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Michal Rataj: building a visual world without pictures.

Article Excerpt
Michal Rataj moves with the same ease in the field of composing "classical" music (although entirely contemporary in idiom), and the world of electronic technologies and the kind of concepts of music that go far beyond the writing of black dots on paper. Because Michal is also a radio producer of many years' standing and an erudite musicologist, we talked not just about his own art, but also about the phenomenon of radio and various theoretical themes.

Your dissertation for your degree in composition at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague teas entitled "Pierre Boulez's ... explosante-fixe ... as a duel between the acoustic and the electronic". As a composer intensely interested in creating both instrumental pieces and electroacoustic (EA) music, is this a kind of stress that you experience yourself? Or does it no longer apply to "your generation"?

It definitely isn't a matter of generations, and couldn't be. On the contrary--mine is already the third generation to be successively handing on a certain continuity of experience in the field of music and technology. In my dissertation (and other similar texts that I wrote before), I was concerned primarily with analysing the positive and negative interactions between music and technology--to try and get a deeper understanding of how various types of experience with new technologies and media can concretely affect work with instruments and the human voice, how what are today generally available analytical tools can benefit composers by casting new light on the microscopic level of sound, how to get a better understanding of what is going on inside sound from the point of view of composition, aesthetics, the conceptual level and so on. These are questions that I probably kicked off myself at the time when I was writing the text and that have become more urgent and intense since then. And--perhaps paradoxically--the more I've been glued to monitors in recent times, the happier I am when I can write a purely acoustic score, even if the music is very much determined by computer experiences or computer-assisted sound analysis. For example, my last orchestral thing Raining (Inside) wouldn't have worked without analysis of the rhythm of raindrops and their transformation, in terms of frequency and rhythm, into a piano part. Well--it's just occurred to me that the stress you mentioned is just a sort of vibration, and as one person close to my heart says: "anything that doesn't vibrate isn't strong".

We are touching on the typical tautology of today's "cutting edge" technologies--i.e. that their products are often good old mimesis in fact. Nevertheless, the music usually doesn't come into existence just by the simulation (for example instrumentally) of analysed sound. I would be interested to hear about the most important basic principles of your--let's say--musical syntax (what is material for you, and what you then do with it) and your aesthetics (what fascinates you, the kind of expression that your music is aiming for).

It's definitely not a question of simulation from either side. As far as material is concerned, recently it's been very important for me to listen--to really "listen in"--to the sounds around me, to discover by active listening what we otherwise just experience as insignificant background, to learn from sounds, to observe how they behave, the kind of structure they have, their characteristic internal movements, their rhythm, how their timbres change in space. Maybe one reason for this is my close contact with radio--my many years of radio experience refining the ear to catch acoustic detail and at the same time giving me a certain awareness of the importance of the meaning of sound. I don't at all mean programmatic music of something similar; I mean that probably it is quite important for me in music to work with a certain narrativity, work with semantic aspects of sounds, stylise them and recontextualise them. Recently I've noticed various people talking about stories in connection with my music and this quite pleases me; I don't think music is some kind of pure abstract essence. The things that musique concrete has brought into compositional thinking and that are very much associated

with the conceptual world of radio are things I final very appealing: the notion of building what you might call abstract sound stories in which there is enough room for the audience to listen actively and for each listener to be able to enter the sound story for himself, to establish an internal dialogue with it.

You seem to regard sound as something that is in its own way alive, something that has its specific expressions and whims like a living organism. Are sounds that are acoustic ("natural") and sounds that are electronically generated equal for you in this respect? And what is your attitude to electronic deformations of acoustic sounds--the "domestication of wild sounds" or "abuse of sounds"? From this point of view isn't the "tearing away of sounds from their natural environment" the very basis of musique concrete? What are the consequences in terms of aesthetics?

Yes, organism is probably quite a good word here. I don't want it to be too out of touch with reality, nor do I want to get involved in some way-out theoretical constructs. But the...