How Do You See the Future of the Double Bass? — a conversation with Aleksander Gabryś

English translation

Aleksander Gabryś

Double bassist and composer, prizewinner in both fields. He studied in Poland and Switzerland. He appears in many centres of musical life (including New York, Buenos Aires - Teatro Colon, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, South Africa, Armenia, Georgia, Rome, Venice, Madrid, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Riga, Belgrade, Vienna, Paris, Berlin) as a soloist and chamber musician with leading European groups for new music. He has given many first performances; works have been dedicated to him by composers. He has performed with the NOSPR, the Sinfonie-Orchester Basel, the Silesian and Zielona Góra Philharmonics, Kremerata Baltica, and others. He writes expressive music, with elements of instrumental theatre. His output includes archival recordings for radio and television, and among his discs the solo album Bassolo (DUX).

DONAT ZAMIARA: A standard question, but one asked of everyone: why the double bass?

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: Because the Bass - our baby-bass - PLAYS LOW, and that excites! Feeling the bass, already in childhood, as the foundation and as the mathematically understood DIFFERENCE of high tones, therefore first of all as a mental “pseudo-bass” reflecting the true Quotient of the World, the differential sound, the square and cubic “Differenzton” that walks and slides along the foundations of acoustics in our life “since always” (all the more so the sharper our hearing is), as the difference of subtracting Hertzes, also of all those tones that Low and High Culture force into us through radio and the internet, opens a certain kind of Purity, a kind of religion which, however, no one dares to call by name; we play with A. B. Ciechański’s beautiful euphemism, “do you want to be happy? play the double bass”, and this is barely, but also already, an introduction to the truth of vibration in the low registers. We are lucky that we double-bass, but after all the athletic and figural capacities we acquire while learning to play this hyper-instrument are an invitation toward other dimensions of life: to treat it more demandingly; if one hears more, one must also feel the bass sum of that “mountain” before our face. In my opinion this can also be translated into human political, amorous, and religious life, without feeling oneself a Don-Quixote in the matter, nevertheless attacking the present age “donquixotically” from the point of view of long-distance and long-wave, single bass pulsations, which professionally, one way or another, we manage. My collaborators are often, very often, CONTRAFORTE PLAYERS (a new version of the contrabassoon, stronger, cleaner, more powerful and better) and LUPOPHONE PLAYERS (bass oboe), because low instruments give the full spectrum of colours, unlike high instruments which, in a concentrated sense, are its “cut-out”. As “homo sapiens” (“sapiens electronicus contrabassissimus”?), with the traditions of having two arms and two legs, I consider the double bass the cleverest way out of the situation in which we were placed after birth.

DONAT ZAMIARA: You received a classical education, and yet the most important place in your life is occupied by broadly understood contemporary music, beginning with the “already” classics of the twentieth century and ending with the new works of the present century. What decided this?

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: The course of life. Life in places where, besides cultivating traditional musical joys, people invest in new discoveries in people, in situations, and through that also in the souls of those who themselves invest in art, insofar as everyone “sometimes is” an artist... But that does happen at moments even with billionaires ambitiously playing flutes after seventy. Yet what soothes their senses better than our double-bass drive, drifting through the corners of palaces as a symbol of hope that somewhere, far away, “someone is having a wonderful time while we are sleeping”? “Someone does not sleep so that someone else may sleep”, and our healthy bass travels through walls while other instruments do not have those chances. Waves fifteen metres long pass, in principle, through every wall, even underground. I had to do with such a bass, and with work on such a bass, in my collaboration with Zbigniew Karkowski on a solo for me. But that was the aim of my education; that is how I see it today, if I were to assess why I learned to play. Probably, in the middle of life, one has to crumble into all the little notes and little elements of played and classical music, thus standing in the classical centre of the possibilities of the “instrument-in-the-hands” called the double bass.

