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Spatial music is a sound and performative genre. And also composition techniques due to the specific use of counterpoint and polyphony techniques. The essential here is the conditions of performers’ separation from each other by a tangible space. Elementary things for writing acquire a new meaning and require an appropriate solution. The synchronization problem of all musicians is an example of this aspect. Space separation offers several solutions: either synchronization through individual metronomes or stopwatches that are activated before the piece begins; according to them, the musicians calculate the time of their sounds. A looser attitude towards polyphony and counterpoint is the second type of organization. The musician has approximate zones where he could play, and the actual sound result will allow for a large amount of randomness and variety with new implementations. The main feature that the composer faces is the impossibility of controlling the whole for the performer. Here, the composer often delegates an individual line of behaviour to each musician caused by the game conditions. Considering them, the performer integrates, in fact, his “solo” to the intended whole.

 
 
 
 

Examples in the compositions:

 

Terracotta
< 2021 >

‘Terracotta’ is the score for the large orchestra (quadruple size). Many unusual percussion instruments are there besides two voices. I characterize it the spatial because it manifests here in two ways. The orchestra has a spatial sound nature always. I imagined it as a gigantic mass of people, a hundred, that saturates energy in one place. A sound and playing energy during their playing can pass through musicians’ groups, then pass further, and so on. The spatial aspect is always present in any orchestra music, because of the instruments’ wide location.The ritual comprehension of the space is a second spatial......

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Pink Hills. Apollo
< 2018 >

“Rose Height. Apollo” is a spatial composition performed by 12 musicians. The name of the place Rosenhöhe (Rose Height, Darmstadt, Germany) gives the title for the piece. In 2018, they invited me to the Nadar ensemble residence there. The unusual composer’s exploration of familiar spaces was a subtheme of the project. Rosenhöhe is a vast rose garden. The park has a lot of signs and cultural symbols. You can’t see the form of tombs built in a cross model from the ground. There are fountains with double arches, where a sunlight corridor happens. There are religious places (minaret) and artistic......

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She Wolf
< 2013 >

“She-Wolf” arose out of my interest in similar transcendental meditation techniques. I mean stopping the flow of thinking, shifting away from evaluative, stopping self-talk. I could determine it as a “blind space of the feeling”.It is something from my childhood sensations when I imagined the forest as a fully alive, a single whole, and a sentient creature. What would happen to a human in this fairy forest? Would a man become its part, dissolve in it? Would a man turn into “a human animal”?“She-Wolf” is a play for five musicians. I divided it into two equal parts: The Other is......

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