promoters (C)

composer and performing musician, b. 23rd October 1953 in Cracow. He studied music theory and composition with Bogusław Schaeffer as well as organ with Leszek Werner in the State Higher School of Music in Cracow. At present, he is a reader at the Department of Composition at the Music Academy in Cracow. Since 1976, he has also worked in the Electroacoustic Music Studio in the same academy; he has held the function of director of this studio since 2000.
In 1977, Chołoniewski established the “Music Centre” Artistic Association which organised about 400 concerts. Since 1979, he has been a member of the “Cracow Group”. He also founded the MCH Studio, co-founded the ”Freight Train” Music Group (with Krzysztof Knittel and Piotr Bikont in 1986) and the Ch&K Studio (also with Krzysztof Knittel). Since 1987, he has organised the “Audio Art” concert series. He was the initiator, and is now artistic director, of the international “Audio Art” festival and (with Matthias Hermann) - of the International Cracow/Stuttgart Contemporary Music Workshops. Since 1990 he has been giving concerts (mostly as a performer of live computer music), teaching courses and delivering lectures on computer music in many European countries, as well as the United States and Canada. In 1993-99 he was artistic director of the Internationale Akademie für Neue Komposition und Audio Art in Schwaz in Austria. He has also created and co-ordinated spatial-outdoor projects (The Ship of Artists, 2000) and interactive on the web (GlobalMix, 1998 and GPS-Art, 2000).
Marek Chołoniewski writes instrumental and electroacoustic music, audiovisual computer compositions, music for the theatre, film, radio and television.

works

Chołoniewski is one of those artists who explore and search for the new. After all, his composition tutor was Bogusław Schaeffer, the guru of Polish new music, while one of his closest artistic friends is the avant-garde pioneer Krzysztof Knittel, with whom Chołoniewski has prepared numerous musical projects, the most spectacular of which was most likely the “Freight Train” - a type of perpetual, ever-changing performance. This is one of the three forms of contemporary music that Chołoniewski seems to feel particularly at home in, the other two being - audiovisual composition and electroacoustic music. He has composed the latter since 1976 in the Electroacoustic Music Studio of the Music Academy in Cracow, of which he has been the director since 2000. He also holds courses and lectures on computer music in many European countries, in the United States and Canada, as well as giving concerts as a performer of live computer music.
The 2001 “Warsaw Autumn” witnessed the first performance of Passage, “an audiovisual composition for eight performers”, a work which extremely well exemplifies Chołoniewski’s artistic ideal. The composer defined this piece also as an “interactive octet for instruments and computer”. In the Festival’s programme book, he disclosed his creative and “technological” creed:
“THE IDEA:
In Passage, the choice of sound material is made by means of pre-defined methods of selection (i.e. algorithms), which in fact deprive the author (in the positive sense of the word ‘deprive’) of the possibility of taking his own individual decisions concerning the specific elements of the musical work. The choice thus depends on the method of selection which, if applied strictly and consistently, will form well-defined musical structures. In this way, the author frees himself partly from his own individual preferences and enters the realm of experimentation, which, as in the case of Passage, was subjected to rigorous control. The composition itself is a sum of my various experiences collected during many years of work on algorithmic computer compositions in which the division between instrumental and computer music was abolished, and so were also the boundaries of style and sound material with reference to the principal elements of the musical work.
THE FORM:
The composition consists of four parts: I. Introduction, II. A Theatre of Gestures, III. The Score, IV. A Film. The first two parts are a performance in which the musicians operate a computer music system through quasi-theatrical actions, thus creating a live, multidimensional sound structure. Each musician performs his or her own independent part. The computer system simultaneously creates a score which will provide the basic tone material for parts III and IV. The musicians perform instrumental parts which they see appearing on monitors. Additionally, the movement of the instruments and the change in the positions of musicians in part III influence the way in which the sounds of acoustic instruments are transformed. The last, 4th part of the work is an audio-visual spectacle in which film projection (computer animations) generated by the movements and gestures of musicians is coupled with interactive transformations of instrumental sound.
THE SCORING:
Passage is performed by an octet made up of two quartets: a woodwind quartet (flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon) and a string quartet (violin, viola, cello and double-bass). Since all the musicians are simultaneously “performance artists” who perform a specific “theatre of gestures”, their physical relation to the instrument, the possibility of movement with the instrument is one of the basic technical assumptions of the presented piece.
A VISTA
The passage (cf. the title) from part II to III of the work constitutes a major technical problem. The material, in the form of a traditionally composed score, appears in front of the musicians’ eyes for the very first time at the moment of the performance. The composition has many versions: the material “composes itself” each time in a slightly different way. Therefore, the musicians perform Parts III and IV a vista. The approximate graphic score composition generated by gestures is tempered and rhythmically averaged by an interactive computer system. The overall concept of the piece excludes the possibility of prior preparation of individual parts by each musician.
The performance makes use of a conductor,or else a headphone system through which the metronomic impulse sent by the computer is transmitted individually to each musician (a principle frequently applied in Like Breathing).
GESTURES
Gestures are the principal source material in Passage. They take two distinct forms:
- of geometric figures,
- of musical expressions.
A gesture performed higher, i.e. closer to the source of light defines a higher value - higher pitch, whereas a gesture closer to the floor, farther from the source of light defines a lower value - lower pitch. An interactive optical computer system reacts to the changes in the position of the hand.”

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