Outsourcing. Johannes Kreidler, MCME, Fedor Beznosikov

The melodies and rhythms of the Dow Jones, the stolen Mona Lisa, and other manifestos of musical conceptualism in the first Russian retrospective of the German composer Johannes Kreidler.

Programme

Johannes Kreidler (b. 1980)

Outsourcing, 2009
First performance in Russia

Two Pieces for Clarinet and Video, 2016
First performance in Russia

Charts Music, 2009
First performance in Russia

Minusbolero, 2010–2014
First performance in Russia

Forms of communication between music and the public, performers and patrons, the ethics and economics of the creative process, art reflecting on its own production and questions of authorship: the key themes of the Music (Hi)stories programme are closely intertwined in the work of Johannes Kreidler. The forty-four-year-old German composer has the privilege (rare today) of being known far beyond the cloistered world of classical music. His compositions, which balance between performance, stand-up comedy, and academic lecture, are inspired by the culture of Internet memes. They break records for the number of views in social media, making Kreidler a star of conceptual art.

Performed by

Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble

Fyodor Beznosikov conductor

Bogdan Korolyok concert host

Illustration: Evgenia Tut

I didn’t write a single note in this piece. Even less than that—all I did was to take notes away. Ravel’s “Bolero” minus the melody. That took about an hour. And yet I’ve never worked on a piece for as long as on this one—five years. Composing this piece—writing it or rather erasing it—was much harder than writing 100,000 notes.

Any act of composition can be understood as a filtering but in this work, for sure, the question of authorship is taken to an extreme. Every note is original Ravel: the beautiful instrumentation, the characteristic crescendo, the simplicity that conceals genius—it’s all Ravel. And yet, what we hear in “Minusbolero” we would never have heard without my intervention. Memory plays a large role in "Minusbolero"—the present absence of the melody, which one almost inevitably sings to oneself. The melody is known, so the accompaniment, which is given, works like the ringing of Pavlov’s bell.

When the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911, Parisians flocked to the Louvre to marvel at its absence.

— Johannes Kreidler, Minusbolero

The composer turns the Dow Jones index and prices of the stocks of leading international companies into music, compresses all the songs of the Beatles and Beethoven’s nine symphonies into one second of sound under the slogan “Time is relative!” and, in one of his performances, paralyses the work of the German copyright society, GEMA. Poet, philosopher, and trickster, he muses on the links between music and politics, economics and new technologies, on how the art market functions in the context of globalisation and how the identity of the artist is shaped in the age of the digital archive, when the entire history of art is available at the click of a button.

GES-2 House of Culture presents the composer’s first retrospective in Russia. MCME and conductor Fyodor Beznosikov will perform the Russian premieres of four of Kreidler’s most important works, all of them acknowledged classics of contemporary music.

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.

Fyodor Beznosikov (b. 1993, Moscow) is a conductor and violinist. He graduated in 2017 from the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied violin under Vladimir Ivanov. He is currently studying opera and symphonic conducting at the Conservatory under Felix Korobov. He has worked since 2023 as conductor at the Moscow Academic Musical Theatre, where he conducted the ballets The Snow Queen and The Final Session (2023). Beznosikov also teaches violin at the Moscow Conservatory. Fyodor Beznosikov works with Moscow’s New Opera Theatre, where he took part in the production of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman (directed by Konstantin Bogomolov, 2023). Since 2024, he has conducted performances by the Russian National Orchestra. He was a winner at the Art Theatre Prizes in 2024.

Bogdan Korolyok (b. 1993, Omsk) is a curator and a music and theatre critic. He is assistant artistic director of the ballet company at the Ural Opera Ballet Theatre. He graduated from the Krasnoyarsk College of Choreography (class of Ivan Karnaukhov), obtained a bachelor’s degree in arts and humanities at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet and a master’s degree in music criticism at Saint Petersburg State University. He created librettos for Le Divertissement du Roi at the Mariinsky Theatre (choreographed by Maxim Petrov, 2017/2021) and for The Order of the King (2018), The Humpbacked Horse (2021, with choreographer Vyacheslav Samodurov) and The Tales of Pierrot (2024, with choreographer Maxim Petrov) at the Ural Opera Ballet Theatre, as well as A Guide to Ballet at the Perm Opera Ballet Theatre (2021, choreographed by Anton Pimonov).