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The Electrotap Weblog

The Electrotap Weblog is a blog for clearing ideas, brainstorming, and reflecting on life - basically those things that don’t lend themselves well to more formal areas of our website. If you have any thoughts or reactions to any of our blog entries, please feel free to drop us a line…

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“The music of Zygmunt Krauze”

10/29/2003

Yesterday afternoon was a presentation at UMKC’s White Hall by Zygmunt Krauze, a composer from Poland. I found his music to be very engaging and enchanting.

He presented a number of his works. The first was an orchestral piece using shifting blocks of sonorities built on m2,M2, and m3 with a focus on minimizing contrast - siting similar goals in some works of visual art.

The second piece presented was fiddle (folk) tune based. He made several transcriptions of the same tune (each is slightly different), he then gave it to 10 performers who each do thier own interpretation of the transcription (including tempo). The outcome creates dense counterpoint but ,again, reduced contrast. He also discussed the issue of where the line is on claiming you have “composed” a work.

His Piano Concerto No.1 includes 2 accordions, electric guitar, and 2 saxophones, and is structured in a number of smaller attaca movements (somewhat like Crumb).

He then shared with us a technique whereby stones or rocks (about 8-12” large) are placed on the strings of the piano to create some really great musical devices. Last night he performed a piece using this technique called “Stone Music.” He also wrote a piano concerto with orchestra using the same technique (I very much liked the effect when combined with other instruments and textures). For notation, he gives description of size and position of the stones. Usually he is using multiple stones in the piano. The excitation source can be the rock bouncing or rocking themselves or using a small metal knife to shake or rattle between the strings - this technique does require amplification. The result is an incredible texture!

To wrap up, he presented Piano Concerto No.2, which featured some really incredible orchestration. He created a soundscape that was beautiful, warm, and rich juxtaposed with stark contrasts of more aggresive and abrupt sections. He talked about his working on how to put segments of contrasting material together(with or without silence), and how to do it so that the segments don’t ruin each other. Part of his conclusion after researching it, is that almost any segment of contrasting material can be put next to each other as long as it comes from the same “hand” - this is also true in the music of Messian.When asked about time aspects he responded that nothing is calculated but always intuited and not thought about too rigorously.

His performance was great. His style seemed mechanical or stilted at times. In some instances this resulted with a good effect and it seemed impossible that he would be doing some of the things he was able too. It was an almost Nancarrow-like effect. At other times I found it distracting and a little disconcerting. It is interesting to see the intersection of his compositional and performance styles. The lasting impression is that it was a phenomenal visit.

Glad I made it back from Norway in time… -Tim

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