Ondrej Adamek: I enjoy working with a simple idea.

In the music of Ondrej Adamek (*1979) the influences of distant ethnic cultures are organically integrated with the exploitation of the most modern composition techniques and refinements of sound peculiar above all to contemporary French music. We talked about these and other issues in the following interview, which introduces one of the most striking representatives of the coming generation of composers in the Czech Republic. Although Adamek currently lives in Paris, where he is completing his advanced studies, and has been collecting international awards and, quite naturally, is orientated to wider European contexts, in my view his music still retains a certain specific "Czech" identity. This is neither good nor bad in itself--it is simply the case.

Tell us how you came to study in France after a period at the Prague Academy.

Immediately I got to HAMU (the Music Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague), I started to look around for possibilities of studying abroad for a time. It was a great piece of luck that one student from Paris had applied to go on exchange to HAMU in the framework of the Erasmus Programme. I first went to Paris in 2000, and my three-month stay there convinced me that it was a very stimulating cultural centre and I had a great deal to learn there. I prolonged my stay as long as I could and after a year's pause I did the entrance exams for fulltime studies at the Conservatoire Superieur. During my studies there in Paris I then came to the conclusion that the professors were too concerned with details and weren't addressing the issues of the basic conception of pieces, the basic idea behind them. So I applied for another study trip somewhere else abroad. I went to Goteborg in Sweden for three months. Here the spirit was completely different. Now I'm back in Paris in my sixth year. I finished the four-year cycle and I'm carrying on with the higher level course. I have a completely free programme, and I'm devoting myself entirely to composing.

Do you plan to stay in France when you finish your course?

I don't know if I'll stay in France. That depends on a lot of things. Most of all on my private life. It would be worth just for the sheer number of concerts of contemporary music. What's more, I spend most of my time holed up at home and concerts are the only opportunities I have for being in contact with the music world.

Has there been some fundamental turning point in your composing since you've been in France? What are the most important things that you've learned and got to know there?

I think there was a big shift in my work when I gradually managed to integrate the new things I had learned in France into my music, and at the same time I was able to continue in my Slavonic approach with a certain detachment. In Paris many of my dreams were fulfilled. I learned how to work in an electro-acoustic studio. The school gave me the chance to present and record ensemble pieces at very high quality, and I gained experience with players and many conductors. I learned the most in orchestration lessons. I discovered the charm of the orchestra. I improved a great deal in terms of careful work with detail, refinement, work with sound and also in work with "virtual space" in instrumental music. I learned how to work in a concentrated way and elaborate scores in full. In France the emphasis is on detail, sound, craft. Often what is lacking is a clear thought, idea, form. I enjoy working with a simple idea, which I try to take to the limit. The French often talk about naivete, simplicity or predictability in music as a fault, but I work with these things deliberately. It's something I believe I brought from Bohemia.

The simple initial ideas of the kind you mention can be very different with different composers. Can you tell us something more about your own?

It seems to be very hard to maintain and develop a certain idea right to the end, and not to abandon it after the first few bars. The original ideas behind my compositions tend to be partly a matter of sound and partly from outside music. In the piece Sinuous Words it was a desire to transpose the spoken word into instrumental music in a way that would make the instruments speak, whisper, utter, that would shake them up. At the same time I was creating a certain intimate world then drowned out by an extrovert, exaggerated, almost menacing merriment. In the piece Shiny or Shy I was trying to transfer the sound of the gamelan, the spectrum and vibration of gongs to the orchestra, and to work with contrasting patterns inspired by music from Bali and with tempo changes. The idea of a delicate world overwhelmed by violent inroads crept in here as well. The piece Rapid Eye Movements for string quartet and electronics is based on continually pulsating semi-quavers in a 90 tempo and a breathing sound evoked by the instruments.

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As my graduation work at the Conservatoire in Paris I wrote a piece for three voices and 35 instruments on a text of my own entitled Jardin perdu [The Lost Garden]. I wrote the text at the same time as the first music sketches and the text later dictated the form of the composition. The theme is the garden as an ideal place and also as the chamber of the soul. The garden is undermined by various different sources of interference. The first are the weeds growing up inside the garden, the second is a crowd trampling it, and the third is the corrosion of the garden. At the end the garden is bulldozed by machines. In the piece I used various forms of singing, an intimate even voice, and fast rap declamations, and I also used a sixteenth-tone piano, a harp tuned to quarter-tones, a sample with snatches of voice and the singers' breath, a lot of percussion instruments, like the chromatic octave of Java gongs, two octaves of cow bells, 3 octaves of boo-bams, a vibraphone tuned a quarter tone higher ... It's a piece tailor made for the performance possibilities here.

