Composer Alive – Agnieszka Stulgiska

We’re thrilled to announce Warsaw composer Agnieszka Stulginska as the recipient of our 2015 Composer Alive commission!

In keeping with our Composer Alive format, Ms. Stulginska has written a new piece in three installments us which we performed and recorded in front of a live audience.

We then performed the World Premiere of the new piece in April of 2016 at the Copernicus Center on a concert that Ms. Stulginska attended.

Watch all of the videos below.

Recording Schedule:

First Installment: recorded 1/31/2015
Read Composer Comments

Second Installment recorded 2/21/2015
Read Composer Comments

Third Installment recorded 3/20/2015
Read Composer Comments

Final Concert recorded 4/10/2015

Agnieszka Stulginska was born in Ostrołęka, Poland. She graduated from the Stanisław Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdańsk, Poland in 2006, where she studied composition under the direction of Mr. Krzysztof Olczak. At the same time she completed her composition studies at the Hogeschool voor Wetenschap & Kunst Lemmeninstitut in Leuven, Belgium.

She then went on to complete her post-graduate studies under the direction of Professor Luc van Hove at the Royal Conservatory in Antwerp, Belgium under a scholarship from the Government of Belgium. In 2012 she completed her post-graduate studies in Film Music and Visual Arts at the Academy of Music in Łódź, Poland.

Agnieszka Stulgińska has received numerous awards including: 1st place in the Musicconversation competition in Georgetown, Texas, and the 3rd place at the 46th Tadeusz Baird Competition in Warsaw, Poland.

Her composition was chosen to be performed for CCO (Cayuga Chamber Orchestra) Composer Showcase in Ithaca, New York. She also participated in a four year program to promote young composers which was organized by the European Krzysztof Penderecki Center for Musicin Lusławice, Poland.

Her compositions were performed during numerous festivals all over the world by such artists as: Kwartludium, Lutosławski Piano Duo, Neoquartet, Prometheus Ensemble, I Solisti del Vento, Elise Artoisenet & Marie-Noelle Betce Piano Duo, Silesian Chamber Orchestra, Warsaw Contemporary Ensemble, Kwadrofonik, Lux:NM, Cayuga Chamber Orchestra and Progress Chamber Orchestra.

Mr. Marcin Strzelecki best characterizes her work when he said: “Agnieszka Stulgińska’s output is, strictly speaking, the music of our times. Her pieces are enveloped in the sonic aura of municipal spaces, street noises, sounds familiar to every inhabitant of a big city. This music does not refrain from fascination with other art areas, multimedia included. The artist works in cooperation with film directors, photographers, designers, image creators and choreographers.

As a teacher, Agnieszka undertakes creative work with children and young people, especially during workshops where music is written as an illustration to fairy tales and legends from Scandinavia, as well as the Pomerania and Kurpie Regions in Poland.”

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Composer Comments for First Installment:

I would like to sincerely thank Seth Boustead, Access Contemporary Music and Palomar Ensemble, for the invitation to collaborate in Composer Alive. It is a true honor to be chosen for this project and I thank the audience for their interest.

This project is a wonderful opportunity for me that is proving to be an interesting, engaging and rewarding experience. Being both a composer as well as a painter, I experience sound as color and sound as other senses.

In composing sonorous experimental music it is difficult to predict the final outcome. Sometimes my ideas are intuitive and spontaneous. By composing the piece in installments I am able to check the combination of sounds before an expressively unique finale. Working on this piece is a lot like cooking - experimenting and combining different ingredients to create something tasty and sophisticated.

It is difficult to convert my thoughts and feelings about this style of music into words. How should an artist describe such unfinished work in words? If a “picture paints a thousand words”, surely a composition like this must as well.

Collaboration through composition of music provides me an opportunity to experience how the different musicians interpret my score. This helps me to better express myself in the language of music.

When Seth first invited me to participate on the project, I had no concept of what my composition would be. I found myself traditionally singing (praying) and dancing in a Kurpie village in Poland, near the location of my mother’s birth. The style of the music is so intense that I decided to make use of it for my piece for the Palomar Ensemble.

