The Song of Freedom
Music was born from a feeling of freedom. The freedom of one’s own voice. Singing that arises from breathing, from an inner impulse—and can exist beyond words and meanings. However, the further history of its existence was connected with a constant struggle between determinism and unpredictability.
The invention of musical notation allowed music to persist and become more complex, but at the same time it cut off its diversity. The emergence of tonality opened up the freedom to develop large forms, yet it established a rigid hierarchy of sounds. Equal temperament unified the sound space and made it possible to freely switch between different tonalities, but at the same time it lost the purity of correlations of the reverberations that arose in nature itself. The twelve-tone technique eliminated the tonal hierarchy, but it subordinated sounds to a new, even more rigid system of organization.
However, in all ages, music has had a unique ability to express what words cannot. Oh, those sweet piano passages in Schumann’s romances, when the breath is taken away by the happiness of love, and only the instrument can sing through what illuminates the hero from inside! Or the transparent, almost weightless sound fields in Pärt’s works, where silence rings like a huge bell!
In Soviet times, music was sometimes used to express what was forbidden to say in words—in the northern country with imperial ambitions, where speech was systematically broken, accustomed to self-censorship and internal division. But wasn’t this a form of silent consent disguised as a complex artistic language?
When there is something to say, it is said in words. And music has nothing to do with this.
This year’s musical program does not take on the role of speaking instead of words. It does not use the language of innuendo but instead creates new sound worlds and offers powerful experiences. Each concert will reveal the theme of freedom in one way or another—through improvisation, timbral transformation, the flow of acoustics into electronics, the emancipation of silence, etc. Hnat Khotkevych, David Lang, Arvo Pärt and young Ukrainian composers meet here. And from their refusal to compromise and their courage, a song of freedom is born inside every listener.