In the piece for large orchestra that I'm working on recently, the initial idea is of endless fall. For the whole 16 minutes of music it actually contains just descending glissandos created out of many layered fine lines. I am playing with different timbre possibilities, with the changeable depth of space and also with the paradoxical glissando--whether endless or the kind where the listener won't be able to tell it if it rising or falling. Like when a painter paints a line leading upwards with his brush, but the colour is flowing directly downwards.

In my pieces I also work with the metaphor of mechanism, machines and the mechanical, uncontrollable technological forces.

Various different influences can be traced in your work. So for example that transcription of gong sounds into the orchestra clearly has a link with spectralism, and in my view the overall impression given by your music aligns it pretty clearly with the French stylistic and technological (IRCAM) circle. On the other hand, in that "conceptual" quality, that concentration on one idea, one might detect influences from the American avant-garde. How aware of these and other influences are you, and how do you try (or maybe you don't try?) to escape them and find a way to your own distinctive style and originality?

It's my feeling that originality, just like the spiritual content of a work, is something that the artist shouldn't be consciously concerned with. Escaping from influences it the last thing I would be worried about. The truth is that the analysis of sound as a source of pitch-based structures is one of the typical techniques of the spectralists (especially Murail and Grisey), i.e. composers active at the IRCAM. The endless glissando is a phenomenon for which Jean-Claud Risset is famous, once again IRCAM. I am not afraid of either French or Czech or American influences, but the French often have a very academic or theoretical approach to composing, while what interests me is what brings something strange, unusual, direct, animal, full of energy.

I would like to look at the question of influences from yet another point of view. In your music I also hear inspirations from ethnic music, mainly Asian (and I have the feeling that you don't hide this yourself). Can you tell us more about this? How do you treat these influences, so that they don't become just superficial exoticism?

That's the whole question--how to do it so it doesn't become a matter of superficial exoticism ... In Sinuous Words I work with a voice from New Caledonia, in Kapky, kapicky [Drops, Droplets] I work with the trumpets of Tibetan monks, and in Shiny or Shy with the gamelan, and I'm planning to work on Japanese influences. For me music is one great diverse world. I don't feel any need to observe any kind of boundaries and not do I feel bound by some kind of loyalty to western culture. I work with elements from "different musics" so long as I have a reason to do it, a concept. The feeling that music is one everywhere gives me new possibilities and freedom of choice. I don't see it as necessary to study the historical, sociological or religious contexts of a musical element I choose as part of the material for a new piece. But I always think hard about the need to "take from elsewhere". I always try to find a new personal way of treating these elements, I'm not just looking for some cheap beauty to stick on somewhere. I always look for a new technique and sensitive integration of the elements. With the music of other cultures I'm often interested in its more general character, in energy, colour, temperament, movement ...

You have won prizes in quite a number of composing competitions. Apart from the financial benefits, do these successes have a positive effect in opening doors for you?

Most competitions are for young composers, and usually for compositions they have written but haven't yet managed to get performed--i.e. for composers who need the competitions most. I am gradually growing out of this category and I only send pieces to competitions very rarely. For me competitions were important as encouragement and mainly as small financial injections. Only a few, for example two last year, have developed into new projects--two orchestral pieces.

By the way, is writing for orchestra really as seductive as is usually claimed? Why do you need so many instruments? Isn't a composer better off with chamber musicians who are truly interested in the music they play?

