This year’s Warsaw Autumn festival didn’t so much have a theme as a keyword: “clearing”. Referencing Heidegger’s use of the term (lichtung), the idea was that it “symbolises a new stage, a new opening and chance, in both the social and individual dimension. The word carries the hope that we wish to have for the future in an age that has been shaken to its foundations. We therefore turn our attention to works that share alarmist premonitions and anxieties, not in order to plunge us into despair, but to alert us, to protect us from perils, and lead us to normality.” There’s a boldness in that idea that was strongly realised in the festival as experienced. This was my first time at Warsaw Autumn, and among other things, i was struck hard by the sheer ambition of it all. While many festivals continue to shrink, reduce and dwindle, Warsaw Autumn was a contemporary music festival at its best and most robust: several concerts every day, supplemented with discussions, workshops, fringe performances, events for children, and much else besides. In every way, this was my kind of festival.
The way that this keyword manifested during the five days i spent at Warsaw Autumn was unexpectedly immediate, with works falling broadly into one of three distinct modes of expression, which could be regarded as lying on (spanning, in fact) a single continuum: pain, abstraction, pleasure.
Let’s talk about pain.
To an extent, the problem of pain – or, rather, the problem of articulating pain musically – was writ largest in the last example of it performed during the festival, at the grand closing concert given by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, fierily conducted by Oscar Jockel. Nafir by Iranian composer Idin Samimi Mofakham was scored for a double bass quartet, orchestra and electronics, and the sheer scale of the piece gave one pause for thought. There was no doubting the immensity of its onslaught, a massive extended cry. But was it also rather generic? Was it, in fact, meaningless? i found myself considering the soldiers, the conscripts, the children, the parents, the refugees: everyone caught amid the morass of ongoing world outrages and calamities. Their articulation of agony would surely be no less immense, without measure, without nuance. Personally motivated, certainly, but impersonally expressed, instinctive, unthinking, artless. Yet music is art, and it seems to me that what Mofakham created was similarly impersonal, a blank wall of enormity that, according to an unspoken convention, should simply be taken as read as constituting ‘pain’. Is that really adequate?
i also found myself considering the particular context, being performed in Poland. The place of Penderecki’s sonorism; and the language of Nafir was clearly a kind of extended sonorism, constructed from blocks of raw behavioural stuff. The place of Karkowski’s saturation; and here, too, Mofakham’s default position was of a similarly filled environment. These seemed more telling links to meaning, though musically rather than emotionally. As such, overall Nafir felt almost entirely removed from what could be called meaningful or authentic expression. The only time it attained genuine power was during the rare occasions when the otherwise perpetual onslaught receded (creating something akin to those aforementioned “clearings”), exposing the four double basses, straining hard, in extremis. These all-too-brief shifts in focus from the mass to the individual had infinitely more emotive heft than the dull overload surrounding them.
Also adopting a sonorist approach was another Iranian, Arash Yazdani, in his ensemble piece Shimmering of White Phosphorous: Incidental music to commiserate the state of being. That title says it all, and while one understood entirely what he was getting at, the unsubtle, superficial way Yazdani wielded his basic, borrowed shapes and gestures felt entirely manipulative. Here, too, sonic extremes simply didn’t equal emotional extremes.
The same concert, given by Ensemble Modern, featured another work impelled by pain, but which occupied an altogether more authentic realm of tangible suffering. The title of Skvyrk, by Ukranian composer Katarina Gryvul, translates as “sob” or “whimper”, yet the way Gryvul actualised this was both deeply subtle and etched with discomfort. The music was initially hard to read: plaintive perhaps, a touch chaotic, but with a lyrical drive within it. The combined effect – the ensemble, amplified, expanded by electronics and Gryvul performing from a buchla easel at the back – was like a deconstructed keening, barely able to speak without fragmenting, shattering or turning inside out. This was made more poignant by Gryvul’s buchla, which introduced an unsettling birdsong-like presence to the work, fragile yet appearing to have a transformative effect on the ensemble: liberating them, maybe? Either way, the piece ended up somewhere microscopic, before ramping up the intensity – with fantastic bass crunches that threatened to rip things apart – arriving at a strange soundworld that was simultaneously delicate and ruinous. Absolutely riveting.
