Transparent Sound New Music Festival Opening Concert

The Greek expression anamorphosis refers to pictures distorted beyond recognition, which become intelligible only from a certain point of view, for example, through some sort of mirror. Among the works performed at the Transparent Sound opening concert, the most significant new music festival during the winter season, is a piece by Judit Varga (teacher at the academies of music in Vienna and Budapest) bearing exactly this name. At the same time, an understanding of the phenomenon of anamorphosis may also be of assistance in comprehending the other works in this concert. One of today’s most original composers, Ashley Fure, who took her doctorate at Harvard, outlines a musical image of Parkinson’s disease in her piece Therefore I Was, depicting how the failure of nervous system communication between the operating conscious and the operating body causes a distortion of personality. Works by young Polish composer Wojtek Blecharz and Italian Marco Stroppa, former head of the research section of IRCAM in Paris, play with the spatiality of music, thereby distorting the identity of instruments. Brian Feerneyhough is the leading exponent of the late 20th century’s so-called ‘new complexity’. In an almost unplayably difficult solo bass clarinet work entitled Time and Motion Study I, he tinkers with the modification of the sense of time of the receiver. Ensemble Interface, which perform the musical works, were established in Frankfurt in 2009, carrying on the heritage of the renowned Ensemble Modern.