In the very middle of bass and bow, in the arrangement of the “eight of infinity”, jumping spiccato or sautillé in the hope of “infinity through the classicism of apparatus movement”, we dissolve into technique on the basis of literature that, in my opinion, from the point of view of Darwinian Nature, is artificial in our times. I am speaking here of adaptations of violin concertos, etc., for double bass. I think it is a circus. Of course I myself love the circus; I myself sometimes am the “head of the circus” “de profundis” and give my clowns a beating, hence this digression. My answer and recipe: contact with psychophysical literature, therefore again the double-bass “Bible of Foundations”, that is THERAPS by Iannis Xenakis, Valentine by Jacob Druckman, or Sequenza XIVb by Stefano Scodanibbio / Luciano Berio. Xenakis brought a double bass into his home while composing, then before 1976. He tried out all the grips with his own stretched hands to be certain that it would be playable. I am therefore amused by the DVD of a well-known ensemble from Germany, in which the double bassist says that he did not give in to colleagues who said Xenakis’s Theraps could not be played, and that he played and recorded it, only how far from the composer’s idea??? Not believing in the faith of others, this double bassist considers THERAPS to be made of unplayable and accidental notes (indeed, Brownian motions are sometimes the basis here, but selected by the composer they become a concretely composed “melody” and cease to be a notation of chaos!), and therefore that, in sum, it does not matter what one plays; instead of runs he uses glissandi, and instead of fff (the instruction “crushing the string” in the score) he plays a thin mezzoforte!!! Here is a lack of basic respect for the composer! For me, unbelievable in the XXI century, or in any other... The approach, briefly speaking, to contemporary music on the double bass is still “dimmed”: people probably think that “it cannot be done” or “the double bassist is doing impossible things”. The matter mentioned earlier, “being happy”, probably gets lost somewhere here; let us therefore sum up the positives: Xenakis’s honesty, for he foresaw the perception of the average “searcher-double-bassist” from the end of the twentieth century and adapted the notation ideally to his/her perception; Iannis Xenakis as an architect composing for double bass on the basis of the multiagogic UPIC system he had freshly invented and created then; against laziness and abnegation of novelty, conservatism with its ephemerides on the side of salaried traditionalists. Hence, from the classical path I am where we are needed: in a reality full of colours and inspirations, openings and hopes, “scents” of the approaching Good and barely overheard hints of the incoming breath of beautiful encounters, a reality of microharmonies and flexible-deep, maximal transformations... The sound of the double bass is here the ideal foundation and point of departure as a tool of contact between the body, through electronics, and dreams. Their sniper-like precision and the setting of aims, and the “shots fired”, that is, sounds that hit their mark, essentially fill my days.

DONAT ZAMIARA: Since we are speaking of contemporaneity, can you specify what you understand by the term “contemporary music”? I know it is a controversial cluster of words, so you may correct me.

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: For clarity I will divide the subject into two camps: paid arrangers of sounds (installers, efficient technicians) and composers. By the latter I mean a truly narrow handful of people with a fresh and new Idea. Something that will shake you through 111 years of hot life after a single hearing in youth. It has to be an incredible coincidence, but when you manage to experience it and can additionally summon, precisely in that moment, REFLECTION, auto-inspection, Actus Contra Naturam in the C. G. Jungian sense - who are you at that moment? - then you experience such a bottom, such a bass, such DNA of your Nature, that in sum it is enough only to connect twenty thousand watts and try what comes out with an iPad encephalograph on your head controlling the sound, simultaneously with the artistic impulse that such DNA provokes in you... The principle of feedback is almost infinite here; it is hard even to find time for interviews, but vibrating, we talk... Recently I was setting up a “talkbox” for the double bass, though in my case controlled by the movement of the mouth through a headset microphone while playing the double bass, additionally effected through several parameters by the toes of the right foot, and it sounded no less bestiary-like than the first American attempts with the talkbox in the “sweet american music” of the 1950s. Certain unfinished problems with electronics, which still chokes when it comes to processing time, space, and pitch in extreme conditions and paradoxical collisions, are also, for me and my collaborators, a field for creating new technological solutions. We hope finally to create an instrument worthy of our times. In our Middle Ages the double bass is certainly one of the ideal points for winding up the foundations of experiment.