One especially problematic performance, which from one perspective could hardly have come more from a place of pain, was Pascha crucifixionis, a new large-scale, multimedia work by Piotr Tabakiernik. While this world première was presented in a neutral performance space – Warsaw’s ATM Studio – it would have made much more sense to be performed in a church, as the piece was entirely devotional in nature, designed specifically for believers in Christianity. That wasn’t its only contradiction; in his excessively pious notes, Tabakiernik made it clear that he wanted to treat the text (from the gospel of John) with kid gloves. Then why write music at all? As it was, the narrative was delivered in the original Greek, without emotion, while Tabakiernik’s music took the form of something like incense, an innocuous ambient concoction, coming and going in varying densities but one basic colour. Incense is an atmosphere, a fragrance, a tint, a context; it smells nice, but it isn’t interesting, and one couldn’t help feeling the same way about Tabakiernik’s music. Besides, it seemed he really wanted it both ways: to present the gospel with complete transparent piety while still wanting to shape it according to his own creative intentions. Hands-off and hands-on isn’t a paradox, it’s impossible.
Of course, this is no different from historical models: extant Passions were similarly designed for the faithful, are no less pious in character and have their own clear agenda. Indeed, the same is true of John’s gospel itself, being just one of several descriptive accounts, all of which differ from and contradict each other, and are deliberately constructed to direct the reader to the author’s particular agenda. (What’s the plural noun for unreliable narrators?). The main body of Pascha crucifixionis was tolerable – boring, but bearable – though the lengthy conclusion, after Jesus had died, was an interminable slog through endless final devotions that left one wondering what on earth something like this was doing in a contemporary music festival.
Two of the most powerful works articulating pain and disquiet came toward the end of the festival, in a concert given by SWR Vokalensemble, conducted by Yuval Weinberg. Claudia Scroccaro‘s On the Edge, combining six soloists, choir and electronics, was already in progress when we entered the hall, the singers dispersed to the sides of the space, while others gradually made their way down the centre to the front. Despite its initially gentle, ambient nature it was strikingly elemental, like voices from the dawn of time. They floated and overlapped – at once one song, fragmented, and 20 songs, united – held together by shimmering electronic gossamer, occasional accents from which made the voices surge, propelling them arhythmically.
Melding lullabies with echoes of trauma, together with words drawn from Mina Loy‘s early poems, the work conveyed a potent sense of perspective: solo lines in the midst of rich, complex group textures, with soft electronics creating both a backdrop and a patina. It was pure lyricality, though its language was continually reforming, glancing against moments of familiarity – a chord, a word, a progression – yet always unknown: like the oldest sounds (pre-music!), like the newest sounds (post-music?). Despite the darker aspects of its subtext, the work attained a sense of transcendence without recourse to any of the tropes and cliches we might associate with that word. The electronics buzzed and swelled, the voices undulated on its surface, all resonating together with an alien purity and authenticity. It was simply one of the most stunning vocal works I’ve ever heard.
This had begun SWR’s concert, and they ended it with something very different in tone, Franck Bedrossian‘s Feu sur moi. Fuelled by Rimbaud’s ‘Une Saison en Enfer‘, intensely visceral and violent electronics provided the environment for the singers, who engaged in ritual-like chanting. Fittingly for Rimbaud’s dark point of origin, this was music of utmost volatility, individual elements (traces of sung lines) fighting to be heard amid the inexorable pull of group sound masses, the ensemble becoming polarised into deep abyssal and high clustered formations, faltering as the electronics threatened to rumble them out of existence. Pitched at an emotional state so heightened that distortion was etched into every aspect (literally abrading the electronics), this only made occasional glimpses of lyrical pellucidity all the more poignant as they become lost in the work’s final eruption.
To return to the Warsaw Philharmonic concert that closed the festival, its most telling articulation of pain – just as immersive as the Bedrossian – came in the world première of another multimedia piece, Lament for Ur. Assemblages from the city that is no more by Polish composer Ewa Trębacz. Featuring an improvising female voice (magnificently performed by Anna Niedźwiedź), small vocal ensemble and video in addition to the orchestra, and utilising fragments from one of the five Mesopotamian laments, it was like being in the midst of an epic ritual, one that experienced a continual emotional breaking down, which was in turn incorporated back into, and made part of, the ceremony. It thus formed a tempestuous, almost overblown expression of agonised horror.
This was followed by a section of more measured lamentation, responding to destruction, in the process co-opting dramatic tropes and conventions such that at times it sounded vaguely filmic. Yet the music rang true nonetheless, the voices in particular channeling rage and anguish, while the orchestral fabric embodied something of the blasted, ruinous state shown in AI-generated images of destroyed cities projected over the stage. By the final movement, the music was literally fibrillating with pain, pierced by shrapnel-like accents, sliding pitches resounding like broken sirens, surrounded by an everywhere keening and fragments of sibillance like so many angry serpents. The ending was dronal, wailing and rippling but fixed in place, fizzling abruptly into nothing but breath.
