Vortex – The Performer versus Electronics

On Serbia’s contemporary music scene, the performance practice of the pianist Neda Hofman-Sretenović stands out in a number of respects. Invariably, her “part” strives to open new aural horizons and seeks to bring the listener closer to new music. Despite her active participation in the Construction Site Contemporary Music Ensemble, which she founded ten years ago, Hofman-Sretenović has not neglected her own pianistic “monologue”, which showed hints of an affinity for electro-acoustic music right from the start.

            Her second CD album, titled Vortex, focuses on works for piano and electronics composed since the early 1990s up to the present. Alongside three pieces commissioned from Serbian composers, Svetlana Savić (1971), Draško Adžić (1979), and Vladimir Korać (1986), the pianist’s selection features pieces by five international authors coming from various generations and espousing different types of sensibilities, spanning a broad arc from America, Argentina, Portugal, to Taiwan (Russell Pinkston /1949/, Per Bloland /1969/, Patricia Elizabeth Martínez /1973/, João Pedro Oliveira /1959/, Mei-Fang Lin /1973/). The result is a plausible cross section of the rich field of electro-acoustic music, the aesthetic of which forms, in fact, a reflection of the spirit of our time, the supremacy and ubiquity of technology and the insatiable human drive for exploring new varieties of sound.

            These composers view the piano as an instrument well suited to collaborate with electronics, which, among other things, enhances the perceptual dimension of our experience. As an all-powerful medium, for Svetlana Savić electronics is a sort of narrator, while American composer Per Bloland sees electronics as a stimulus to the author for re-examining the piano in its overall complexity, aiming to transcend its possibilities and construct multiple identities, rather than relying on existing conceptions of the instrument. Russell Pinkston, Director of the Electronic Music Studios at the University of Texas at Austin, whose primary focus of research has been in developing software and hardware for real-time synthesis and digital signal processing, goes so far as to envisage two different performance modalities for his work, TaleSpin (whose title served as inspiration for that of the album as a whole): one for Disklavier (an acoustic piano outfitted with electronic sensors for recording) and processors and one for piano and tape, entrusting the human performer with a markedly more virtuosic part.

            Thanks to the featured composers’ divergent types of stylistic expression and their authorial approaches to the mutual challenges that the piano and electronics set before each other, their joint play in illuminating, permeating, complementing, competing with, and transforming each other, this CD will immerse its listeners into an excitingly dynamic and imaginative sonic universe. It will push them into a sort of trans-human tail spin, wherein the origin of the sounds and their identity, the difference between the pianistic (acoustic) and the electronic will be at times difficult to distinguish. In some of the works, the line separating the instrumental from the electronic stratum is well hidden, making it seem, in places, that more than one piano is playing, or that the piano is another pair of “virtual” hands in the electronic part (e.g. in the works by S. Savić, P. Pinkston, D. Adžić). By contrast, Mei-Fang Lin and Patricia Elizabeth Martínez insist on forging a dynamic interaction between two autonomous media. In Vladimir Korać’s piece Pleiades, cluster structures in the piano served as the basis for the electronic part and a suggestive sonic conjuring of cosmic light, while in her piece, Tri jesenje noći (Three Autumn Nights), Svetlana Savić assimilates natural environment sounds, i.e. the sound of moths. Some of the works focus on the motive of movement and the passage of time. Pinkston’s piece evokes a situation that is slipping out of control, while the segments comprising João Pedro Oliveira’s In Tempore proceed at different speeds, generating a continuum in which time is alternately compressed, stretched, and relaxed. A few of the pieces found their stimuli in extra-musical contents, such as Bloland’s piece, which evokes the ghost town located where two worlds come together in the well known novel Pedro Páramo, and the work by Adžić, inspired by Baba Pusta, an abandoned manor house.

            Apart from forcing the composer on the adventure of exploring new, hybrid territories of sound, the challenge of connecting the piano with electronics also affects the nature of the performance practice. According to Neda Hofman-Sretenović, electronics, “by virtue of its ‘perfection’, confronts ‘living’ performers with an infinitely broad spectrum of colours, rhythms, and dynamics, thereby setting up divergent and provocative challenges”.[1] In every work featured on this CD, the pianist’s interaction with the electronics as a virtual but co-equal protagonist is vital for creating that specific amalgam that brings together various binary divisions: real/abstract, old/new media, analogue/digital, organic/technological… The performer is the indispensable pillar carrying the burden of numerous compositional and performance demands (including actions entailed by real-time electronics); not only does she initiate, control, and coordinate multiple layers of sound and structure, she also breathes “life” and emotionality into them, through her performing and affective gestures. That is precisely one of the demands that Martínez sets before the performer in the score of her El alma al cuerpo (The Soul to the Body): the pianist “must give her all during the performance: deliver their own trembling soul of music, so that the body (fixed sounds), apparently invariant, can come alive”.

            Although at first sight it might provoke the “conservative” suspicion that piano music has “run its course”, this CD in fact offers a fresh insight into the wealth and diversity of expressions and possibilities that the piano and electronics may accomplish together.