My composition concentrates on everything but the melody (- no melody) (“Between the Songs”): - detuning and tuning from many many sounds into one composition, - waves and pulses in different forms, white voice (original scream singing technique, which is a characteristic for the Polish folk vocal music), vocal inflections when speaking and accents (poetry, text) and the content of songs (life full of hardships, vitality, death, purgatory, heaven, mysticism, love and many others). The acoustics and characteristics of the location also influenced the composition itself.

The composition consists of three parts.

First Installment is called: “Old Waves”

Composer Comments for Second Installment:

When I first heard flamenco performed live, I was thrilled and hypnotized by how the old woman sang. Her hoarse voice tore up from the bowels with all that she sang. Just about everything was there - she sang about love, suffering, death and even about ordinary life and daily work chores.

It surprised me that the Polish countryside women sing and shout what directly relates to their everyday lives. Of course, the rhythm and melody are fundamentally different but the content, expression and truthfulness, carries some inexplicable similarity. They singbecause of a strong inner need, rather than for money and fame, as in so many different parts of the world.

In relation to the dance, when I attempted to learn Brazilian rhythms from the indigenous people, I noticed that each time I try to properly play with the time signature, the more it starts to diverge from what they are playing. In their playing, "one" was different than "two" for me, "two" was not the same as "three", and "three" was unlike "four"!

It is similar to blues and African music, where the emphasis is also in a different place. In that precise moment I have discovered that each region of the world perceives the rhythm a bit differently. At the same time, everyone has the same strong inner desire to dance - the same heart rate on which the breathing frequency depends.

What is the current state of the indigenous Polish dances? Similar to what was described above - "two" does not take as much as "one" and "three" differs from the previous ones.

It is my honor to invite you to listen to the second part of my piece for Palomar Ensemble which I have called "Dance with My Breath". In the creation aspect of this part, once again, I tried to include everything that happens outside of the melody - even outside the pitch and the traditional way of playing.

I attempted to find what is common to everyone: the heart rate and breathing. And this is what makes people unique, different and one of a kind.

I have decided to neither suggest the type of dance nor what I generally describe in this piece to give the performers the freedom of interpretation. This will add an extra dimension to this composition - as to how it is perceived in different parts of the world.

Composer Comments for Third Installment:

When I began this piece I already had sketches of the first two installments in my mind. For the third installment, I only had the words of an old traditional Polish folk song to work with, especially the following text: “Oh sweet healing for my troubled heart.”

So I decided to wait to see what comes out of the first and second installment and somehow create something out of the outcome of those first two parts. However, when I have initially heard those first two installment about three weeks ago, my impression was that the piece has already almost been completed.

At that moment, I had two options. I could either follow what Alfred Hitchcock has said: ”A good film should start with an earthquake and be followed by a rising tension” or alternatively, move the action element to another medium or a layer. To achieve this, the words of the old traditional Polish folk song has helped me.

I moved the narration aspect of this piece to the audio layer. Therefore, the third installment is now performed using the audio layer which now also includes fragments of the first installment.

It gives an impression that the performers experience inside of them what has already happened in their life and that they also have been healed within.

Right in the beginning of the third installment, we actually do not hear the performers play. We do see their faces and hear their breathing, instead. The healing aspect (impression) comes by means of my mother’s very quiet singing voice – sounding like it has just been played from some old vinyl record.

We then come back to the very beginning of the piece where the cello imitates an old analog plate. Following this, I use some special electronic effects to create pulses and waves that are not part of this virtual layer.

There is one more aspect to keep in mind about this piece and song itself. At the same time I was writing this piece, I was also desperately trying to find somebody who could sing me this old Polish folk song I mentioned earlier.

Unfortunately, there was nobody who could remember the melody - even the old man from the village from whom I obtained a notebook with this text. Therefore, although the melody has been lost, it still works as the central idea of my piece. Keep in mind that a “lost melody” has universal meaning. The words are just so beautiful and pure and such melody goes much more further than one’s lifetime.

It definitely seems like everyone of us has this kind of melody in their soul. The beauty and goodness of the melody is impossible to describe. We do miss it and are constantly searching for it all our life.

Each piece that I write relates to events in my life. Many things that happened to me over the last three months are part of this composition. I am happy to share it with you - that you are now a part of it.

Enjoy listening to it!