This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the composer Kazimierz Serocki, a luminary of the 20th century Polish musical avant-garde.
For me, Serocki is a composer who has been influential in musical sound and in musical devices. To demonstrate Serocki’s influence on my own creative work as a composer and my own interest in making sound qualities as form-creating element, I present a brief overview of his brilliant orchestral work Symphonic Frescoes (1964) - one of the first examples in his oeuvre of “composing with sound colors”.
Read moreAny composer or musician who is driven to use a compositional approach that integrates the ecological and who deals with the external world as part of their creative work is trustworthy only when writing about sounds that they have directly experienced and intimately known.
I have always gone directly to the source when recording a sonic environment. For this reason, when I combine real-world acoustic environments into the musical landscapes I compose, the authenticity of myself as being the earwitness to a specific biological community or location has been clearly established.
The Activity of Recording Environmental Sounds Means Being Inside the Act of Listening
Wandering the temperate forest, I like to use the microphone the way a physician uses the stethoscope. With my microphone acting as a resonator, I search for intensified sonic worlds made by the forest, listening to sounds and vibrations in a quest to discover what the human eye alone cannot see.
Read moreFor several years I have been building a portfolio of musical works in which the physical form and external structure of specific leaf shapes and leaf arrangements are traced onto music paper. On every score, lying inside the borders of each distinctive leaf formation are hand-drawn elements of musical notation, wordings, poems, numbers and abstract shapes. These leaf pieces are extensions of my research in music composition, acoustic ecology and ecomusicology, and each one of these graphic scores holds an individual place in my personal ‘composer’ glossary of leaf morphology.
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