Michal Nejtek.

Michal Nejtek (1977) has been emerging as one of the most remarkable composers of the young Czech generation. While still a student he won a number of prizes for composing and he drew a great deal of attention for his graduation piece at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague--the chamber opera Dementia Praecox on a story by S.I. Witkiewicz. Soon after graduation he obtained several prestigious commissions (Warsaw Autumn Festival 2001, Donaueschinger Musiktage 2002, De Vol-harding 2003). As an active pianist he has performed with the Agon Orchestra for example at the Warsaw Autumn Festival and the Wien Modern. He also works with Agon Orchestra as a composer and arranger. Agon regularly includes his pieces in their concerts, and in 2005 an entire concert of his works as part of the Marathon of New Music festival. A joint project by Agon and the legendary rock group Plastic People of the Universe, for which he wrote the arrangement, found favour with a wide audience. Michal Nejtek has also been expressing his talent in major stage forms and multimedia projects (Lamenti, Distress Sonata). His orchestral work Nuberg 05 written for the Berg Chamber Orchestra has been published on the CD HIS Voice Sampler III (see announcement in this issue). For more information go to www.musica.cz/nejtek.

Why did you decide to become a composer and what influence did the conservatory have on you? (Several other interesting composers graduated from the Teplice Conservatory when you did.)

It was more or less chance. I used to improvise and I wanted to it a more stable form, to fix it somehow. Composition had never been taught in Teplice and I have the feeling that I and Tomas Pospisil were the first to study it there. Prof. Buzek taught us composition with great emphasis on structure, but left us a great deal of freedom as far as developing out own musical idiom was concerned. I remember that he managed to really get inside my thinking and advise me on possible specific solution inside my micro-world. Otherwise my memories of the conservatory are basically romantic (although I actually teach there myself these days)--I met some very important gurus there, and went through several musical initiation experiences ...

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Despite all your classical music projects you still keep in contact with rock musicians (the group Vecicky--Little Thigs). What does it give you?

A certain normalcy. Composers ought not to live in the vacuum of their seminars, awards and analyses, and (at least in my view) they ought to integrate themselves into ordinary musical life. In any case I've always enjoyed rock'n'roll, it involves huge pleasure, energy, playing together, it's--to use Agon leader's Petr Kofron phrase--"being in sounding music".

What is your opinion of the trend to integrate elements of rock (and jazz) music into the work of the "classical" composer? Are the reasons for it aesthetic or sociological?

Maybe both. Today the influence of what's called "non-art music" (a ghastly term by the way) just can't be avoided. When I was growing up Michael Jackson and Miles Davis were much more important to me than Kabalevsky and the other composers of instructive piano pieces. These lead me to one clear conclusion: these things are an integral part of my musical consciousness (perhaps even my unconscious) and it would be pointless and false to try to eliminate them. On the other hand, it would be nonsense to try and use them in the interests of a more lucrative career. It doesn't work like that, and it's always obvious.

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This issue links up with the question of opening up to a broader public. I have in mind things like Agon's joint projects with The Plastic People of the Universe. Doesn't it all remind you a little of the Red Army Choir accompanying the Leningrad Cowboys?

No. Our first joint concert (December 2002) was still a little hectic, and we were still looking for a shared language, but as time went by I discovered that the two groups (chamber orchestra and rock band) could be combined better and more deeply than is usually the case in projects like this. The main problem was to discover the things in which the PPU were at home and to exploit. What's more, Agon and the PPU are not polar opposites. The members of the PPU can read music and play from it, and on the other hand the members of Agon are also part of all kinds of rock groups and know how to improvise. And so when in one part of the Passion Play (piece by PPU) I had Agon member Tomas Cistecky and Vratislav Brabenec from PPU playing wild solos side by side, you wouldn't have known which came from which world. Our latest project, which Brabenec and me are preparing for next year ("a train opera" in Lysa nad Labem) essentially involves the dissolution of identities because Agon will represent a station brass band and will sing, and the Plastic People will play trad Country and Western.

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In your last orchestral work (Nuberg 05) I can hear the inspiration of "remixes" transferred into a symphonic score. What do you think of current trends involving recycling of the music of the past?

I don't really know. I don't like the idea that it's no longer worth trying anything really new, but on the other hand here and there the approach throws up something inspirational. When I think about it properly, then of course basically this recycling isn't anything so new either--the recycling of previous music is something that has always gone on in the composer's mind, and so today it's just that we help ourselves out in the face of this huge quantity of information by using computers. It isn't something that I have a special interest in, but I admit that some ideas (mainly contextual and stage) fascinate me--for example an ensemble performing on the podium and from somewhere the sound of an orchestra stealing into their music, playing fragments from the following pieces on the programme--as if the time phases were overlapping.

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Are you sceptical about the modernist search for the new (style, idiom, material)? Isn't the aesthetics of remix precisely what is new?

I'm probably sceptical about the search for the scientific and exact (inventing a "new" system, tone material) but I have no doubt that something can come into being by other routes (across styles, by the accidental meeting of elements, media, musicians). And I would reduce the meaning of the word "new" from "objectively new" (for the world) to just "new for me".

Would you admit to any specific influences in terns of style and ideas? (New York downtown composers, Agon composers and suchlike.)

Certainly. At every phase in my writing something has been fundamentally important for me, whether a piece, a person, the experience of a concert. To name them all would take far too long, but if you like I can mention a few at random: the first Agon album, Zappa, Cage, Smolka's Euforium, meeting you, Goebbels ...

Do you have any dream?

Yes, to have a band even better than those I work with now, full of dynamism, full of brilliant and committed people who play empathically to one goal, one expression, but at the same time there play comes out of many roots. I'm a little afraid that the idea of having a band like that in the Czech Republic today is Utopian. Nonetheless I shall keep working on it. So that at the next interview all I would be telling you about pleasure in playing and pleasure in work.

RELATED ARTICLE

announcement

mlada krev young blood

YOUNG BLOOD--The Music of Young Czech Composers 

Michal Nejtek: Nuberg 05, Miroslav Srnka: String Quartet no. 3, Ondrej Adamek: Strange Night in Daylight, Milos Orson Stedron: Prosper and Gamble, Marketa Dvorakova: Waters, Petr Bakla: Wind Quintet, Martin Hybler: Echoes of Trees and Rocks, Marko Ivanovic: Rock's Goin' On?

The Czech Music Information Centre has just published the CD Young Blood as a representative sampler of the work of the young generation of Czech composers. We are offering this CD free of charge to all existing and new subscribers to the magazine Czech Music. If you are interested in the CD, please send us your request at [e-mail] or at the postal address HIS o.p.s, Besedni 3, 118 00 Prague 1 Czech Republic, and we shall be plesed to send you the CD. It comes with a booklet in English.

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