electroacoustic composition for chamber ensemble of semi-improvisers playing along with field recordings of stray musics.

Commissioned by Sacrum Profanum Festival to be premiered by Works & Days ensemble in Krakow on September 30th, 2019, at a Cricoteka venue.

CD of the live performance will be published by Bolt Records in year 2020.

Works & Days ensemble
Arturas Bumšteinas (direction, field recordings)
Gailė Griciūtė (prepared piano, angklung)
Anton Lukoszevieze (cello, kanklės)
Mėta Gabrielė Pelegrimaitė (flutes)
Artūras Kažimėkas (bass clarinet)
Dominykas Norkūnas (el. guitar)


“vvalking along”

(Viscous – neither fluid nor solid, glutinous, gelatinous, thick, dense, viscid, mucous, gummy, gluey, adhesive, tacky, adherent, syrupy, viscoelastic, gooey… Porous – permeable, penetrable, pervious, cellular, holey, absorbent, absorptive, spongy…)

Before I started writing this piece I thought calling it „Inward Music“. Because of the nature of musical material and the envisioned relationship between the pre-recorded sounds and live instrumental music I hoped it would be the best title. But when I actually started working on it I understood that I have developed a serious case of allergy to all kinds of binary oppositions and dualisms in art. It just came to me that all titles that have „in“ or „out“ in them (or what’s even worst – both of the prefixes together!) induce a panic attack to me and should be approached with therapeutic care. Then, while reading Nancy Tuana’s essay I thought I could borrow it’s title for my composition. I like how the writer asserts that viewing the world through binary oppositions is an impossible unreality. The world consists of interactions between these supposed binaries. This interaction and meeting of binaries is how the world is shaped: nature and culture clash and blend and both contribute to the reality of the world. For example genetics and environment are not two separate things that individually contribute to the whole via certain characteristics. The same is with culture and nature or civilized and savage. Weird In Nature blog says: “Let’s take an example of an ordinary wooden bridge. Nature produced the basic material of wood from its trees as the cornerstone of the bridge which was then altered by civilization as the tree was cut down and shaped into planks and subsequently treated with chemicals to resist the decay that goes on regularly in nature. This human altered wood was then put back into nature changed and formed into a bridge. This human construction borders the natural and the civilized and is made up of the interaction between the two”.

Quite similar thing happens in my piece – each musician instead of a musical score has a monitor loudspeaker in front, which plays sounds of human-made music heard in nature and/or urban environments and sounds of nature heard in the city. Musicians respond to what they hear by adding their own sounds. There is no real musical notation score, but there is a time-line and short guidelines (inspirations) that I wrote for each musician individually. That is maybe enough for the musical composition which has both some structure and some freedom in it.

The field recordings in this piece consist of various stray musics heard in the open air environments and because of the constant sounds of walking that punctuate the whole piece I finally decided to call the composition “Walking Along”. Last few touches and “vvalking along” is ready to go.

Currious thing: from my humble archive of field recordings I choose only those sounds that were recorded in the cities and towns named V – like Vilnius, Varniai, Vienna, Venice, Warsaw… In the middle of the piece I placed the recording of a distant music heard during the midsummer’s night celebration in the village of Vainiūnai.

Arturas Bumšteinas, 2019/06/28