The opening and the conclusion of the 17th Moscow Forum festival together with the artists of the Studio for New Music ensemble shall be organized by the renewed team of the Centre for Electroacoustic Music of the Moscow Conservatory, the direction of the work of which by its very definition combines not only acoustic and electronic music, but also traditional concert practice with the newest performative formats, such as purely musical performance with multimedia means. This “digital turn”, which defines today the fundamental transformations of all the arts and their qualitatively new interaction on the basis of various digital platforms exerts absolutely new demands on musicians and visual artists. The contemporary performer is required not only to possess certain technological skills, but also, in response to new challenges, it is necessary to acquire diversified proficiency of the multifaceted artist, which a concert performer of the new formation is turned into. In these new formants of the presentation, a concert frequently ceases to be a purely acoustic event, in multimedia project the sound element becomes merged with the visual, the improvisational with the notated, and the instrumental with the choreographic.

At the same time, the limitless abundance of opening possibilities also has its own negative side. In Brigitte Muntendorf’s composition Public Privacy #6: voice | bright no more the issue arises of the personal and the public in the world of contemporary digital culture in which these boundaries are diffused. The dialogue of the singer with herself discloses the secret hypostases of personality and immerses the listener into the artist’s inner world.

Matthias Kranebitter in his piece Nihilistic Study No.7 notwithstanding the involvement of the technical possibilities of electronics, inspires himself with the aesthetical ideas of Jean Dubuffet, one of the founders of Art Brut — the unprofessional, markedly simple art of children, self-taught people and lunatics. Lapidary juxtapositions of multicomponent chaotic motion of the ensemble’s instruments with equally chaotic sounds of the real world or electronics shape a clear relief of the musical composition’s form, simultaneously ostentatiously simple and paradoxically multiple-value, similarly to how the composer views our present-day world.

The aspiration “to depart from the comfortable ghetto of present-day ‘cultural’ music in order to deal with the sound universe which surrounds us” is Fausto Romitelli’s creed, which revealed itself vividly in his final composition Green, Yellow and Blue. This piece presents a bright testimony of the composer’s wish to exit from the harsh systematization of genres; when combining the electric guitar and the musical connotations with the traditional instruments of Romitelli’s ensemble connected with it overcomes the boundaries between various genres and styles and creates its own absolutely new world of sound. This composition was inspired by the works film of the well-known artists — Thierry De Mey and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. A remarkable visuals of this film was created by applying special filters and algorithms which changing the motion, space and colors of the exquisite gardens in which it was shot.

The aspiration to liberate music from compulsion dictated by traditional notation brings Rafaël Cendo in his piece Foris (Latin for “forest”) to a gesture-related type of compositional writing with a dense forest of new graphic symbols representing various devices from the set of extended instrumental techniques. At the same time, the electronic domain, which transforms sound in real time, and the six-channel spatial development of sound creates the impression of a special acoustic space in which the direct connection between created and transformed sound becomes lost for the listener.

In Alexander Khubeev’s The Specter of Antiutopia the transformation of performers’ motions into sound is achieved with the use not of the customary electronic, sensors, but acoustic sensors, which amplify over and over again the “visual” element and bring it out unto a separate strata of dramaturgy.

Alexander Schubert’ Hello is a audio-visual piece in which the projection serves as a score to be interpreted by the ensemble. The video consists of gestures performed by the composer in his living room. “The piece is an invitation into the personal world of Alexander Schubert. Please enjoy”, as composer writes about his piece.

In recent years, questions of ecology have ceased to be a subject related only to science or production technologies, but have advanced to the rank of the most crucial social and political themes. Despite the fact that ecological issues have been well known, the realization of the critical importance of their study emerged only in the early 1970s, when UNESCO instituted a special program titled The Human Being and the Biosphere. It is interesting to note that artists have realized, much earlier than scientists and politicians did, the global nature of the problems of ecology, and its direct connection not only with the biosphere, but also directly with culture, ethics and art.

In the 1960s, the “father of acoustic ecology” Raymond Murray Schafer wrote his work The New Sound Landscape, followed by a second work, “The Tuning of the World”, which are becoming a theoretical foundation for the creation of “compositions for the natural medium”. The selfsame Shafer also became one of the initiators of adopting a law against noise pollution. In the 1960s, John Cage declares in one of his essays: “Music as I conceive it is ecological. You could go further and say that it IS ecology” (Cage. For the Birds). The composer did not make any distinctions between nature and culture, sound and space, instrumental (or vocal) sound and noise. Back in the 1960s Luc Ferrari began working on his Hétérozygote, a composition for magnetic tape in which the sounds of the external environment are used for the creation of musical dramaturgy. Finally, his composition Le lever de jour au bord de la mer (1970), which has become a classic of the genre, constructes entirely by means of montage of fragments of tape recording made by the composer during the course of an entire day on a beach.

