Artist

Admin

Singer

Soprano

Lydia Brotherton

Conductor

Petr Kotík

Stage director

Katharina Schmitt

Set designer

Pavel Svoboda

Lighting designer

Zuzana Režná

Video designer

Bass

Markus Hollop

Basse

Mezzo-soprano

Lena Haselmann

Mezzo

Orchestra

Ostravská banda

Ostrava Center for New Music

Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures

Ostrava

Czech Republic

Hlubina Coal Mine

Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures: Aventures, nouvelles aventures Ligeti

Public

Adventures and New Adventures

Approved

In my vocal or vocal-instrumental compositions Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures, I have used an artificial language. Such a made-up language serves as a kind of wrapping that contains real language at its core. All human affects, turned into rituals by conventional social behavior such as agreement or disagreement, dominance or submission, honesty or deceit, arrogance, disobedience, even the merest hints of irony hiding behind apparent consent or, indeed, admiration hiding behind apparent contempt – all of that, and more, can be precisely expressed in an asemantic, emotional artificial language. The “text,” given in phonetic alphabet, had not been there before the music; rather, both took form at the same time, meaning that the text itself is music, a composition made purely of speech sounds. This “speech sound composition” is based on imagined relationships between different modes of affective behavior, not on an abstract blueprint. Technically speaking, there is a phonetic system of grouped speech sounds and their changes that play a role when the piece is performed, but these are primarily chosen according to their capacity to evoke emotions in a form that is akin to speech. The composition, therefore, does not “set text to music” in the conventional sense. Rather, it can be said that music mediates the text and vice versa. Music does not provide “accompaniment” to the vocal element. The instrumental parts are written so as to flesh out or underline the speech sounds: we see phonetic composition affecting the very realm of instrumental music. This heightened emotionality, along with the body language and facial expressions that stem from it, can steer, despite its pure musicality, close to imaginary stage action as defined through affect rather than content. Listening, we experience an “opera” of sorts, with adventurous episodes undergone by imaginary characters on an imaginary stage. That is to say that our experience is opposite to our previous experience of opera: the stage and protagonists are evoked by music in the first place. This is not a score created for an opera; the “opera” takes place inside the music itself.
- György Ligeti

English

Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures by Ligeti, From (2016/2016), Directed by Katharina Schmitt,, Conductor Petr Kotík, Hlubina Coal Mine, Ostrava, Czech Republic

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