Dmitri Kourliandski: Open music
Dmitri Kourliandski is a contemporary music composer from Moscow. His compositions won prizes at the international composers competitions, including the Gaudeamus Prize 2003, Gianni Bergamo Classic Music Award 2010, Johann Joseph Fux opera composition competition 2011, Andrey Voznesensky foundation “Parabola” prize 2016, Franco Abbiati 2017 Prize of Italian music critic. The interview is co-created by Laura Švītiņa who created text version of video interview.
What is your musical signature?
People decode musical pieces with their meanings, expectations, and experience. Sometimes I’m surprised by the variety of ideas people find in my music. So probably the openness for such a variety of meanings could be named as my signature. It is always important for me not to dictate what one should or not receive, understand, or feel. I believe that listening is an active and creative act. When we listen we compose what we hear, so all the listeners are composers of the music, which they receive.
What is your way of composing?
The starting point for me is always questions — what to compose, how to compose, and especially why to compose. If I receive a commission to write, for example, a string quartet, I start with questioning this very situation — I place a question mark after each word of this sentence. Then I think about what is the concert situation, what are the relationships among listeners and musicians, among sound and text, what is the notation, etc. For example, before writing The Riot of Spring the questions were — what is the figure of conductor nowadays, and who are the people in the hall? In 2013 these questions were provoked by the political situation in Moscow and also it was hundred years since the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. It was my reflection on what is folklore and what can be a revolutionary gesture towards what we perceive as folklore.
Watch full interview with Dmitri Kourlandski
Why do you still compose?
Well, it’s quite easy — for me composing is the most natural way to reflect the world and to find ways to articulate, fix, and send the reflection as a materialised message.
What is good music composition?
I’m very much concerned about being authentic. Music history as well as social and political history is filled with expectations and given roles, I call them models. Some composers follow and support models and some composers try to overcome the models, if not to create, which is the ideal case. It is a dichotomy of The Avatar versus The Author. If models use us, composers, as Avatars to replicate themselves (models of what is art, how it functions, how it communicates with the audience, etc.), then it is not a composer writing music anymore, but musical models writing a composer. I find it sad and dangerous. It is not only about purely musical models because composers create societies of sounds, hierarchies, minorities, and majorities. Music projects certain political and social systems and even ideologies. There are no ready-made or given instruments on how to compose and what is music in general. I always say that composing music is each time composing what is music and the history of music in general, it is the history of such permanent reformulation of music as a matter. So for me, good musical composition is probably the one where I see composers conscious and careful about such matters, where a composer is rather The Author than The Avatar and is concentrated on territory before the sounds — the initial motivation field. I would underline that I’m not speaking about the means. It can be multimedia composition, but deeply traditional and conservative in the initial motivation field. And in contrast, I can imagine even tonal language can be sometimes much more contemporary, experimental, and radical than some on a first glance experimental types of music.
How has your music perspective changed during the last 10 years?
At a certain moment, maybe 10 years ago, I found myself engaged in my own models. So I started to leave my cage step by step in a very different direction. If in the beginning the compositions were very fixed and structured, then later I came to open forms, graphic notations, text scores, performances, etc. This experience provided the possibility to come back to the fixed situations and find solutions.
So you’re constantly challenging yourself?
Yes, especially in recent years I find it the most interesting. I don’t need to feel safe in very formulated and solid stylistic walls. I feel solid in this pre-sound, pre-compositional field, which is for me the most important point. And as the experience shows, this pre-compositional field is very much durable and visible, it is possible to project it in sound and real concert situations.
What processes have the greatest impact on changes in composition?
The biggest, of course, is the personal events and my reflection on the situations. I’m not a fan of being influenced and I’m trying to be conscious when it happens because then I stop being a composer and I become the projector of some outer situations. Speaking of technologies, I’m interested in how it is possible to deal with them without serving them, and becoming a slave for them. I see it as another challenge for us to articulate and solve this The Avatar — The Author problem.
What is your way of dealing with technologies and not becoming too dependent on them?
Technologies gave a lot of possibilities to reflect more fields of our presence. But, I’m not much into programming and computer music in general. I’m not absolutely optimistic about the situation of having software, even having notation software, because they enclose us into the possibilities and impossibilities which they provide and unconsciously we are somehow dictated after them. One of my solutions is composing music in software, which is not meant to be for music, like Excel or some text and scheme programs. Almost the whole cycle of maps of non-existent cities is composed in Excel.
Do you use some notation software?
Only the sketches I do by hand and it’s mostly ideas and some very abstract things. When I come to the necessity to fix the score I have the piece in my mind in its entireness and then I decide which software will be relevant. Actually less and less I use notation software, but more and more text scores, Excel, etc.
If Kourliandskis lived in Berlin and not in Moscow, would he be a different composer?
I lived in Berlin for one year and a half, it was 2008–2009. I can say Berlin was not my point of change, but rather my point of improvement of what I was doing by that time, at that moment. Changes happened not because I moved from Berlin to Moscow, but because of the way I was composing. I needed to change my optics and zoom in on more concrete and basic ideas of what is composition.
What do you fear the most as a composer?
If to speak about fears, then I would not split the personal and the professional fears, because as the composers we project our fears and neuroses to our listeners. I think I fear to lose this inner need for doubtness because I believe that no doubts bring wars.
What is the role of new music in society?
Music and arts in general introduce us to The Other and reveal our abilities to interact with it. I’m speaking about the music and art that questions this territory of motivations, that doesn’t deal only with surfaces of objects and sounds. Such kind of music opens the individuality of perception and it becomes more artistic. I believe perception is a very creative territory of human activity.
What is your perspective on the music scene changes over the last 25 years?
I think this collective thinking idea of compositional schools, certain collective traditions, aesthetics started to be less important as the individuality. And important is that the same thing happens to the audience — if composers follow the expectations which come from outside, then the audience composes the music. But if we challenge our personality and try to find authenticity, then we propose the audience with very different situations. And when the audience meets these situations, they become different from themselves. Actually, this idea of composing the audience, changing the listeners is a part of the composer’s artistic responsibility and it is also a part of the reason why contemporary art is often seen as an aggressive act in society. They want to change me, they want me to become different. I feel that in the last decade the audience tends to be more open for such an experience to meet The Other.
Do you see some changes in the audience over time?
I have experienced quite a variety of audiences. The Russian audience is very different from the general European audience. In Moscow, the audience is very young, enthusiastic, and participating one. They’re ready to come on stage and improvise together and after the concert ask where to study such kind of music. There are many laboratories for people who are interested in such experiments and they create the core audience of Moscow’s general contemporary music stage. At the same time in Europe, the audience is kind of aged. But it is not a question of losing the audience, just a certain social marker that in a certain point of life, people turn towards the concert halls and often towards the extreme, even experimental corners of the stage.
How do you see the future of new music?
Whatever we can imagine, life can correct or even cancel our expectations as it happens right now. It’s only a question of being ready for the changes and to prepare the mechanisms of acceptance and relationships with whatever comes in the future. I would say that in 30 years this initial motivation field will stay the same and if we concentrate on this field as a starting point for our reflections we will be ready to deal with whatever challenges may come in the future.
What would be your suggestion to young composers?
Questioning every situation and every gesture you produce as a composer could be the universal key. If we question what we do, suddenly we can realise the reasons — because I was taught or told to do it or I don’t even give my attention to what I am doing. In my teaching experience, I see that highly skilled students who are taught how to do, how to deal with situations are mostly the ones in depression because it was not their unique key and instruments, but they have taken someone else’s situation with them, and it presses their personality.
Selection of works created by Dmitri Kourliandski