However, by no means only ambient recordings or compositions for the natural medium present “ecological music”. In the present time, one of the aesthetic canons of the genre is exemplified by the music of John Luther Adams, which is broadly presented in world concert practice. According to the composer himself, during the course of his entire life he “has searched for the ecology of music, supposing that music may be conducive to the awakening of our ecological understanding”. It is noteworthy that in 2011 Adams received the Heinz Award, bestowed for his achievements in the field of environmental protection and his contribution to development of the arts. Two works by Adams are performed in our programs, reverse in their imagery, while at the same time representing adequately the composer’s style — Dark Wind and The Light That Fills the World. This is what the composer writes about himself: “In my compositions there are only… slowly changing colors on a super temporal white plane. While its sides are blurred. Separate sounds merge into one acoustic horizon; harmony and color combine with space and time… Music aspires to lead us beyond the limits of syntactic meanings, even beyond the boundaries of images, in order to teach us to listen to ourselves within an enshrouded whole. These deceptively static sound fields are site of constant changes. But the experience of listening to them present not as much a journey through a musical landscape, as sitting in immobility, when the wind and the weather, light and shadows slowly change around us”.

Das Andere by Horațiu Rădulescu, one of the strangest of the 20th century visionary composers, presents 18 minutes of continuous “fusion of the sound plasm”, which stems from the high G of the third octave to the C of the tenor octave — encompassing the entire viola range. The special abstract notation invented by the composer does not give the performer a single chance of “concealing himself” behind the notated and learned music, it provokes the musician to a constant search for new sound pertinent to the conditional notation, albeit, one which corresponds precisely to the composer’s intentions. With each subsequent performance the piece does not repeat itself, but is created here and now. It is possible to discover in it an entire encyclopedia of Rădulescu’s techniques, by means of which the composer attempted to “place the performer at a boundary between notated and substantially created sound, into a domain in which the state of trance is achieved”. The piece is built on the alternation of two types of textures, which are repeated from the beginning to the end of the piece without any special changes, thereby creating a peculiar kind of “controlled meditation”.

Dvo_YE by Anna Pospelova bases on the elements of words from Elizaveta Mnatsakanova’s poem Spring Music…. The fragmented poetical text here is merely the building material for the electronic sound, but it integrates to a certain degree into the flute part.

The sound landscape of Crépuscule du soir mystique by Natalia Prokopenko is composed of rustles and glide sounds in such a way that separate phonemes help shape the respective stages of the gradual formation of Sound, Word and Meaning.

The images of nature in the Sakura-Variationen by Helmut Lachenmann and The Singing of Birds by Edison Denisov have induced the classics of avant-garde music to reveal certain stylistic features untypical for them. Lachenmann’s Variations do not contain anything from his signature musique concrète instrumentale, but rather present collaged postmodernist melodic constructions with diverse stylistic connotations. On the other hand, in Denisov’s piece it is particularly the musique concrète — the sounds of the birds — which provides the foundation of the sound, generating imitational answers from the piano, the part of which is entirely notated graphically.

Shout, Rustle, do not be Silent by Elizaveta Zgirskaya presents the composer's passionate utterance in the genre of video art about the destruction of the wooden architecture in her native city Tomsk.

The program of the evening is a sort of artistic exploration of certain aspects of the theme of "space in music”. In a Large, Open Space by James Tenney for instrumental ensemble is essentially an original type of spatial-sound installation. Each instrument plays in random order the tones of the pitch set written out by the composer, which gradually form a certain image of an overtone chord resonating with the space of the chord and demonstrating its individual acoustic features.

Beat Furrer compares the spatial-temporal differentiation of heterogeneous textural strata in his piece Phasma with how in the perception of a passenger of a fast train the spaces and swiftness of the motion of the objects of the proximal and the distant planes — the speedy flickering of close-by objects and the slow motion of faraway ones — differ from each other.

The multimedia French group LiSiLog in its artistic project Light ProjectionS explores the most intricate processes of transgression of sound and light, the transition of the artist’s motion into musical sound. The space of the hall itself examines as an invisible keyboard, which keys programmes into a special individual sonority and is brought into action by the choreographic motions of the dancer or the musician. The technical foundation of the project is the interactive platform Light Wall System (LWS) developed by Christophe Lebreton.

The project, which united several heterogeneous compositions, lines up as a unified performative-sound program. The inspiring impulse for the composition titled Corps invisibles was served by the graphics of Japanese writing and the new social phenomenon of the so-called "invisible people", who live all of their lives through in closed apartments.

The core of the composition titled Transitions is the complex chain of reactions, reflections and interpretations of the musical material by means of performance gestures transformed through the LWS.

The work titled The Final Sunset constructs as a superimposition of estranged "cosmic" side-tones of the saxophone on a recording of the sound of the Earth carried out by NASA. At the same time the saxophone sound regulated by the LWS through the performer’s motions, approaches the quality of electronic sounds, while the recording of the sound of the earth unexpectedly turns out to be close to the style of New Age Music.