DONAT ZAMIARA: At what moment, and why, did you make a turn toward modernity? Was the education you received at home (contact with your mother, a music theorist) a help, pressure, or rather a signpost, and what was the role of your father-composer in all this?

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: I will make that turn soon! There was always a piano at home (taken apart and partly pacified, prepared, and miked by me); in the 1980s I also had a violin, a clarinet, a guitar, a Commodore64, an Amiga500, and a Kasprzak tape recorder that, through measured pressure, allowed many transformations. Forced to practise as a juvenile pianist, I created my own recordings and with them tried to get my own back on the overwhelming, classical, and reality-unadapted sphere of demands of my “Piano Ladies”. In sum, when today I look at how children are taught in Switzerland, I have an ambivalent impression: on the one hand, such coercion “would never pass in life”; on the other, without that coercion I would not have had such pressure to prove that in spirit I was not a pianist, that I lived in a parallel musical world more interesting to me. Returning to your question: one can perform everything modernly, even in an old style. I am speaking here of the paradox of a paradox: we empathize with the style of oldness, wear their costumes and hairstyles and even hand-sewn shoes; this discomfort amuses. I myself studied violone at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis for three years, so I licked this style of transition from the role of “curator of a historical exhibition” to “entering the exhibition as a real world”... tell me, who are you when performing early music? What technological evolution, what kind of up- or down-grade, must be exerted on one’s brain in order to feel in a way appropriate to the situation in which we have been placed again? Are we the ones discovering early music? Are we slaves to certain rules? Is the “feeling of freedom and joy” while playing such music not a strongly artificial balancing on the thin rope of conservatism? The case is similar with jazz, even the so-called free kind, which I also consider a conservative art in our times. I think that cultivating every “musical style” is a task for “curators and artistic scientists”, while the Artist, after mastering basic technique and developing his own, must reject models and seek his own global solutions. But perhaps I demand a great deal of the “extra-musical” from music... Contact with the greatnesses of our world seems healing to me here. Hence I cannot say that I made a turn toward modernity, because I was always only its element, while such manifestations of sociological cohabitation as so-called schools, etc., took possession of me initially and transitionally. Modernity, in my opinion, is the only solution to all problems, the only necessary way of looking at reality, and if it became a general attitude, we would have a beautiful paradise not only on earth, but the cosmos would long since be ours, or at least a few nice planets.

DONAT ZAMIARA: How do you prepare for the compositions you perform? How much Olek is there in all of it (in performance), and how much of the composer?

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: Here I have two systems: psycho-communicational and computer-based. Or rather three; there is also playing technique. Of course traditional reading is not foreign to me: notes, rhythms, colours, dynamics, interpretive courses... but is this really, to the very end and truly, what we are after in music? Taking psychiatry into account, we possess eight elements of control of the “system of transmission”, contact, play with the audience by means of the double bass: intuition, intellect, feelings, perception, ego, shadow, anima-animus, and self (everything works in two or even four directions, by feedback). Playing with these elements of control of the tool-instrument gives the interpreter-creator quite a lot of satisfaction. An unpleasant splinter of these skills is the capacity for a penetrating and crushing judgment of the player as a human being. Of oneself as well; therefore the arousal that playing the double bass is can even connect with aversion toward oneself: in this sense every movement made on the instrument is a victory over oneself and over the reality in which, by force of circumstance, we are immersed and “swim” along with the sound.

