XVII INTERNATIONAL MUSIC FESTIVAL
MOSCOW FORUM
A space for new music and aesthetic debate
The Spectre of the Future
11–15 October 2021
The theme of this festival — THE SPECTRE OF THE FUTURE — in a certain sense “lays bare the DNA structure” of all sixteen preceding forums. It is at once an “archaeological” and a “futurological” investigation of the complex, contradictory processes reflected in today’s musical art. It embodies the Moscow Forum’s inherent drive to look into the future, into aspects and potentials of music not yet put into words, and at the same time an attempt to shape that future and construct its possible features.
The Forum’s programme is devoted to a creative reflection on the pressing problems of our tomorrow that are already evident today. Artificial intelligence and the ecological crisis, the depletion of resources and demographic problems, the postcolonial world, youth subculture, the “new ethics” — these and many other issues are becoming leading themes of contemporary art, and music is no exception.
A distinctive feature of the festival is its aim not merely to present a panorama of contemporary composition but to rethink the very format of the concert. The programmes consist not only of examples of new music but also include discussions held between performances of the scheduled works, right in the concert hall, with musicians, philosophers and art theorists, sociologists, critics and cultural scholars taking part. The unity of the creative and scholarly approaches is reflected in the very titles of the programmes, whose common denominator is the word LOGOS, understood as the unity of intuitive and rational knowing/feeling:
FUTURO // LOGOS
TECHNO // LOGOS
ECO // LOGOS
SOCIO // LOGOS
COSMOS // LOGOS
The festival’s guests are the French multimedia group LiSiLog, which works on a syncretic fusion of choreography, sound and light. In their project Light ProjectionS the French musicians explore such subtle matters as sound and light, as well as the aspects of space and movement associated with sound, broadening the perspective of perception and inviting the audience to experience the syncretic unity of choreography, sound and light.
On the Russian side, the concerts will feature the Moscow Forum’s resident ensemble, the Studio for New Music, which has performed at the world’s most renowned venues — the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory and the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus and the Cité de la Musique in Paris, the St Petersburg Philharmonia and the Teatro Malibran in Venice, as well as many other major halls. In keeping with the festival’s tradition, its concerts will also feature young Russian soloists Alena Verin-Galitskaya (soprano), Yulia Migunova (cello), Alexey Potapov (electric guitar), Venedikt Peunov (bayan), Ignat Krasikov (clarinet, saxophone) and Dmitry Batalov (piano), prizewinner of the XIV International Contemporary Music Performance Competition in Orléans. The festival will close with a programme prepared by the Centre for Electroacoustic Music of the Moscow Conservatory.
As is traditional, the festival will include a daytime educational programme. On the eve of the opening, on 10 October, the Centre for Electroacoustic Music will host a masterclass by the French visionary musician Jean Geoffroy. In the workshop, composers, performers and dancers will be invited to create multimedia compositions using the special technological platform Light Wall System.
On 11 October there will be lectures by Muriel Joubert, head of the musicology department at the University of Lyon, and by Andrey Smirnov, a well-known researcher of 20th-century sound culture and winner of the 2021 Innovation Prize. Vera Geslin, president of the LiSiLog association, will present the French collective’s multimedia projects, and from 11 to 30 October the Ground Solyanka Gallery will show, as part of the exhibition C.CUT-UP!, interactive installations by the association’s renowned French sound artist and music computer scientist Christophe Lebreton (alias Zakahamida).
From 12 to 15 October the Conference Hall of the Conservatory will open its doors to participants of the III All-Russian Seminar of Young Cultural Scholars and Music Critics (in collaboration with the new music portal Stravinsky.online, named a winner of the 2021 “Resonance” Prize). The speakers at the seminar will be the most promising young critics and cultural researchers, among them Evgeny Bylina (NLO publishing house, HSE School of Design), Elina Andrianova (Muzykalnaya Akademiya journal), Ekaterina Vasilyova (the “KoOPERAtsiya” opera laboratory), Anastasia Antonenkova and others. Guests of the evening discussion programme will also give lectures.
The festival is organised by the Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory, the Centre for Contemporary Music and the Centre for Electroacoustic Music of the Moscow Conservatory.