MODART provides emerging compsoers with the opportunity to develop a new work for vocal ensemble and receive a public performance by the Song Company
MODART
"First came a piece entitled Construction by Alex Pozniak, of NSW, setting a French text though a little surprisingly said in his preliminary remarks that he doesn't speak the language and was primarily interested in exploring the pure sounds of his chosen text by Blaise Cendrars. This led to some startling moments - in particular, the running down to a dead halt on the word ossification and an abrupt revival on the next one - locomotion".
- OPERA OPERA David Gyger
Biography: Alex Pozniak
Alex Pozniak (b. 1982) is currently in his final year of a Masters in Musical Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, under the guidance of Matthew Hindson. Learning piano from the age of seven (and obtaining an A.Mus.A in 1998), Pozniak’s compositional interests began to blossom during his high school years. Working with composers Anne Boyd, Nicholas Routley and Ian Shanahan during his undergraduate years at the University of Sydney (beginning in 2000), Pozniak went on to obtain First Class Honours and the University Medal in 2005, the year in which his mentorship with Hindson began.
Pozniak completed a BA alongside his music studies in which he studied philosophy, psychology, art history and theory, while majoring in English literature. His musical inspirations come from such wide sources as contemporary art music, avant-garde rock, heavy metal, Merzbow’s Noise music, electronic/computer music and free improvisation.
Recent premieres have included Spectres by the Bourbaki Ensemble, Hybrid Loom by the Sydney Symphony Fellows, Sketches on Britten at the 2007 National Music Camp, and Waveforms for ensemble and electronics by Kammer. Pozniak participated in the inaugural Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra’s Australian Composers’ School in 2006, led by Richard Mills, during which the TSO performed an extended version of Hybrid Loom.
Program Note: Construction
Construction is a setting of the final poem from Blaise Cendrars’ Dix-Neuf Poemes Elastique (Nineteen Elastic Poems). Written in 1919, the poem encapsulates the excitement of the early twentieth century Parisian artistic circles, which included the rise of abstract art, the birth of cinema and of the burgeoning machine age. The poem first presents the material nature of paint and colour, and the process of paint in flux as it dries. In the second half, the painting suddenly comes to life, infused with the locomotive energy of ‘la machine’. The reference to a 75mm cannon recalls the recent memory of the war in which both Cendrars and Fernand Léger fought. As Léger noted with keen hyperbole, ‘the breech-block of a 75mm cannon lying out in the sun did more for my development as a painter than have all the museums in the world’. A musical setting seemed a fitting supplement to a poem whose subject matter is visual art: a way of constructing through the cross-pollination of aesthetic lines.
CONSTRUCTION
De la couleur, de la couleur et des couleurs…
Voice Léger qui grandit
comme le soleil de l’époque tertiaire
Et qui durcit
Et qui fixe
La nature morte
La croûte terrestre
Le liquide
Le brumeux
Tout ce qui se ternit
La géométrie nuageuse
Le fil à plomb qui se résorbe
Ossification.
Locomotion.
Tout grouille
L’esprit s’anime soudain et s’habille à son tour
comme les animaux et les plantes
Prodigieusement
Et voici
La peinture devient cette chose énorme qui bouge
La roue
La vie
La machine
L’âme humaine
Une culasse de 75
Mon portrait
(Blaise Cendrars - Dix-Neuf Poèmes Élastiques (Nineteen Elastic Poems) 1919)
CONSTRUCTION, translation
Colour, colour and more colour…
See Léger expanding like the sun
of a tertiary epoch
And hardening
And settling
Still life
Earthy crust
Liquid
Milky
All that tarnishes
Cloudy geometry
The plumb-line that retracts
Ossification.
Locomotion.
Everything swarms
The spirit suddenly comes to life and in its turn
clothes itself like animals and plants
Prodigiously
And look
that painting becomes that enormous thing that moves
The wheel
Life
The machine
The human soul
A 75mm. breech
My portrait
(Blaise Cendrars - Dix-Neuf Poèmes Élastiques (Nineteen Elastic Poems) 1919)