The computer system essentially refers to memory and to “engraving into sheet metal” all those motor-interpretive-intellectual-emotional assumptions; it is based on programs and applications that improve, accelerate, and visualize the statistics of learning. Personally, since the 1990s I used SuperMemo; now there are already numerous other apps. Fundamentally, such nonlinear learning leads to a state in which the work can be played backwards, and in the last bar we feel exactly the same as in the first. This technique was useful to me in mastering large portions of challenges on the occasion of various competitions. The third layer is the technical element: let us say that there are 54,000 positions of the double bassist in relation to the double bass, taking into account the product of the possible ambit of the position of the place on the bow at which we happen to be playing (≃25), times the positions between sul tasto and sul ponticello (≃12), on each string (x5), with six vertical angles of inclination of the right wrist and six vertical positions of inclination of the left wrist (this has timbral significance: with what consistency we lead the narrative by the position of the left fingers), and we obtain 54 thousand settings of the body-playing-apparatus to choose from!... Thus besides describing the bass by means of intuitive, mental, perceptual, and emotional movements, and interpretation as “I”, as “not-I”, as “arousal-goal tendency”, and as “super-world, self”, we can place ourselves “in counter” to these interpretive options in those at least fifty-four thousand positions. Interpreting this physically, I think it would be interesting to see an example of a performer jumping the playing apparatus “arc-wise” (consistently and asymptotically) in a series of contrasts of positions going on one side from the minimum and on the other from the maximum deflection of apparatus extremes, while simultaneously interpreting some favourite work, for instance by J. S. Bach. I consider exercises of this type instrumental yoga, but as to the artistic value of such events one must be cautious, so as not to confuse the concepts of art and exercise.

DONAT ZAMIARA: Bestiarium! Can you bring us closer to your process of composing? A flash of an idea, or the conscious realization of certain concepts that were born in your head long ago?

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: Bestiarium Fortune Square TrioTrip SinfAct for double bass, violin, horn, symphony orchestra, and a considerable amount of electronics w-intégrée into the instruments, based on synthesizers and the modular shaping of process and sound, is the most powerful performing apparatus I have had at my disposal so far. This week a film will appear about our concerts and work, as well as a review of our actions in the respected musicological journal DISSONANZ in Switzerland. Certain favourite trails and obsessions of the artistic instinct remain the same; perhaps they change only as much as the face with age, but basically I approach every compositional task with a basic pinch of “creative drop” in the brain, which is unwritten, rather an “act of creative will”, its need, a compulsion certainly constituting at least 25% of my life. Besides, I think this inspirational auto-bio-chemistry accompanies not only me during every improvisational or creative process. Of course composing contains a whole range of processes, yet I do not begin work unless I burn for it with sincere love and desire. Luckily for me, I have within me a whole mine of this longing for the “not-yet-done”, and therefore I undertake every next process of action as if I were beginning “from zero”; thus I approach my own ideas, works, and recordings every following day as if I were seeing them for the first time in my life, and then for a moment I die of frustration over the lost time and over what I had not yet thought of then, but which I now perfectly sense in advance and know how it is supposed to be, and then something sparks, what you mention: flashes of ideas. This is a kind of mediation with oneself, making independently built contradictory columns of concepts conflict with one another, suffering because of that, and precisely “mediating with oneself”, as in an alchemical crucible in search of “lapis”. This artistic struggle is of course conducted under conscious control; out of this inner mud one sculpts, experiments, polishes. Then only one version remains, the so-called finished form of the work, and in sum, despite the joy supplied by the energy of subsequent presentations and performances, there is a certain sadness that this is already the end of the time given to me for work on this piece... I have to leave it, because the day of concerts is coming, and then there are new artistic tasks. In this way, with each successive artefact, I hope to become more and more “compacted” in every fraction of time in expressing simultaneously thought, feeling, realization, and striving, regardless of whether this is playing the double bass, an instrumental work, improvisation, or simply a social experience.

DONAT ZAMIARA: Despite your solo activity, you do not avoid chamber music. When you draw on the so-called classics, do you do it for pleasure?