The orchestra is an absolutely wonderful invention of European culture that has no parallel. Musically it is something completely different to a chamber ensemble. In the first place I am fascinated by the way it still exists today. The discipline and perfection it requires from every player doesn't correspond to the European mentality at all (you can find something similar in gamelan or in the Beijing Opera). And then, an orchestra isn't just a multiplication of instruments. Acoustically and psychologically it functions in a completely different way to smaller musical ensembles. I'll give you a simple example: I can write pp--crescendo poco a poco--ff--sffz pppp subito for solo violin, but that doesn't work in an orchestra. The group of violins would play just a variously coloured mezzopiano. You have to compose it into layers, to divide the role between other instruments, to add them to each other for the crescendo, to underline the sffz using another group and to colour the fade away in the pppp in yet other instruments. Everything has to be exaggerated. At the same time this single wave of energy moves across the podium in a frame of many metres. And that fascinates me. Rehearsals with an orchestra are limited in terms of time, and it's always a matter of just a few hours for one piece. So the piece must be written in such a way that it works from the very beginning. Looking for new colours by using special performance techniques is quite risky. On the other hand, it is exciting to look for new colours using unusual combinations of established modes of play. Not long ago I saw Eotvos conducting the French Radio Orchestra, Debussy's Images. It worked unbelievably well in terms of colour and space. Play with the strings, the first violin solo, the string tutti, the first row of first violins, the first two rows of violas, it was enormously playful and imaginative work. I am fascinated by the contrast between instruments that shine out directly (for example trumpets, oboes, clarinets and flutes in the highest registers) and instruments that work as background, shadow, resonance (horns, clarinets and flutes in the middle and lower register). I could give you many other similar examples. Maybe a lot of people will find these ideas banal, but they strike me with new force every time I hear an orchestral concert.

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As regards work with space: do you try to underline the spatial aspect of your pieces in some way, do you work with space deliberately (for example in chamber music as well)? Do you draw inspiration for example from the virtual three-dimensionality commonly used in electronic music?

Space has existed in instrumental music since the invention of the piano pedal. In the orchestra the sound of the pedal was replaced by the sustained tones of French horns and woodwind. Space isn't something that everyone notices in music, and not everyone works with it consciously. Just as in painting, music can be entirely two-dimensional, or it can have three dimensions. I happen to be interested in working with space, because it contributes atmosphere, colour, diversity, nostalgia ... I'll give you an example. Suppose I have a musical object that I am gradually shifting into the background. This can be done by working with sustained tones in pianissimo, with smooth registers, by reducing the high frequencies, with echo, with repeated notes or with tremolo, but you can also work with micro-intervals and resonant instruments (the piano, harp, metal percussion instruments and so on). In electro-acoustic music, three-dimensionality is something taken for granted, perhaps like instrumental range in instrumental music. Space is created partly by the system of having several speakers (stereo, quadrophony, octophony, 5.1 etc.) and partly by using artificial echo, delay, dynamic envelopes, registers or filtering (when the higher frequencies are reduced the music gets further away, and sound that is very rich in the highest frequencies sounds as it is directly on the speaker membrane). While in electronic music the three-dimensionality is virtual, it is at the same time more or less absolute, while in instrumental music we are talking more of a metaphor, which brings another poetic dimension, and this is what I find particularly interesting.

Do you have any idea of the direction your music will take in future? What do you dream about, what attracts you?

In every new composition I unconsciously take a bite of something that at time I use only on the margins, but which at the same time opens up a new path for future compositions. In the future I want to take these "nibbled" directions as far as they will go: constant obsessive pulsation leading to a trance state; the construction of unbroken, uninterrupted forms, for example twenty minutes of gradation; work with changes of tempo, with halting, acceleration, with a mechanical and an animal energy of tempo; new orchestral colours such that the ear cannot make out their origin.

Ondrej Adamek (*1979 in Prague) studied composition at the Academy of Performing Arts (AMU) in Marek Kopelent's class and at the Conservatoire National Superieur in Paris, as well as taking part in different composition courses to study under a number of well-known composers. In addition to his instrumental, vocal and electro-acoustic work he also works with contemporary choreographers. His compositions have won awards at many international competitions (Prix des Editions Musicales Europeennes, Brandenburg Composers Prize, Metamorphoses, IMEB-Bourges, the Hungarian Radio Prize and others). He currently lives in Paris. You can listen to his piece Strange Night in Daylight on the CD "Young Blood", which we send free of charge to subscribers to Czech Music quarterly on request ([e-mail]).

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KATERINA KNEZIKOVA | soprano

JANA STEFACKOVA | mezzo-soprano 

JANA SYKOROVA | mezzo-soprano

Narrator: DANIEL BAMBAS

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Choirmaster: PETR FIALA

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