Music (Hi)stories

Whispers and shouts of London, product placement à la Johann Sebastian Bach, the world premiere of Sacred Spring, and other stories in the new curatorial music programme at GES-2.

Two outstanding media theorists of the twentieth century, Roland Barthes and Marshall McLuhan, both told us: whatever talks about anything talks, first and foremost, about itself, or: the medium is the message. But what does music talk about? What can be the content of an art that lacks the semantic concreteness inherent to literature and painting? At various times, the meaning and the value of music have been sought in its unique internal form, inexpressible in any other way, in its ability to convey feelings and metaphysical ideas, or in the possibility of using it to address real-life tasks. The history of music is the history of attempts by musicians to maintain the identity of their art under the pressure of economic relations, philosophical interpretations, and technological progress. The curatorial series Music Hi(stories), which will run from January to June 2025 at GES-2 House of Culture, traces some key stages in this process.

Programme 

Illustration: Yevgenia Tut

There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us.

— Aaron Copland, composer

Any composition is the sum of two vectors. One indicates the context in which the music arises, the other overcomes that context.

— Sergej Newski, composer

The sociologist Howard Becker noted that works of art are made where creative individuals and social relations intersect. The idea is nowhere better exemplified than in The Cries of London, a work for voices and instruments by the master composer of the English High Renaissance, Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625). Gibbons reproduces the voices of traders, beggars, cabmen, and passers-by in early seventeenth-century London, giving music history its first example of the field recording genre. The Coffee Cantata (1735) by Johann Sebastian Bach is an unsurpassed masterpiece of product placement. It was commissioned for and performed in Zimmermann’s Café, a vibrant meeting place in the heart of eighteenth-century Leipzig.

On closer inspection, social relations are the ultimate theme of another famous work by Bach, despite its traditional categorization under the heading of “art for art’s sake.” The Musical Offering (1747) is a set of keyboard pieces based on a musical theme presented to the composer by King Frederick II of Prussia. The story of their relationship is encrypted in the text of this Baroque musical monument, which, according to recent research, was never intended for concert performance, but was meant for a single addressee—Frederick himself, as the author of Thema Regium (Royal Theme).

Silence is the central device of Alexander Knaifel’s Agnus Dei (1985), a work dedicated to the victims of the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War. The text of the diary of Tanya Savicheva, a Leningrad girl whose family died around her, is not spoken or sung, but only read by the musicians to themselves as a tribute to a tragedy that is beyond words.

The interaction between words and music is a key theme of Music Hi(stories), and the first concert of the series demonstrates how radically different approaches to text in the works of three composers—Giya Kancheli, György Ligeti and Alexey Sysoev—build opposing scenarios for the interaction between stage and audience.

“Music and word are in a precarious balance, the struggle for supremacy is eternal. They play to a draw.” The formula of Dutch critic Elmer Schoenberger could be the epigraph of Enoch Arden (1897) by Richard Strauss. Disputes over the genre attribution of this epic score for narrator and piano are unresolved to this day since it can be perceived either as a musical work with spoken text or as a dramatic performance with piano accompaniment. GES-2 House of Culture will present the world premiere of Enoch Arden in a version with the Russian translation by the philosopher Gustav Shpet.

Richard Taruskin, author of the five-volume Oxford History of Western Music, located the source of musical meaning in social and cultural context: he explored the European musical canon as the outcome of collaboration and mediation that facilitated the work of composers but that also constrained them. The title of a new work from the contemporary Russian composer, Anton Svetlichny, inspired by Taruskin’s ideas, gives its name to the entire six-month concert series at GES-2 and the piece will receive its world premiere as part of the series.

The forms in which music communicates with its public, performers, and commissioners, the ethics and economics of the creative process, and reflections within music itself on the methods of its own production and authorship—such are the themes of Music Hi(stories). The series brings together composers of four centuries in a single narrative, where the icon of musical conceptualism Johannes Kreidler, in the Russian premiere of his play Outsourcing (2009), can be seen as the direct heir of Ludwig van Beethoven and his monumental Diabelli Variations (1823).

Curator:
Dmitry Renansky

Producers
Ekaterina Arkhipova, Marina Badudina, Ksenia Makshantseva, Yana Romashkina

Programme

Alpha and Omega

Tickets

When: 23 Jan

Giya Kancheli, György Ligeti, Alexey Sysoev

Performers
Elene Gvritishvili, Fyodor Lednev, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, N’Caged Vocal Ensemble

Yaroslav Timofeev concert host

The Musical Offering

Tickets will ba available later

When: 13 Feb

Johann Sebastian Bach

Performers
Out Ensemble

Yaroslav Timofeev concert host

Enoch Arden

Tickets will ba available later

When: 22 Feb

Richard Strauss, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Gustav Shpet

Contrabass-2

Tickets will ba available later

When: 13 Mar

Grigory Krotenko, Olga Bochikhina, Alexey Zolotovitsky

Outsourcing

Tickets will ba available later

When: 26 Mar

Michael Beil, Pierre Jodlowski, Johannes Kreidler

Performers
Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble

The Cries of London

Tickets will ba available later

When: 16 Apr

Orlando Gibbons, Richard Dering, Luciano Berio

Performers 
Intrada Vocal Ensemble, Ekaterina Antonenko

Sacred Spring 2025

Tickets will ba available later

When: 27 Apr

Alexey Sysoev
World premiere
Commissioned by GES-2 House of Culture

Performers
Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Fyodor Lednev

Yaroslav Timofeev concert host

Agnus Dei

Tickets will ba available later

When: 20 May

Alexander Knaifel

Performers 
Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble

33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli

Tickets will ba available later

When: 31 May

Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano recital by Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev

Music (Hi)stories

Tickets will ba available later

When: 7 Jun

Anton Svetlichny
World premiere
Commissioned by GES-2 House of Culture

Performers
Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Fyodor Lednev

Coffee Cantata

Tickets will ba available later

When: 24 Jun

Johann Sebastian Bach