Wading in the stream and strolling in the meadows: interview with Krystof Maratka.

Only a few Czech composers have managed to make a successful career in France. The most obvious examples are Antonin Rejcha and Bohuslav Martinu, but recently there has been ever more talk of a young Czech composer who has been living in Paris since 1994 and has already attracted attention on many occasions not just in France but also at festivals elsewhere in Europe, in the United States and Australia. Krystof Maratka was born in Prague in 1972 into a family with strong cultural interests and traditions. He studied piano and composition in Prague at the conservatory and the Academy of Performing Arts). He went to France first on a French government scholarship, studied at IRCAM and won further scholarships. He also married in France and works there today as a freelance composer. He has received commissions from festivals including Festival Presences, Dresdener Musiktage, and the Korsholm Music Festival in Finland. His pieces have been played by leading performers like Patrick Gallois, Michel Lethiec, Franz Helmersohn, Gustavo Romero, Raphael Oleg and Vladimir Mendelssohn, by ensembles such as the Talich Quartet, Quatuor Ysaie, Quatuor Kandinsky, the Mozart Piano Quartet, Ensemble Fa, and the Grieg Trio, and by orchestras including the Orchestre de Radio France, the St. Petersburg Camerata, the Brno State Philharmonic, or the FOK Prague Symphony Orchestra. He has also written a piece as a commission for the Czech Season in France and one of his pieces was played at this year's Prague Spring Festival.

Your piece for clarinet and orchestra premiered at the Prague Spring was surprising for its synthetic conception. What led you to folk music and non-European musical culture and its integration into a contemporary composing idiom?

Folk music is a living form that reflects reality and through tradition captures time, and so the mystery of existence as well. For as long as I can remember this fact has bothered and excited me, drawing me towards folk. If we have the chance (thanks to professional recordings) to enter the world of ethnic music, we find an ocean of fascinating kinds of musical expression, so diverse, contrasting and structurally complex that we realise that "western" classical music forms a mere fragment of the whole.

In my clarinet concerto "LUMINARIUM" I wanted to give up my own initiative as much as possible and accept the particular musical fragment as it is itself formed by rhythm, harmony, tempo, dynamics and do on, since the mere fact of transcription for orchestra is a recasting and a deformation. The piece is composed in the spirit of a documentary film that follows different cultures independently of each other and tries to illuminate their characteristic signs, the distinctive identity of different kinds of music and so of different peoples.

In the piece this synthesis results in the intel-penetration of atonal music, tonal music, modal, pentatonic, micro-interval and so on, and their "universal" location then naturally shifts the different musical aesthetics to a single level and relativises them by juxtaposition.

Numerous commissions and performances are a sign that your music enjoys considerable success in France, but in terms of style it is not part of the French musical mainstream. How would you characterise your position as a composer in France?

Let's underline the word mainstream. It means that one form of musical thinking (which is neither better nor worse, and doesn't represent the majority anyway) is in fashion and dominates certain music institutions that have some kind of power and media impact on the public, i. e. a few contemporary music festivals, a few ensembles that present the pieces of selected composers and so on.

But that is just one side of the coin. There are also many organisers and institutions who don't have a clear and often dogmatic attitude towards the music of contemporaries, "non"-contemporary music festivals or just Music festivals, musicians, conductors and various funds and foundations, and now there's also the Presences Festival in Paris, probably the biggest French festival of contemporary music, which is becoming very democratic, and so on. The situation is paradoxical, then. My pieces are not in the hands of so-called "specialists" on contemporary music, but in the hands of simply and unique musicians, who stand up for it. I find this attitude natural, and it strikes me as healthy.

What's your experience when it comes to comparing the two music cultures, Czech and French, from the point of view of the composer?

The difference comes from the difference in national character.

France is a country where many cultures mingle. This encourages a certain openness and courage for confrontation with the unknown. It can also be a temptation to competitiveness, a predatory attitude and careerism, but it can nonetheless be a motor force for seeking out and discovering new techniques, methods and forms, although then again that sometimes makes for excessive conceptualism, an exaggerated need for theoretical backing and compartmentalisation. People have a strong sense of responsibility, they're serious but sometimes too self-important. And also they talk too much.

In Czecho what's important is a quiet life and easygoing approach. There's a far freer and informal atmosphere, which is a temptation to slowness, not really pushing things through to the finish and to delays. Czech humour, irony, scepticism ... is a unique spice of life, but in destructive form it can result in lack of genuine seriousness, trivialising important things, irresponsibility and philistinism. Then of course there is the fact that there's just one people here and one culture, which means a tendency to introversion, ignorance, and fear of the "big" world, but on the other hand creates a unique cultural inheritance and tradition that sustains unity and a sense of a whole moving through time. In France I feel as if I'm in a metropolis, which offers a mass of possibilities, new discoveries, events, and spurs to action. In Czecho I'm in the woods, wading in the stream and strolling in the meadows where I at last feel a fresh wins, a kind of authentic inclination to nature and the foundation of things.

You've had the chance to work with outstanding performers. What does contact with performers mean to you and how does it affect to your work?

In my eyes an outstanding performer isn't just a musician who is a master on his instrument. He is its soul and creative imagination, and so shares something with me. The composer and performer meet at the level of fantasy and imagination and that is where you find the key to most of my pieces. To bring music to birth I need a musician who is himself born with the music, who regenerates his musical experience with new discoveries, thirsts for exploration, and realises that in their time the pieces that are "repertoire" today were once contemporary, new and so unconventional music. In my experience it's the performer who has the real executive power over new pieces. He's someone who can push to get them performed and persuade people that they are worthwhile, and so we need to ensure that a creative approach to music is cultivated in schools and conservatories.

For me when I came to Paris (1994) one of the pleasant discoveries was this hunger for knowledge on the part of musicians.

What are your plans for the future? Do you have a particular dream?

At the moment I'm working on a composition called "OTISK" ["PRINT'], a 30-minute piece for large symphony orchestra which follows traces of the origin of musical instruments, above all from the early stone age. It is a fascinating view of the cradle of music. The piece is a co-production commission from a number of orchestras and institutions, which is interesting from the financial point of view for the organiser and from my point of view because it will be played by different ensembles in several different places. Currently the institutions involved in the project are the Toronto Philharmonic (its principal conductor Peter Oundjian is the initiator of the project), the Caramoor Festival in the USA, the St. Louis Philharmonic, the Colorado Philharmonic and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. My great wish is that one of the Czech orchestras would join in the project and so the piece would get played in what for me is still my home. I don't know how to explain, exactly, but despite my travels it's here in Central Europe that I feel at home, and I'm a Czech to the marrow of my bones.