Tatiana Gerasimenok: Ritual Music
Read my intreview with Tatiana Gerasimenok. Tatiana is a Belarusian composer based in Germany. Her works are multimedia pieces composed of various art elements and technologies. Tatiana’s approach to her ritual music attempts to break down the barrier between the audience and the artist and establish a more meaningful connection. Text version of this interview was created by Estere Bundzēna and edited by Tatiana Gerasimenok.
How has your music changed over the years?
I started out by composing deathcore music and performing pop music. Then I learned Western musical notation and composed sheet music in the academic tradition. Later I created textual instructions for performers, giving them the right to choose their instrument and the freedom to express themselves without much restriction. At this time I began studying at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory as a composer. At that period I perceived art as the human body, and music as one of the sensory organs of that body, as hearing. Gradually, I became interested in engaging the other senses of the audience — sight, smell, touch, taste and the vestibular apparatus. So I added other artistic mediums to music and began to work with the senses of the human body as instruments of a musical ensemble, which led me to the experience of synthesizing the arts.
What do you fear most as a composer?
As a composer, my biggest fear is the inability to speak freely about what worries me as a human being. Without the ability to express oneself freely, there would be neither science nor art. Such freedom is good for a person’s psychological health and helps people feel valued. I consider respect for personal space and choice to be an important element in the development of a person’s creative potential.
Why do you still compose?
I keep composing because creativity is one way of marking territory in space and time. I mark that I was on this planet and at this time. My personality and my perception of reality is embodied in my artwork and is a private illustration of the circumstances I experience as a human being. You can mark your territory by using different tools according to your interests. It could be art, genetic engineering, programming, human creation, politics, building an interplanetary transportation system. By your own actions you improve your chosen topic.
What is the signature of your pieces?
I describe my music as a ritual, a game, a psychophysical trip. I like to study Homo sapiens as if it had just come out of the womb, with no culture, no language, no experience of being in a new space. I am interested in exploring the universal human language: crying, coughing, laughing, yawning, facial expressions, body movements. I perceive these primary signals of the human body as pure energy through which it broadcasts its inner state and communicates with the environment.
What are the future trends in music?
Future trends are shaped by events affecting most of the population, such as ecology, the need for new ethics, the regulation of new technologies, protection from discrimination, and everything related to the question of our coexistence on this astronomical object.
Pandemic, which is a 2020 trend, has pushed us to move more confidently to online platforms. This trend will not go away, because it is part of the idea of new technologies. Moving online will also help solve the problem of overconsumption, because to socialize online you only need to buy clothes for your upper body, and you can be naked underneath. Offline, all a person needs to do is go to the store or get a coffee, take a walk to the park or the gym, where wearing one and the same thing is enough. As long as we pollute the Internet and our heads, the planet will try to recover.
How do you compose? What is the process of composing?
I formulate my task, study the chosen topic, reading both official research and opinions on social media. I analyze the information received, select sound, visual and other material for future work, and then create a system based on this material.
How does technology influence your music?
It’s great that technology has become available to everyone at affordable prices. It allows me to express my ideas more precisely and in more dimensions. With the advent of various audio and visual editing programs, phone camera and voice recorder, the creative process has become easier.
How has the music landscape changed in recent years?
Music has gone from the composer’s high control over the performer to a great deal of freedom for the performer within key boundaries.
Due to the large amount of improvisation, unfixed instrumentation, and approximate musical notation, the performer becomes a composer. Composers begin to work with non-professional musicians. There is a fusion of the arts taking place. The composer becomes a multi-artist. Professional musicians become multi-performers, actors, dancers. There is experimentation with space by placing musicians and sound objects in different parts of the room. The musicians descend from the stage and are placed among the audience. The composer invited the audience to interact with the musicians, influence their actions and be part of the piece. The audience becomes the performers. Performances appear outside the concert hall, in shopping centers, nightclubs and private parties. Art infiltrated everyday life, seeking to erase boundaries and merge with it. Composers begin to collaborate with scientists and programmers.
As technology allows composers to rehearse with musicians and discuss a planned event online, they have moved to the regions from expensive and crowded capitals. Institutions, festivals, and social constructs have lost their relevance, equating professional composers and amateurs.
How has the audience changed over the last years?
As part of the audience, I can say that due to the open access to a lot of information on the Internet, people have become very educated. With the huge flow of unfiltered information coming online, people have developed a new type of perception such as clip thinking. This has also influenced the way authors deliver information in order to express their idea as short as possible. Audience attention has become more expensive and insatiable. Scrolling through apps accustoms the brain to instant gratification while searching for information. This accelerates a person’s info metabolism, resulting in nothing remaining in the memory. Thus, neither Trier’s new movie nor flying to Mars becomes an event in this flow.
Online activities, such as visiting museums or courses, are becoming increasingly beneficial because they save travel time. If it’s a concert recording, you can rewind the tape or click on the beginning, golden ratio and end to catch the idea. Or watch a lecture at 2x speed and have complete control over the information coming into your head.
The world has already moved from an offline platform into new territory. It was as if we had just left the womb and moved into a new space. As long as the Internet has no clear restrictions, no code of law, no Digital Testament and no division into states like Facebook, Google, YouTube, it will be a zone of temporary equality. So Lady Gaga’s Instagram live broadcast may be less popular than the dog’s TikTok account. And when the rules are systematized, the restrictions, institutions, expertise, and the whole hierarchy that shapes our offline activity will appear in the online space.
What are the future trends in music?
Problems that prevent people from living often become trends because by highlighting them, we find solutions. Everyone can think about what worries them personally and start highlighting it.
I like that pre-Internet music of any historical, cultural, genre origin becomes ideologically compressed and automatically updated in the context of the Internet, which gives it new life. When making music for the Internet, one might think about how it will look not in a concert hall with armchairs, but from the phone screen of a viewer sitting in a closet. How it will sound with or without headphones.
The relevance of the offline world will not disappear, but it will become an appendage of the Internet and a renewed and exciting field for multisensory experiences. Gradually, virtual reality gadgets will become publicly available. The offline space will expand with the emergence of VR venues where artists can experiment with new technologies and the public can participate in these experiments.
What does new music need?
Academic systems of art education were born in a pre-Internet environment. The time has come to rethink these systems and to expand the research topics taking into account the emergence of new branches of human activity.
What is the basic conceptual idea behind multimedia music?
The idea is to make the impact on the audience more informative per unit of time. Thus, make the impression more intense by working with more channels of attention. Refresh the perception of music by mixing it with other art forms, especially digital, expand the compositional area beyond music, and experiment by combining independent arts together.
What are your favorite multimedia works?
I appreciate all of them.
How does multimedia composition differ from other types of academic music?
The fact is that multimedia music uses more tools and more modern tools to realize an idea.
What is a good musical composition for you?
If I have a task and I can get the necessary tools to accomplish it.
Selection of works created by Tatiana Gerasimenok
Photo
