19:00 – 20:00
Malle Maltis – Variations on White (2022)
Ekke Västrik – Contrasts (2023, premiere)
Alise Rancāne – Blue Moon Station (2023, premiere)
Marianna Liik – Second Life (2023, premiere)
Sander Saarmets – Phantom Trails (2023, premiere)
Variations on White (2022). Malle Maltis: “White noise, like the white color in painting, is a substance with no limits that can be used to create anything.”
Ekke Västrik: “Contrasts for six electronic music instruments (2023, premiere) is a piece which explores the interpretation of graphic notation in the context of electronic music. There is no such thing as a perfect notation system for notating electronic music and performing it live, so the composer often has to create a new notation system for each new piece. For this piece, I tried to think of musical images with different characters and to find them a visual response. The interpreters are not provided with any special instructions for interpreting the signs, hence the sounds may be different from those originally imagined. Such an aesthetic of “error” is very much welcomed in this work, and hopefully opens up new possibilities.”
Alise Rancāne: “The piece Blue Moon Station (2023) is made as a musical game taking inspiration from games such as PaRappa the Rapper and Crash Bash. The story of this game takes place in the interdimensional mass transit terminal “Blue Moon Station”. In the game, the performers are six intergalactic travellers who are competing to win a free ticket to the nearest galaxy – Cygnus A. The piece was created with the support of the Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia.”
Marianna Liik: “Second life (2023, premiere) is based on my 2016 piece ReCycling, for a varioola for four hands, where the instrument could be heard in live performance. The varioola is an electronic instrument with exciting sonic possibilities, designed by electronic engineer Anatol Sügis and sound director Heino Pedusaar in Tallinn in 1955– 1959. Thanks to the varioola samples created by Margo Kõlar, this unique instrument has been given a new life in the form of samples. In this piece, the musicians of the Estonian Electronic Music Society enter into a dialogue with a varioola acting as soloist.”
Sander Saarmets: “Phantom Trails (2023, premiere) throws the listener into the middle of a quantum cloud of enigmatic choices where one experiences the unfolding of parallel events via the different members of the ensemble. We don’t see the ensemble as a whole: instead, we see one person in different versions. Even though parallel paths should not meet, there are moments when the presence of others becomes clearly perceptible. How much do the different choices matter, and what are the chances of still arriving at a similar ending point?”
The Ensemble of Estonian Electronic Music Society (EMA) is dedicated to playing electronic chamber music. The ensemble is appreciated for its flexibility and musicality, which is often lost between knobs and sliders when it comes to electronic music. As there is practically no repertoire for such an ensemble, EMA has commissioned and performed over 20 new works over the years. Composers’ approaches to the ensemble, the use of instruments and the way the score is formatted have varied considerably. The same is true for our programme, which brings together five very different works.
Photo: Priit Mürk / ERR