From 18 September to 19 October 2023, Moscow’s major cultural venues will host concerts and educational events marking the ensemble’s 30th anniversary. Since 1993 the Studio for New Music has been at the centre of a structure through which the “ecosystem” of New Music in Russia was built from scratch. Its pioneering significance lies in the unity of creative and scholarly approaches: intuition and reason, feeling and knowledge. In miniature, the StudioFest programme shows how such a structure works — something rare not only in our country but abroad as well.
The anniversary project pays special attention to new performance practices. This is a field of limitless possibilities, in which artists act as researchers, formulating problems that matter to them. It is also a space of discovery for those still mastering the craft: learning to read the musical “text” and what lies behind it, learning to convey their ideas precisely and to ask questions…
StudioFest brings together the two sides of the same coin and presents events that answer different needs and artistic interests.
Concert listings
Studio | Science
and conductor Igor Dronov — began to develop at the Moscow Conservatory in the early 1990s. Their main goal was to form a network of research and creative structures capable of sustaining a fully functioning ecosystem of contemporary music in Russia. Thus, alongside the creation and performance of new music by the ensemble, it was examined theoretically in the projects of the Centre for Contemporary Music,
in the courses of the Department of Contemporary Music and in the discussion programmes of the Moscow Forum festival. Over 30 years, the projects of the Studio for New Music and the Centre for Contemporary Music have helped overcome the consequences of the informational and aesthetic isolation of the “Iron Curtain” era and made new-music concerts a familiar part of life in our country.
The idea of Studio | Science echoes the key themes of the anniversary year: taking stock of thirty years and immersing ourselves in new performance practices. Over four days spread between the festival concerts at the Moscow Conservatory, there will be three sections of academic readings (theoretical, practical and a youth section), presentations of anthologies on extended instrumental techniques, of a new book by Yuri Kasparov and of a unique Russian-language media archive.
Schedule of academic sections and presentations
28 September – 17 October
28 September
11:00
Theoretical section “30 Years of New Music”
The theoretical section aims to trace how the landscape of contemporary musical art has changed over the past 30 years. Participants will address theoretical and historical aspects of the newest music and share the results of music-sociological research.
6 October
11:00
Practical section “New Instrumental Practices”
13 October
12:00
Presentation of Yu. Kasparov’s book “Timbre-Texture in the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble”
14:00
Presentation of the Studio for New Music media archive
16:00
Presentation of the anthology “A Guide to Extended Instrumental Techniques”
17 October
Youth section “It Will Be Tomorrow”
Participants will present their research and reflect on how the future was envisioned in the 20th century, in the periods of the early and post-war avant-garde, and how it is envisioned today. Papers may be based on work of various formats: course papers or dissertations, completed studies or musicological “works in progress” without final conclusions yet.
Studio | Objects
"Artemyev" Art Space, Moscow Conservatory
Alongside the main festival events, the Conservatory’s new art space hosts a multimedia interactive exhibition. Visitors can trace how the functions of everyday objects are transformed in different cultural settings: what happens to faceless elements of daily life when composers place them in an experimental musical environment, and what information object-instruments carry when they become museum exhibits.
The exhibition features sounding objects from the Studio for New Music’s arsenal, as well as installations dedicated to the ensemble’s most striking productions. A separate space is devoted to the composer and actionist Georgy Dorokhov, who went down in history as the most radical author of this century. Besides visual information, the exhibition includes unique audio materials. Visitors can explore the acoustic properties of some of the objects themselves.