Virtual Rhizome makes use of another technology — the Smart Hand Computer. Based on the interaction between two smartphones a performative-sound labyrinth lined up from 23 sonorous elements fixated behind certain gestures unfolds itself before us. This action becomes intertwined by choreography the succession of elements in which it incalculably changes the musical form upon each performance.

The program of the Studio for New Music ensemble is a sort of artistic immersion into the theme of social criticism, which has swept throughout the art of Europe: from the undisguised irony regarding the complacency of the bourgeois in Jean Vigo’s silent film À propos de Nice with “live music” by François Paris (2005) to the bitter breakdown in Rolf Riehm instrumental-theatrical composition Lenz in Moskau, in which the tragic story of German poet Jacob Lenz, who the German burghers failed to understand, and who was compelled to flee and to die incongruously in Russia, little understood by him, becomes a symbol of loneliness and humiliation of an artistically minded person.

The related idea of a forcible and destructive incursion of reality into artistic fiction also appears in Romitelli’s work which was inspired by Francis Bacon’s painting Blood on the Floor, Painting 1986 and which absorbed into itself the explosive potential of rock music and the beauty of fancifully deformed Spectralism.

Mauro Lanza in his Quartet brings in a sort of “sound investigation” of one of the first hacker’s attacks which took place in Chicago in 1987, when during the time of a broadcast of a next scheduled television series on the screens a certain character appeared in a mask of a popular computer interviewing character Max Headroom from one television anti-utopia which identified the future with the diktat of television and large-scale corporations. A man holding a can of Coca Cola was groaning, shouting and laughing, pronouncing random phrases and, at the end, having stuck out his middle finger and humming a fragment from the hit song “I am losing you” disappeared from the screen. The hackers have never found, while the described case became the first link of a dangerous social phenomenon — encroachment on security systems.

A cycle of three compositions bearing the general title of Riss (German for "break" or "severance") by Mark André was inspired by the composer's study of a religious essay by Margaret Gruber titled Der Vorhang Zerreisst, where the curtain becomes a symbol of the hidden presence of God in mundane life. In this cycle, the composer discloses to the listener sound worlds which are concealed from his everyday perceptions, and which are based on soft, estranged noise-like sounds of instruments, which provoke us by their very subtlety and tension to a most concentrated type of listening. At the same time, Mark André brings out the sound sources of his compositions directly from the texts of the Gospels themselves, such as, for instance, the murmur of the congregants in the resounding acoustics of the temple or the rustle of fire.

The performative group Waldgang has expressed its vision of the path towards the spiritual through the process of melting metallic coins equivalent to the minimal wage into a church bell, to the ensoulment of the material element, so that what is bereft of voice would obtain sound.

Biomechanics. Evolution is a multimedia project of the Centre for Electroacoustic Music of the Moscow Conservatory (CEAMMC) within the frameworks of which traditional instruments interact with various types of media – electronics, video and light, and the performers themselves occasionally demonstrate themselves in uncustomary roles, playing various objects and specially created instruments. The CEAMMC presents pieces by the leading composers in Russia and in other countries, who work in the sphere of electronic music and multimedia.

In Matthias Wettl’s Nocturne four performers direct 16 lamps with the help of 16 light switches. The musical part of the piece is comprised only of sounds created by the switches. But when the performers turn the lamps on and off, the premises, which is lighted up in a special way by means of flickering light fixtures, becomes yet another important dimension of the composition, so it turns out to be a work not only of music, but also of the art of audio-vision.

new piece by Alexei Nadzharov tests possibilities of a reflecting stage situation on the basis of the interaction of live sound and video with the traditional form of concert performance. In his piece ARTRA for percussion instruments, electronic sounds and video, composed for a project commemorating the centennial anniversary of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Nikolai Popov uses a fragment of the Danses des adolescents from the gold covered disc of the "Voyager I" space probe, which was sent off beyond the Solar system.

In Alexander Khubeev’s composition Luce, inspired by Scriabin’s ideas, the part of the light is concisely noted down and programmed, while the performers put into effect not only the musical part, but also affect the performance of the “light part”, thereby also creating a special type of visual theater by means of shadows and glints.

Edges by Frank Bedrosyan are based on the effect of superimposing the sound layers of the piano and the electronics, until they are completely merged with each other. Cologne-based composer Sergei Meinhard in his composition HeroIn for electric guitar, electronics and video explores the boundaries of both the aesthetic principles of contemporary music and of our aural perception.

Star Me Kitten is a lecture about the connection between sound and content”, as Alexander Schubert writes about his composition. This lecture contains quotations which are typical for this genre — from a musical fragment from the horror movie The Thing, as well as a fragment from Romitelli’s music. There are also subtle references present — to a tennis game and to cats.

Between the compositions there is a performance of Stanislav Makovsky’s Interludes, which are based on the use of rhythms and figures of various dance genres. The composer calls his method of work with electronics in this piece “electroacoustic composition in reverse: here the computer controls the acoustic instrument, while all the sound transformations are carried out by means of elementary preparation”