“Time, Space, Number, Gesture”
02.11.23 – 4.04.24
This subscription series marked the 30th anniversary of the Studio for New Music and introduced listeners to phenomena of musical language: time, space, number and gesture. These concepts may seem speculative and beyond the reach of sensory perception,
yet music turns abstractions into sensations: human memory speaks in the language of sounds, appealing to the emotions. In the programmes of the series, the Studio for New Music presented various trends and techniques of the 20th and 21st centuries, including spectralism, saturalism, minimalism, stochastic music, dodecaphony, sonorism, instrumental theatre and jazz. Presenter – Fyodor Sofronov. The four programmes featured music by Scelsi, Lang, Adams, Grisey, Bochikhina, Feldman, Messiaen, Berg, Reich, Stockhausen, Brubeck, Webern, Xenakis, Ferneyhough, Sofronov, Sciarrino, Kagel, Donatoni, Karaev and Zimmermann.

“Topology of the Elements”
3.10.24 – 25.05.25
This is a series of lecture-concerts united by the idea of exploring elements and spaces, be it outer space, the cardinal points, cities or the Internet. It is a journey through elements and states across different worlds, each with its own symbolic and metaphysical meaning. How the composers of the 20th and 21st centuries sensed these worlds was presented by the Studio for New Music ensemble in the four programmes of the subscription: “Cosmos. East. Utopia”, “Air. West. Paris”, “Ice. North. Petrograd” and “Water. South. Venice”. The four concerts featured music by Stockhausen, Scelsi, Lang, Romitelli,
Tarnopolsky, Satie, Messiaen, Pisaro, Levinas, Rieder, Haas, Gudachev, Levkovskaya, Yurg, Sciarrino, Cage, Nyman, Pärt and McLay.

“Zaum”
1.10.25 –2.04.26
The first thing that comes to mind when we hear the word “zaum” (“transrational language”) is the literary works of the Futurists, in which established associative links between words are destroyed and the boundaries of rationality are overcome. But music, too, is a kind of “zaum”: it is hard to grasp with the mind alone. Just as writers worked with letters, morphemes and words, turning to various kinds of literary zaum, composers created their own “transrational” works using the building blocks of musical language: sound,
interval, chord. But if the listener does take the path of rational perception of music, how great will the difference be between what is written in the score and what he hears? To explore this question, the Studio for New Music ensemble, together with the lecturer Fyodor Sofronov, turns to the experience of phenomenology, delves into the study of listener perception and tries to find out how the relationship between the listener and the musical work is built. The subscription consists of four concerts: “Phonetics”, “Morphology”, “Syntax” and “Synthesis”.

Tickets and programmes are available on the Moscow Philharmonic website (in Russian)