Cezary Duchnowski

Featuring: Agata Zubel, Klangforum Wien, Titus Engel

Cezary Duchnowski, although perceived as a specialized composer with consciously chosen specialization, is very open to extremely versatile activity in the musical field. Apart from absolute music, he’s also keenly interested in relations between music and the word, music and theatre (or rather performance art) as well as visual arts in the wide sense. What he aims at with this kind of syncretism is a genuine interaction of various media. In his musical activity, he explores various areas of the arts, and feels particularly close to those that stimulate a dispute between composition and improvisation, between determinism and freedom. He is also versatile with music forms which include multimedia opera, symphonic forms, music for smaller orchestras and chamber ensembles, music for the theatre and pantomime. Nearly all of his work uses electronic media as an integral part of instrumentation or as a new context for traditional instruments.

His work as a composer is determined not only by the individual language and tech nique he has worked out but also by the attitude to the very process of creation. That attitude results from his specific approach to music and art in general. Art should first and foremost evoke emotions, and it is prerequi site for Duchnowski for those emotions to be positive. All, even the most refined tools and concepts, can only serve to create aesthetic values.As a performer, Duchnowski regu-larly collaborates with artistic groups that combine creative work with performance. Some of them are ElettroVoce Duo with Agata Zubel, performing music for voice and

electronics, Trio Phonos ek Mechanes with Paweł Hendrich and Sławomir Kupczak, which presents largely improvised, computer-generated music and many projects with Andrzej Bauer as a performer and designer of musical space in the Cellotronicum project. phonoPhantomatics is inspired by the vision described by Stanisław Lem in Summa Technologiae on creating a special form of virtual reality. The science of creating “two-way connections between artificial reality and its recipient” was called phantomatics. This mechanism is the main model of a new musical composition. An attempt to create a system of connections between an acoustic instrument and a virtually created context in the area of musical values is the leading idea of this composition. The dependency system is to run on many levels and in many dimensions. The complementarily perceived matrix of a phonophantomatic machine will consist of local and global interactions of sounds, both electronic and electroacoustic and pre-compositional processes and musical patterns/gestures improvised by Klangforum musicians.