Muzyka Strun

We invite you to a unique solo recital pre­sent­ing the orig­i­nal music of Woj­ciech Błaże­jczyk. We will hear sounds at the inter­sec­tion of min­i­mal­ism, the avant-garde and eth­nic music.

The com­pos­er per­forms live mate­r­i­al from the Fry­deryk Award-win­ning album Muzy­ka strun — exper­i­men­tal com­po­si­tions writ­ten for unusu­al string instru­ments: zithers, dul­cimers, auto­harp, yangqin, val­i­ha, crwth, psaltery, ban­dura, guzheng and ban­jo. What mat­ters most is the sound of the strings them­selves — often pre­pared, set into vibra­tion by mal­lets, fin­gers, a bow, met­al rods and oth­er objects. By apply­ing non-stan­dard sound-pro­duc­tion tech­niques and prepa­ra­tions, the com­pos­er coax­es entire­ly unex­pect­ed, mag­i­cal­ly vibrant tim­bres and tex­tures from the strings, dis­turb­ing the physics of vibra­tion to some degree. 

“Like Pythago­ras, Błaże­jczyk inves­ti­gates how strings behave: he short­ens them, pre­pares them using var­i­ous objects, sets them vibrat­ing, exper­i­ment­ing with uncon­ven­tion­al meth­ods of sound pro­duc­tion, plac­ing a con­tact micro­phone as close as pos­si­ble — which, like an acoustic micro­scope, allows every nuance of the sound of a vibrat­ing string to be heard. Dri­ven by the curios­i­ty of a dis­cov­er­er of extra­or­di­nary sounds, he does not stop there; acoustic research into sound and the behav­iour of a vibrat­ing string becomes an occa­sion for philosophis­ing about the world” — writes Moni­ka Pasiecznik. 

The con­cert is accom­pa­nied by the inter­ac­tive sound instal­la­tion Struno­fo­nia, in which the instru­ments are dis­played in a spe­cial­ly pre­pared space filled with sounds from loud­speak­ers — sounds of the indi­vid­ual string instru­ments com­posed into tex­tures of a med­i­ta­tive char­ac­ter. Vis­i­tors may touch the instru­ments and pluck their strings, there­by join­ing the son­ic struc­ture of the instal­la­tion. Such an instal­la­tion took place dur­ing the Warsza­wska Jesień fes­ti­val in 2022 at the State Ethno­graph­ic Muse­um in Warsaw. 

The Hash­tag Lab Con­tem­po­rary Music Space is co-financed by the Cap­i­tal City of War­saw.
The media patron of the Hash­tag Lab Con­tem­po­rary Music Space is POLMIC​.PL.

Co-financed from the funds of the Min­is­ter of Cul­ture and Nation­al Her­itage drawn from the Cul­ture Pro­mo­tion Fund — a state ear­marked fund — with­in the pro­gramme “Com­po­si­tion­al Com­mis­sions”, imple­ment­ed by the Nation­al Insti­tute of Music and Dance.

Tickets

40 PLN