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: The life of a free artist means that all artistically encountered relations clarify with time and people fit together, or they do not. Of course anyone can change, yet the process of individuation without the participation of a psychoanalyst is a task for a narrow handful of people endowed with deep self-reflection. I am glad of the privilege of choosing with whom I will play and what; of course I sometimes accept other people’s proposals, because I do not want to close myself inside my own “bestiary”. Playing with my Ensemble Phoenix, Klangforum Wien (on 14 and 15 March, Enno Poppe’s opera IQ at the MaerzMusik festival in Berlin: I play double bass and also sing on stage; it is a costumed mixture of styles, refined music), Ensemble Modern (today at the Kurt Weill Festival), oenm in Salzburg, Collegium Novum Zürich, I would basically call chamber music, in every possible configuration, taking into account all the novelties we possess from original percussion or intimate electronics, or instruments as key as the contraforte or lupophone. Performing new music in the company of these last-mentioned instruments is an experience that changes one every time: it is something like a mass, only lived more strongly. In this way I can say that I practise chamber music for pleasure. Of course I also regularly receive invitations in the sphere of festival chamber classics, where I enjoy, among others, the company of Sol Gabetta, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, or Gidon Kremer; nevertheless I treat such concerts more as a fitness test than a deep artistic experience. The so-called broad audience lives on this and “goes wild”, and I am sincerely surprised, because after the emphatic and almost euphoric experiences brought by contemporary music in all its varieties, I consider the uniform, or rather the costume of the classics, simply constricting: our instrument is no longer changing (apart from the new experiment in Markneukirchen, a giant violin, an alternative Octobass from 2014), it still retains its classical form; what has gained gigantic dynamism, however, already since the middle of the last century, is composers’ thinking about the double bass; it is impossible not to respect this, not to embrace it with the most urgent attention! Let us finally acknowledge this gift, openly and willingly, because who knows how long this extraordinary “boom” will last if we do not create “demand” for it? The costume of the classics, indispensable at the school and even study stage (after all, one must learn the basic craft on something, and in this sense the best models are precisely here), after I had completed that necessary road, turned out for me to be an insufficient impulse for further work on myself; it seemed to me, with respect for all the wild, “romantic” virtuosos of the bass, simply tedious, because deprived of a vector of novelty, of those original idioms intended for the contemporary bass, and only for the bass... Simply: it did not create (I emphasize: in my thinking about our instrument!) a future, goals, or even... occasions for play. Of course I value above all the genius of Schubert, Bach, Beethoven, but today we have different times, and there is no point blocking oneself with complexes or the “comfortable slippers” of conservatives.

DONAT ZAMIARA: Are you also involved in pedagogy in the field of the music you play?

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: When young musicians turn to me, I always try to answer, and sometimes arrange a creative meeting. A few days ago I gave a four-hour lesson to a double bassist from Japan, who came to me with a whole heap of scores, but also with no idea how to play all that is notated differently from black classical little notes with tails. Jacob Druckman’s Valentine seemed to her at first an abstraction, yet it is “far-out” classicism of style and dynamics and at the same time of the precision of notation of every movement on the double bass, from 1969, from New York. Both of us had joy from what we managed to discover, especially from that state of euphoria about which Druckman writes in the preface to Valentine; as a result I “wrecked” my throat, and today I think that although I like teaching (I taught for some time at the high school and the M. Karłowicz State Music School in Katowice), I will nevertheless remain with occasional giving of advice and leading of workshops on what interests me, instead of engaging in regular pedagogy, which incidentally ties one to a place, and this clashes with a free concert programme and ordinary human artistic freedom. There is plenty to talk about; a mass of wonderful, brilliant works for solo bass and with company is waiting! When I think that I would have to teach Dittersdorf “round and round”, the question immediately arises in me: “would that be why I should live?” Of course, “Dittersdorf is almost like Mozart for violin”, my Professor in Basel, Ovidiu Badila, told me this, and he almost convinced me. Besides, I admire Dittersdorf for his double-bass skills and the boldness of his expedition to Beethoven; this is an important moment showing that double bassists have adrenaline. It is possible, moreover, that I will record this Dittersdorf, my own piqued-up cadenza version, because after all, like everyone, I ploughed through that Concerto, played it this way and that, and I know that some bowings were sometimes treated almost symbolically! I treat the aura of those triple (as in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and among Freemasons!) transposed harmonics, Dittersdorf’s “call to the hunt”, with sympathy and as a very pleasant invitation across the space of centuries. Nevertheless, I consider the use of the Dittersdorf concerto during, for instance, entrance auditions to orchestras a misunderstanding in relation to the composer Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf: I studied the violone for three years at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis; at the entrance exam I played Mozart’s Per questa bella mano KV612 in Viennese tuning, that is: E-A-d-fis-a; I also played Dittersdorf, and we can establish one basic fact here: in the main theme of this concerto, on the violone in Viennese tuning, it is enough to place the left hand in the proper position and use two fingers twice, while on our baby-double-bass they order the hand to jump repeatedly here and there, in order to play a few sounds tuned into tempered (that is, fraudulent in the sense of natural tuning) D major. I think that Dittersdorf, if he came to the Probespiel of our times, would be strongly surprised, if not offended, that they are destroying the beauty of his work.

