Fyodor Sofronov’s authored series of lecture-concerts “Zaum”

The first thing we imagine on hearing the word “zaum” 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, so composers created their own “zaum” works using the building blocks of musical language: sound, interval, chord.

But if the listener nevertheless follows the path of rational perception of music, will there be much difference between what is written in the score and what he hears? To get to the bottom of this question, the Studio for New Music ensemble, together with the lecturer Fyodor Sofronov, will turn to the experience of phenomenology, delve into the study of listeners’ perception and try to find out how the relationship between the listener and the musical work is built.

The programme of Concert No. 2 “Morphology (Morphological Zaum)” features music by composers of the New Viennese School: Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern.