Nie dajcie się zjeść!

Nie dajcie się zjeść!

This advice from “Uncle Witold” I understood literally in the 1970s and 80s, and I heard it on the stairs after the Professor’s many visits to my parents almost every time. He would add, already invisible beyond the bend of the staircase: Baśka is working!!! Full of energy and new understandings of the nature of sounds surrounding Him, he moved toward new - for those times and for my reality, over-dimensional - international compositional missions. Today - the perspective of several hundred performances already, on five continents, of my Father Ryszard’s work An die Freude, based on a motif spun from the sound-bearing letters of Witold Szalonek’s first and last name, alongside motifs sung high toward Joy from L. v. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, places me before a Master wonderfully open to contact but also authoritative, to whom I owe my first insight into the description of the secrets of natural microtonality. I felt Szalonek’s pioneering already as a child during our many meetings in the family home. Even then I tried to imitate the symbols used by the Professor in notation; even then, with pleasant indignation, I received the remarks of the Master in a scarf, directing me toward more sensible and truer definitions of musical behaviors and sonic events. The awakening of new-dimensional views onto the possibilities of experiencing the truest beauty in the tenderly stroked brutal extremes that an instrument can draw from itself, with at the same time a one-word command-information being set down: Form! For the Professor, the form of a work was so important that already in itself it constituted an expression of the rank and value of the work that would only then be poured into it in the form of sonic contents.

The first work of the Master that I performed, on the occasion of His 65th birthday in 1992, was 1+1+1+1, opening the mind and soul of an adept of the newest musical thought. Henryk Mikołaj Górecki was also present at the concert; he visited many times the successive unveilings of Szalonek’s double-bass visions. When I had already gone onto the stage and was preparing the double bass as well as the analog recordings of the three remaining double-bass tracks - synchronizing the tracks was then no small art and challenge! - he gave a loud cry in the full concert hall of the Academy of Music in Katowice: “What have you cooked up there again, Gabryś?!”, only to shake both our hands after the concert. Szalonek recognized the version for four double basses as a new realizational step in the polyversionality of his work, and I too drew many lessons, reaching into the philosophical nature of music, from the infinity and multiplicity of all possible courses of this largely aleatoric work.

When, in 1997, I received a composition fellowship at Schloss Wiepersdorf, 80 km from Berlin, I had the extraordinary opportunity to live for more than a week alone with the composer in his villa in West Berlin. This period of contact with the Professor undoubtedly gave the greatest chance to unify notions concerning the dynamics and meaning of the musical work. I was then working on the work Actus contra Naturam, referring to Opus contra Naturam, a notion created by Carl Gustav Jung and related to the process of individuation. In the text of my authorship used for this electroacoustic work with dancer, the notion Neutrino-Eye appears at the end. This student-like figuration of a Thought faster than light did not please the Master, and for a long time we searched for a better solution at the point where semantics and sound meet. When, during this conversation, I began to cut bread, Szalonek stood up and took the knife and loaf from my hands, and I can say that it was from Him that I learned to cut bread properly, from a completely different side than I had done before.

The difference in experience and age ceased to be a barrier from the moment when, in preparing the Cadenza from Musica concertante per violbasso e orchestra, the Master ordered me to improvise and, into the Unknown, listened to my double-bass associations, experiments and painful emotions after several dozen minutes of nonstop playing. We both liked these exchanges of possibilities and energy, and the discussions of that time certainly gave me a surprisingly strong understanding of a beauty new to me - like that arising from the division of the natural column of air in underpressure, created by the arrangements of keys and fingerings described by the Maestro; from the compositional side, I remain as sincerely grateful to Him for this as He sincerely devoted, invested and gave His Time to describe, in the form of multiphonics that work sensationally and fantastically, these non-mainstream and non-academic foundational milestones of the Newest Music, which was already in the world powerfully forcing its way into the consciousness of concert audiences, while in Poland it was generally being pushed away.

Of course, since that time very many publications have appeared describing multiphonic phenomena in new ways, but we also know that in the case of wind instruments a great deal really depends on the characteristics of the concrete specimen of the instrument; so the performer - endowed by Szalonek with an open mind - often simply has to invent his own fingerings. More than once I witnessed people’s extreme delight in themselves when they had played a work of the Master; the surprise that it can be done and that it is excellent, the readiness for experiment, even for a brief moment... this is an extra-musical force, a kind of mission that Szalonek felt with immense strength. Years later, in 2011, I had the enormous good fortune to perform 1+1 again, this time with the famous jazz double bassist Zbigniew Wegehaupt in the great concert hall of the Academy of Music in Katowice. Wegehaupt, a historical and extraordinary talent of the jazz scene, had - despite his great fame - great respect for good contemporary music and, despite his 57 years, had never until that moment performed such music; for him it was a phenomenon and a musical collision of musical cosmoses. We played as a duo before a full hall and received abundant ovations, because Szalonek’s mentally open work permits precisely such creative musical collisions, and even provokes them, when one reads closely into the infinite sonic openness in many segments of the work.

The high point of my “Szalonekian” double-bass experiences was the concert on the day of my 30th birthday with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice. This excellent, mystical work - Musica concertante per violbasso e orchestra - I later also performed with the Silesian Philharmonic, and that version appeared in 2010 from the Warsaw publisher DUX; that two-disc album, titled BASSOLO, presents the most important musical discoveries on my path that can be played on the double bass. Szalonek’s masterpiece had earlier been created by the genius of the double bass Bertram Turetzky in 1977, and later by the visionary, composer and improviser Fernando Grillo. A work that introduces one into Depth, losing real time in the first lonely sighs of pizzicati, through an unimaginable massif of great harmonies, in which the screams of woodwind instruments are split in combination tones, it leads toward ever more intense solo parts of the double bass, which can be interpreted both as ontological question marks, wild fury of despair, a dialogue with the orchestra, and as the sadness of freedom or of solitude in the crowd following the trail of the Numinosum... Thus the trail shimmers with all the colors of the world and inspires the soloist to open the soul and to play in the name of the whole world for the moments permitted in Form. It reaches a moment when the orchestra falls silent and listens to the musical statement of the double bass; this is a masterly culmination by Silence! The seconds between the fortississimo of the orchestra and the first sigh - or question mark - of the double bass cause in the soloist a desire to express his own reaction to the dramatically arisen situation; recordings of earlier performances show that each chose a different path of interpretation for this moment. Personally, I tried to keep as exactly as possible to Witold Szalonek’s notation and to express emotions faithfully with His symbols and His notes. The size and density of the manuscript issued in facsimile form led me to copy out some fragments of the score, which made me aware of its richness and complexity: it turned out that there were ideally thought-out correlations to be played between the double bass and percussion, the undulations of the winds, the dynamic sea of the strings, and above all the final quasi-polymetric scene, when the double bass sobs a harmonic arpeggio-pizzicato in dialogue with the Harp, while the orchestra strides in chords of long forces of multicolored nature, archaically inviolable, nostalgically beautiful and unchanging for the human being.

When I was giving concerts in a quintet with Gidon Kremer, I had the opportunity to pass on to him too the notes of the Professor’s “Chaconne - Fantasie”, which the virtuoso studied with interest and perhaps intended to perform in the future... Other impulses and paths inspired by Szalonek are the year 2020 and my collaboration with His student of former days, Ulrich Krieger, whose CD of shattering beauty, Five Goulish Dreams, had already long before been for me a musical model and a companion in my walkman from the age of 14. Today - we met after years on the occasion of Ulrich Krieger’s invitation to Basel by Ensemble Phoenix Basel, with which I have played since 2000. When we realized WHAT and IN WHOM our common denominator was, our sympathy exploded with the force of a friendly volcano. Already after the first common sounds we both felt that in some incomprehensible way we were from the same family, that we were searching in and through music for similar depths of Depth and the nature of Nature. The molecular understanding of vibrations, but with the attempt to control the movements and vibrations of these molecules within the possibilities of an acoustic analog instrument - this is a musical kind of yoga, which both relaxes and mobilizes, teaches. Of course, in order to relax, one probably first has to become tense, but Szalonek, through his challenges and bold musical visions, says clearly that it is worth it, and the path traveled with Him gives a reward and incalculable satisfaction.

In the last 20 years, living in Switzerland, which has become my life base, but also an excellent point of support, with a multitude of international festivals as well as ensembles from Vienna, Frankfurt, Zürich or Salzburg, I have had the opportunity to meet the leading composers of our time, women and men, and perform their works. Whether the Vienna Konzerthaus with Klangforum Wien, the Venice Biennale with Ensemble Modern, Festival de México or Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires with my home Ensemble Phoenix Basel, the Berlin Philharmonie with Collegium Novum Zürich, the music academies in Yerevan, Sarajevo or the Goethe Institut in Montevideo, Elektroteatr Stanislavski in Moscow or The Stone in New York - on each of these stages, without the earlier experience of Witold Szalonek’s music, I would certainly have been less bold in the risk of crossing the extremes and boundaries of systems imposed by the physical limitations of the instrument and, in conservative environments, by uncurious tastes. That pioneering thinking, as it was in the times when Witold Szalonek - being at the same time Professor at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and, in Poland, a diminished and unwanted inventor - today celebrates an extraordinary triumph: the wider public has already “matured” for a return toward the sources, toward the physical nature of sound, breaking away from the equal-tempered system imposed on us with all-powerfulness; how interesting it was, beautiful in its artificiality, how revelatory in its avant-garde pores! Today, however, exploited for centuries, it leaves room for new penetrations, creating for us options that exist in the process of c r e a t i o n of sound. Countless variants of multicosmoses await their discoveries! For this chance, let us pay homage to Witold Szalonek. His “Baśka” is still working - in new, open heads.