Music Biennale Zagreb: Cantus Ensemble & MBZ

Just as skilled at interpreting pieces by Croatian and foreign authors, it will combine these two qualities in the current edition of the MBZ. Compositions by the biggest names in contemporary Croatian music — Milko Kelemen, as an indispensable part of the MBZ, and the doyens of the Croatian avant-garde, particularly electroacoustic music and musique concrète, Ivo Malec and Branimir Sakač will be played, accompanying the Cantus Ensemble's performance. The Zagreb audience will also be able to see the premiere of the short experimental animated film Structures by the Polish avant-garde artist Piotr Kamlera, for whom Malec's 1961 composition Dahovi was originally created. Kamler's films were composed by members of GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), including the great Iannis Xenakis, Bernard Parmegiani, and Ivo Malec.

In addition to announcing the first performance of Olja Jelaska’s piece, it is worth mentioning other composers who, like her, have moved away from the composing tradition as well as from traditional listening and critical strictures by using a more organic approach, that is by returning to the classical chamber ensemble, sometimes together with electronics. The common denominator of their new musical features is the deconstruction of composing techniques or the broadening of the standard perception of timbre, tonality and, historically speaking, musical rhetoric. On the one hand, Olga Neuwirth in her piece - the piano concerto explores different aspects of the pianistic style in her composition while introducing a sampler as a double that extends the piano’s range with microtones, as well as the attempts of the ensemble to challenge its own instruments in order to create some kind of expanded musical space.

On the other hand, Gadenstätter, who is nearly as important both as a thinker and a composer, starts from the hypothesis that listening is not just a biological and physiological fact, but a learned behavior, so he chooses the new music as the most reliable musical umbrella under which one can practice “the perceiving of a perception,” and then its expansion. So, in the composition Iconosonics he disassembles and reassembles historically codified musical-rhetorical figures, iconic signs (such as the storm and the battle) originally found in the history of Western music in madrigals, and then in oratorios, operas and program music of the 19th and 20th centuries. Playing with human perception, Gadenstätter works to accentuate the enlightening discomfort created by the tension between the recognition of a codified meaning of the figure and its gradual shift from the traditional context in the presence of the listener. A performance in the Jedinstvo Plant, an incubator of alternative artistic activities will no doubt contribute to this shift from the traditional listening context, i.e., the concert.