Ivana Miladinović Prica

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Arrhythmia – Piano Compositions by Contemporary Serbian Authors

Performers of new music are these rare and bold contemporaries of ours who are able to discern, in our complex present, the light of musical creativity issuing precisely from their time, as something that directly concerns and addresses them. Focused on that now, that moment of performance whereby a new work acquires currency and aesthetic presence in the world, they find their working space along the edges of contemporaneity, striving to be both in their time and with their time. And nowhere does contemporaneity pulsate so strongly as in the act of performing a newly written piece for the first time.

A unique place among artists who examine recent musical creativity and inscribe it into the present is occupied by the pianist Neda Hofman-Sretenović, the spiritus movens of the Construction Site Contemporary Music Ensemble, and one of our most accomplished performers and producers of contemporary music. In her well-developed performing (solo and chamber) practice, richly contributing to the area and experience of our contemporary artistic context, her album Aritmija (Arrhythmia) occupies a special place, as the first release featuring pieces for solo piano composed in the last five years. The listener is thus presented with a collection of seven works by seven Serbian composers of different generations, whose oeuvres are well-known to Hofman-Sretenović, because she has often collaborated with most of them. Apart from the four of them who teach at the Composition Department of the Faculty of Music in Belgrade (Milana Stojadinović-Milić, Tatjana Milošević, Ivan Brkljačić, and Branka Popović), there is also a young author among them, Ana Kazimić, and two composers (Svetlana Maksimović and Marko Nikodijević) who have chosen to leave their home culture, but have retained dynamic relations with Hofman-Sretenović, which are present in this collaboration as well. This collaborative endeavour achieves an almost transcendental degree of compliance on a single recording, showing a peculiar kind of intimacy between the pianist and the works she recorded. Not only did Hofman-Sretenović participate in their completion, i.e. the final stage of shaping the score in time, not only did she live through them by interpreting and lending them the energy required for their birth and long (trans-media) life, but she also initiated the making of four of those seven pieces.

Aritmija (Arrhythmia), a composition by Milana Stojadinović-Milić that lent its title to the entire album, was directly inspired by Neda’s performing skills. Its subtitle, Slagalica za Nedu (A Jigsaw Puzzle for Neda), refers the listener to children’s play and reverting to childhood. Jigsaw puzzles are usually considered a child’s pursuit and this sort of playfulness – which lives on in some grownup activities as well – is guaranteed in this piece by allowing the performer to combine the work’s individual segments in performance as she pleases.

In the second commissioned piece, Hiljadu devetsto... devedeset prva (19... 91) (Nineteen… Ninety-one /19… 91/) by Ivan Brkljačić, those gentle expanses of childhood are lost in the chaos and discord of the real world. Playing with the two syllables whose opposition forms Neda’s first name (ne–da) inspired Brkljačić to remember our shared past. The dissolution of unity into two extremes, the bright and dark side of that past, of that dramatic year (1991), is conjured up by a simulation of Baroque two-part polyphony in the first movement and a sort of collective fall in the second movement’s “tragic round dance”, where the piano becomes a source of an intense, percussive type of sound.

The titles of the remaining pieces likewise take the listener on various journeys of association and conjure up different sound images. In the third commissioned piece, From Rayleigh to Mie by Branka Popović, arrhythmia is re-signified as refractions of light, one of which generates the blue shades of daytime sky, while the other produces fog. This entailed working with timbre (echo and pedal), as well as reducing the means of expression down to an expressive usage of the high and low piano registers. In the pieces by Ana Kazimić and Svetlana Maksimović, whose dynamic and textural reliefs likewise refer to the flickering of light, one may note traces of impressionism, sonic flashes of Monet paintings inspiring one with feelings of elation and serenity (in Fragmenti molitve za mir / Fragments of a Prayer for Peace by S. Maksimović, the fourth commissioned piece), while in A. Kazimić’s Auroriel, the sonic spectrum is extended with glissandi played directly on the piano strings. Women’s compositional experience is also complemented in this album with Random, a piece by Tatjana Milošević. The piece features musical materials from earlier pieces by Milošević, which branch out, like a rhizome, throughout her oeuvre (including, for instance, a motive from her mini-opera Adonis i Galateja / Adonis and Galatea, premièred by none other than Neda and the Construction Site Ensemble). In Sadness/Untitled by Marko Nikodijević we find a reductive type of expression, discreet and delicate moves, and a kind of withdrawal of subjectivity. It is as though this sort of escape and retreat into an almost amorphous condition harboured a tendency to glorify the listener’s own ego.

In this album, Neda Sretenović-Hofman presents the listener with her careful framing of the mysterious and soft worlds of these seven pieces, for the most part marked by tones pleasing to the ear. Her signature and affective gestures are recognized in her refined phrasing in terms of tone and dynamics, shifting rhythmical and rhetorical impulses, powerful lyrical accents, looming above the noise of the world like a sort of magnificent and badly needed comfort.

Ivana Miladinović Prica