DONAT ZAMIARA: Compositions have been written for you. Is it difficult to persuade composers to write works for double bass, or do they rather willingly use the ever greater sonoristic possibilities of our instrument that are still being discovered? And is the theatrical element present in your performances part of the composition, or already your interpretation? (In reference to the fifth question.)

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: Works very often came to me by themselves. I would compare the fertility of my Father Ryszard here to that of my favourite Giacinto Scelsi: both wrote about ten works for double bass, out of an ordinary inner compositional need. (In the area of the double-bassization of this “need”, the record-holder is probably Galina Ustvolskaya, whose Dies Irae for eight double basses, piano, and cube I have played several times and with pleasure; I invite readers to the next performances!). In this way I have a few “hits”, some of which have not yet been performed. Larger forms “shelf-penetrate”: concertos with orchestra, for example Gabrysconcerto by Jevgenij Iršai, which I think I will premiere next year, depending on construction schedules (I am thinking of the new form of the Silesian Philharmonic) in Poland, as well as smaller forms, solos dedicated to me, UNDERGROUND: Traces by Aram Hovhanissyan or ERECTION by Stephen Crowe. Zbigniew Karkowski’s solo STUDIO VARESE is waiting for its premiere, as is Alex Buess’s work inspired by Béla Lugosi in Dracula from 1931, or a thing by Nicolas Tzortzis in which I scenically represent Tony Soprano, with double bass naturally. These spontaneously mentioned composers write for me-us of their own will, and I must emphasize here the capacity of the Swiss system to finance this type of undertaking: composers here have concrete chances for subsidies that give them momentum for living and creating. As for the sonoristic possibilities of the double bass: as the largest instrument it most resembles an orchestra, with that quantity of colour palettes which, by articulations and attacks or by ascents on the double bass, we know how to “broadcast”. This always returns to me with particular force when I play György Kurtág’s duet with soprano, a half-hour set of super-funny texts about, for example, sleeping potatoes or other impertinences (for example Dreistigkeit or Touropa), incredibly perfectly composed for double bass, which here gives the soprano an “orchestral” foundation, sometimes singing, sometimes motoric, but above all ideally, brilliantly harmonic; after all, Kurtág is the compositional “grandson” of Béla Bartók. Besides this, let us remember Bertram Turetzky’s double-bass book, The contemporary Contrabass: it is a collection of his attempts, double-bass discoveries, compositional provocations, and achievements around the globe. He is a kind of “alternative Gary Karr” of the double bass, assuming that Gary is for the classicists and Bertram for the modernists, and indeed he still teaches in San Diego. Many things can be learned from Turetzky; he even came to Poland and recorded Witold Szalonek’s concerto with the then WOSPRiTV. Let us recall that this Concerto was also played by Maestro Fernando Grillo, deceased since July of last year, and that this masterpiece was entrusted also to unworthy me in 2004. Since I am listing so many names of stars of the contemporary double bass, I will also mention a work extraordinarily important for the history of our instrument, Stefano Scodanibbio’s Sequenza XIVb, signed with Luciano Berio’s name. There the double bass of the XXII century is written down. Whoever searches will not go astray; I had the pleasure of assisting Scodanibbio at the Basel Academy of Music when he gave courses and played, five times in a row from memory, looking us straight in the eyes, this ultravirtuosic, mystical, and at the same time technically extraordinarily original work. As for the theatrical element, I admit that we have a strange profession: we are not actors, and yet we experience emotions on stage. We show them. Some play “with a cold face”, but does keeping the cheek muscles in check not complicate the development of uncontrolled expansions of transmission within oneself, especially during a public appearance? Perhaps it is worth opening oneself within the limits that our culture opens for us. By culture, by culturality, I understand for example Peter Greenaway’s newest film, Goltzius & the Pelican Company, an image exemplifying boundaries that keep widening together with culture, not constraining the abilities and possibilities of us as “homo sapiens” and at the same time “homo ludens”. These limits, called the “event horizon”, are after all determined by the circumference of the power of our imagination. I consider every action capable of being understood as theatre, and especially playing an instrument. That musicians are not good actors is not my fault, although I recommend individuational development to everyone; besides, everyone undergoes it throughout life, in a more or less conscious way. With composers, meanwhile, it varies: some write exactly what must be expressed in which fraction of time, others suggest the situation in which I have found myself and what musical options I have. The theatre, for me, is not theatre at all, hence it is hard for me to answer your question.

