The Spectrum XXI festival gravitates around a ‘Spectral Music’ nucleus most dynamically represented by the Romanian composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram. What is new in this militant music is neither the dissonance nor the feeling of the unknown, nor even the incredible research into the timbres of ‘conventional’ instruments.
“What is new here, and something to be, if not understood by the brain, at least felt by the body, is that musicians coming from a classical heritage are overturning the organizational principle that has always defined it. This ‘society of the spectral’ relegates the idea of organization to the background, requiring it to adapt to a pre-existing sonic reality and to the immanence of sound as both first and final cause.(…) From the swarm-like oscillation of free-floating sound, they manage to extract a sense of both temporal progression and a residual tonality, contriving to read in its erratic motion something like the narrative of a possible story.”
http://https://youtu.be/l6MF0lG6bU0
This kind of “antistructural” praxis, although present in popular music ever since rock music broke with the idea of mass appeal, has never before been adequately thought through by schooled musicians – more often than not unable to exorcise the demons of analysis and rationality.
Hyperion Ensemble is a chamber music ensemble based in Bucharest. It was founded in 1976 by composer Iancu Dumitrescu and specializes in the performance of contemporary classical music, more particular it is the main promoter in Romania of the Spectral Music trend. Spectralism has become worldwide present with several notorious main schools from France, Canada, Italy and Romania, the Romanian school being largely accepted as the most valuable contributor to this trend. HYPERION has attained universal prominence due to the openness, force and originality of its creations, being considered, from USA to Japan, from South Africa to Chile or Korea, as the laboratory of daring and original musical contributions.
http://https://youtu.be/VNevykJCTwc
As a starting point, Hyperion explored possible connections between the most archaic Romanian music – Byzantine music, folk music collected by Bartok, etc. – and today’s avant-garde music. It is a tradition of performance, of interpreting each new score as a provocation of the spirit, and a quest for new domains of sound. Aesthetically, at the heart of this work is the notion of spectrality as it developed in the work of Dumitrescu, Avram and other Romanian composers, that is: a specifically transformational spectrality, as opposed to the structural spectrality of the French Itinéraire group.
HYPERION INTERNATIONAL:
Conductors: Iancu DUMITRESCU, Ana-Maria AVRAM
Special Guest: Stephen O’MALLEY
with Maya DUNIETZ (flute, piano), Yoni Silver (bass clarinet, violin), Orban GODRI (bassoon), Tiberiu CENUSER (trombone), Ioan-Marius LACRARU (viola), Andrei KIVU (cello, trumpet, tuba), Alex Drool YONOVIC, Haggai FERSHTMAN, Colin HACKLANDER (percussion), Eran SACHS (no-input mixer), Adam SCHEFLAN, SCHMIL FRANKEL (doublebass), Guillaume OLLENDORFF (e-guitar).
SPECTRUM XXI – Sonic Trans-Fusions
The Eightth International Festival of Spectral Music
Presented by Berghain & Digital in Berlin
Ticket buyers receive a CD with Hyperion/Dumitrescu/Avram for free.
Wednesday, 05.11.2014 | 20:00 CET
Berghain | Am Wriezener Bahnhof | 10243 Berlin/Friedrichshain
http://hyperspectral.99k.org | http://berghain.de
