W poszukiwaniu Rzeczydźwięku (In search of the Thingssound) - Małgorzata Kazińska, Tomasz Skweres

Working on a piece inspired by exhibits from the Museum of Warsaw and the script by Małgorzata Kazińska is an interesting challenge for me, as it is quite different from work on a composition to be performed in the traditional concert hall context and addressed primarily to an adult audience.

On the one hand, I strive to use the same kind of musical language, taking into account a wide spectrum of forms of reception affected by the subjective perception of time, the listener’s emotions, and reactions to melodic progressions. My language makes use of a characteristic type of harmonic expression, based on the relative tensions created by the various intervals. On the other hand, my music appeals in a simple, emotional fashion to the youngest audience, to the child’s extremely sensitive imagination. In the creative process I thus pay special attention to contrasts and brief acoustic illustrations based on associations, rather than to large-scale dramatic development.

My composition thus consists of numerous brief musical numbers corresponding to individual exhibits found at the Museum of Warsaw. It combines traditional notation with partly improvised sections, thus leaving much freedom to the performers who will guide the audience on this musical museum visit. The work is essentially based on and characterised by a focus on the performer–listener relation, with special attention paid to the youngest audience, both in classic stage / concert passages and in those sections where the audience actively cocreates the musical whole. To me as a composer, the most interesting aspect of this task is cocreating the work with the director: how to preserve the structural unity of the musical numbers and at the same time allow for a flexible organisation of those numbers to create a musical museum visit, one made most attractive and educationally valuable for the children. 

Tomasz Skweres