DONAT ZAMIARA: Can you share with us your impressions of the projects in which you have taken part? You spent several weeks living on stage. Where is the boundary between the artist and the private person?

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: Hmm, that really was the only action (six weeks in total!) during which I would sometimes be awakened by the public violating my double bass, just when, in our reworked calendar, my allotted five hours of sleep had arrived. Each of the five creator-performers moved with a specially selected step in our musical machine for 13 times 13, thus 169 hours, that is one week and one hour, because that is how long the spectacle lasted, during which the public visited us interactively at every possible hour; we were installed in the centre of Bern, so in the warm August/September of 2012 we did not lack an audience also between three and six at night. We certainly tested our limits, because everyone eventually had to collapse, while the transmission and performance nevertheless continued live, both on webcams and on the radio: we bought our own FM band for those 169 hours, and the public from the entire area of the Swiss capital could follow us non-stop. Anyone who came to us and played with us could presumably later find themselves in our reworkings and layerings of bands and textures, which gradually, within Carrillo_N13¿, we produced, accumulated, and “unstitched” in ourselves. Two architect-engineers assisted us, satisfying our whims during a month of preparation with professional patience; de facto we supplemented the whole Machine until the very last second: inflated inside the skeleton construction we had built from three tons of wood, a large red aviation balloon formed an entry airlock, so that at the beginning the public had to climb up to us on all fours, with provisions! The delivery of victuals was indeed a form of ticket: we were living there in an extensive space, but cut off for more than a week; as cogs of our microtonal musical machine, we constituted its “food”, but we ourselves, as human beings, also needed food, and with precisely this the public paid-saved us. During this event I built my own instrument, named HARFEOLA, with a string more than a hundred metres long stretched over little wheels installed on the roof of an old, inactive descent corridor; so it was an art of recycling. All that wood created an incredible resonance, an acoustic box for my harfeola, and after it was connected to electronics the possibilities became unlimited. The impression that comes to me first now is the fact that at a certain moment a mass of children took us over, because they simply went wild at our place; they had an instrumental paradise. We had at our disposal, among other things, a sixteenth-tone piano, whose 96 keys from lowest to highest contained one octave; each key therefore meant only 1/16 of a tone. Such a piano, as well as a 1/3-tone piano and other fabulous sound toys, belongs to the Bern Academy of Music. The idea of bringing precisely this piano into our project was mine, and so... a helicopter arrived, lowered the piano through the roof, and we had accompaniment for The Internationale, which within this project, under the sign “CAPITAL”, we performed in the form of a waltz... There have been so many ideas and works on my path... As I see, we would have to do interviews more often; live reports are probably better! And so I invite you on 14 and 15 March to Berlin: IQ by Enno Poppe, under his baton, is a new form of opera, at least from the point of view of a double bassist. A bassist who has stirred with his bow in more than one pot, and does not intend to stop!

Interview conducted by Donat Zamiara. We thank Mateusz Loska for his help.

[Online - since 11-12 March 2014.]