensemble; live electronics used in combination with traditional music instruments (including didjieru the Australian aboriginal trumpet); examples of ‘cinema for ears’ (i.e. film soundtracks without parallel visual images) treated mostly from the musical point of view, and so forth. A part of one of the concerts (on June 2) was devoted to music performed by Olesia Rostovskaya (Theremin Centre, Moscow); this performance was a considerable success and roused a keen interest for the instrument and its artistic possibilities.

The theoretical part of the festival consisted of two open lectures delivered by Andrey Smirnov (Theremin Centre) and Sophea Lerner (Sibelius Academy). As the main subjects of these lectures, the advanced methods of computer-assisted composition and collective (in particular——distance) improvisation were analyzed. The lectures were illustrated with practical music examples that included such impressive operations, as transforming the data of solar bursts or cosmic particles’ trajectories into original complex forms of sounds.

Of course, the compositions that constituted the festival program were of different artistic value. But this diversity of aesthetic levels was, to a certain extent, in conformity with the variety of genre and stylistic trends represented at the concerts.

In this respect, the festival offered to each of its participants (without excepting the ‘passive’ listeners) a rich material for reflection and for determining the most agreeable, individual way to further the evolution of electroacoustic music, considering the traditions that yet exist.

 

 




Updated 1st November 2005


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