Music (Hi)stories. Anton Svetlichny, Fyodor Lednev, MCME

Neural networks, digital archives, and internet memes feature in the world premiere of Anton Svetlichny’s stand-up concert, conducted by Fyodor Lednev.

Programme

Anton Svetlichny (b. 1982)
Music (Hi)stories, 2025
World premiere
Commissioned by GES-2 House of Culture

In his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, the American art critic Clement Greenberg wrote that it was typical for poetry and painting in the twentieth century to “derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in” and to focus on “the moments themselves of poetic conversion, rather than on experience to be converted into poetry.” The structural analogue of this trend in the music of the twenty-first century is a new conceptualism. However, whereas, in painting, attention to the artist’s own means of expression led to the birth of abstraction, in music—an art form that is abstract by definition—the opposite occurs: focus on method and material leads to extreme concreteness. A meta-position in relation to the production of music and its expressive techniques is achieved by insertion into the musical fabric of commentary texts and storytelling—the very “talk about music” that the Romantic era judged impossible and useless. This, precisely, is the structure of works by such composers as Trond Reinholdsten, Matthew Shlomowitz, and also Johannes Kreidler, whose productions were featured in a concert earlier this year as part of the Music (Hi)stories programme at GES-2.

Performed by

Fyodor Lednev conductor

Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble (MCME)

Illustration: Evgenia Tut

Anton Svetlichny has devoted much time to the analysis of historical and contemporary musical landscapes in his articles and lectures of recent years. The world premiere of his work Music Hi(stories) continues the conversation that has been underway in the GES-2 concert programme since January 2025. In this piece, the composer proposes shifting talk about music to the sphere of “stand-up.” The author’s monologue will touch on topics of concern to Svetlichny and his contemporary colleagues, from deadlines, creative block, and the politics of style to neural networks, digital archives, and internet memes. Music Hi(stories) is also a catalogue of unrealised projects, reminiscent of the virtual libraries of Lem and Borges, and the conceptual irony of contemporary Norwegian composer, Øyvind Torvund. It is also a homage to the Argentine classical composer of the second half of the twentieth century, Mauricio Kagel, an interdisciplinary artist who anticipated what would later be called the “performative turn” in contemporary art.

Svetlichny’s score, performed by the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble conducted by Fyodor Lednev, will enter into a dialogue with the narrator, clarifying, criticising, and sometimes refuting what is said in words.

Anton Svetlichny (b. 1982, Rostov-on-Don) is a composer and essayist. He graduated from the Rostov State Conservatory with a degree in composition. He won the Pythian Games competition for composers (2007) and was a prize winner in the Russian Music 2.0 programme of the Aksenov Family Foundation (2022). Anton Svetlichny is a member of the Resistance of Material (SoMa) group of composers. He is a co-founder of the InEnsemble contemporary music group and will be composer-in-residence at the Moscow Philharmonic Society for the 2025/2026 season.

Fyodor Lednev (b. 1971, Minsk) is a conductor. He graduated from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory where he studied choral conducting (1995) and operatic and symphonic conducting (1998). Since 1995, he has taught at the Saint Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov Music College. He has appeared as guest conductor with leading Russian orchestras, including the Svetlanov State Orchestra, the Russian National Orchestra, the Russian National Youth Symphony Orchestra, the musicAeterna Choir and Orchestra, and others. In 2024 he won the prize for Best Conducting Work at the Golden Mask theatre awards in Moscow.

Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble (MCME) was founded in 1990 by composer Yuri Kasparov assisted by Russian avant-garde luminary Edison Denisov. MCME was the first Russian ensemble to focus on music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and on cooperation with contemporary composers. MCME has given Russian and world premieres of more than 1000 works.