X International Festival of Contemporary Music
MOSCOW FORUM

FREEDOM OF SOUND!

9–14 April 2007

Why do the patterns of frost on a windowpane always form the same shapes, while the sound patterns of music take an infinite number of different forms?
What drives their changes, and why do they change over the course of history?
How do the laws of nature and the laws of society interact in music?
What essence, in the end, can sounds — these simple vibrations of the air — express, if more than once in the history of the 20th century entire artistic movements were banned and composers themselves were ostracised?
These are the questions to which this year’s Tenth Moscow Forum festival is devoted.
Vladimir Tarnopolsky, artistic director of the festival

Freedom of sound is both the theme and the motto of the Tenth, anniversary Moscow Forum festival. The 20th century, which through one of the great transformers of music, Edgard Varèse, proclaimed the idea of the “liberation of sound”, opened up radically new possibilities of musical sound to the listener.
Freedom of sound is music overcoming the boundaries of its “first nature” — in the noises of the surrounding world and in sophisticated electronic technologies.
Freedom of sound is the “refusal of habit” (H. Lachenmann), independence from the historically accumulated burden of formal conventions and aesthetic norms.
Freedom of sound is the expansion of the timbral possibilities of classical musical instruments and new principles of their interaction in ensemble, based on the unpredetermined nature of improvisational self-expression.
Freedom of sound is also the composer’s responsibility to the individual and to society, understood in the spirit of Shostakovich. It is, above all, the freedom of the creator of music himself — both outward and inner. It was the 20th century that produced examples of the harshest ideological pressure — never before had so many composers been forcibly driven from their native lands or simply destroyed, physically and morally.
How far can a composer’s inner freedom extend? To what extent can social or political pressure go in forcing a composer to become an outcast or a conformist? And finally, what is the contemporary composer’s responsibility for what he does with sound?

Our music festival is not a scholarly congress. It does not pose these questions head-on, still less attempt to answer them. But it can offer the interested listener a broad panorama of contemporary composition, an understanding of which is so necessary today and so inseparably linked to these questions…
This year’s guests of the festival were Ensemble Recherche (Germany), an outstanding chamber group specialising in the music of the “high avant-garde” and one of the world leaders in this field, and the brilliant intellectual pianist Marc Ponthus (USA). On the Russian side, the festival featured one of the most original interpreters of contemporary music, the pianist Alexei Lubimov; the pioneer of new music Mark Pekarsky and his percussion ensemble; well-known string and wind soloists; and the festival’s constant participant, the Studio for New Music ensemble.
The festival included a series of masterclasses by outstanding performers, a scholarly conference and an exhibition dedicated to the festival’s anniversary.