TVP3 Katowice interview — Bassolo (2011)

Full interview

VIOLETTA ROTTER-KOZERA: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I invite you to a meeting with our guest - Mr. Aleksander Gabryś. An outstanding double bassist, composer, performer, representative of the young generation - may I say that?

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: I do not know, it is hard for me to judge - because the thirty-seventh year has already struck since I have been fighting as a performer and double bassist - and as what else, madam... as you would be pleased to title me. My warm greetings to you, Madam Editor, thank you for the invitation to the studio, and welcome to you all.

I am glad that we can meet in this form, with a certain shift in time, but for me it is a privilege and an honor, and on top of that a certain closing of some stage of my life. We intend to talk here about my record, a double album which, as it were, takes the first part of my life into a certain loop.

It is, I do not know whether a crowning, or else a kind of summary of a whole quantity of journeys that I have made through the world and into the depths of myself, one could say; something like astronautics and psychonautics. The result is a collection of works recorded by me on a disc entitled Bassolo.

The number of names and the diversity of their origins speak for themselves. These are practically people from the most various corners of our globe, and also discoverers of new regions, unknown to others, because every single work recorded here by me is connected with a large, large portion of experiences, struggles with myself, and also with the world: whether I mention Xenakis here, or Giacinto Scelsi, or Gérard Grisey, or also several pieces written especially for me - in the course of conversations with living composers - today as well.

If I am to relate myself somehow to all of this - it is something like an exhibition, to which I warmly invite you. And I am glad that there is something like Telewizja Katowice, which allows me to propagate this type of music; because it is not music for pleasure, but music inviting one to open oneself to oneself.

VIOLETTA ROTTER-KOZERA: Ladies and gentlemen, and a matter of immense importance: this is already music that has in a way been assessed, recognized. I have a Polish newspaper in front of me, I remember a review from an English paper, from the very prestigious magazine The Strad, where our musician, the Polish double bassist, is written about in the best possible terms. It is simply all superlatives.

In Ruch Muzyczny we can read that Aleksander Gabryś is an outstanding artist. He is not only a connoisseur of the secrets of the contemporary double bass, with a repertoire comprising several hundred items, but also a musician impressive through the force of his commitment. We feel that too in what you are saying, because I know this music lies close to your heart, it is something by which...

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: Rather in the understanding of a certain nature: what is the double bass? The double bass has the longest, thickest strings. And the String, if one thinks about it - and this also, for example, in the context of Michio Kaku, known already for twenty years, whom we were interested in as secondary-school graduates, who talks about superstring theory; admittedly they sometimes curl up, these strings, but they also allow travel in time - if a human being approaches his contact with the instrument a little metaphysically - and not with the violin, not with the cello, because they are too small, simply, to see all this, but precisely with the double bass, which trembles all over, and moves, and almost forces the human being to vibrate together with it - then the human being, as if, touches some such, I do not know, phenomenon, some elephantiasis of Nature, some Leviathan, which trembles all over.

Contact with the String and, now, the splitting of the sound of this String, that is a certain novelty in relation to classical music - this leads precisely into some areas of perfecting one's own understanding of life and, in general, raises the pleasure of living to a higher level. This has to be said clearly.

That is why I encourage all people to have a double bass at home - even as a bar, as in Wajda's Man of Iron, or else for playing - because one can always play a little - and let us remember Adam Bolesław Ciechański's saying: if you want to be happy, play the double bass.

And this thing remains valid also on my record. Admittedly it is not classical music, that is Vanhal, Dittersdorf, all those things through which, of course, as a classically trained double bassist - in Katowice, in Basel, and also at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis - I had to pass. But it is an experience with the String, and with Nature.

I will add, for example, that the composer Thomas Lauck, who wrote one of the compositions on this compact disc especially for me, slept with the double bass for an entire month, and probably composed when something for this double bass came to him in a dream. He experimented with it using various unconventional tools, as a result of which he achieved a very unrepeatable, one-of-a-kind effect, in any case characteristic of his work. It is definitely worth following.

VIOLETTA ROTTER-KOZERA: At the same time, in your artistic work you connect all kinds of directions. It is an extraordinary intensity. From this perspective of thirty-seven years, do you already look at yourself as a fulfilled artist?

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: I would quote Walt Whitman:

I, thirty-seven years old
in perfect health begin,
Hoping not to cease
till death -

in perfect health, being thirty-seven years old, I am only beginning - hoping not to rest until death.

And I think this record is only a certain beginning, because certain things are missing here. I do not have, for example, my own works - I consciously gave them up on this record. On these two discs I recorded acquaintances, closer or more distant, but from all over the world. Practically fifteen names, including four Poles. The rest - all of it from Korea, through Armenia - these are all fruits of my concert travels.

That is why I presented myself here as an interpreter. At bottom this record has a very classical character, because these are simply works recorded from A to Z and written in scores. But very soon we will be - in Bern, for example - carrying out a six-week project: living on stage, sleeping on this stage - as part of the Bern Biennale 2012 festival - and we will be exploring the microtonal ideas of a composer born in 1875: Carrillo Julián, I think, or Julián. But already in those times he - a violinist, conductor, composer - experimented with microtonality.

I will say it directly: my basic musical ideal - and in general my idea of what music is - and my feeling for the true nature of music - is microtonal spectralism. Practiced literally. Practiced by Georg Friedrich Haas. He is an incredible composer. It would take too long now to go on about him here. But I often perform his works with my Ensemble Phoenix; he even recently wrote a piece for us, which we performed on the occasion of the five-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the University of Basel. A four-and-a-half-hour work, in which every semitone is divided into one hundred parts, and these parts are divided by ten again, that is into fractions. And then - when the instruments tune - proportional harmonies arise: ultra-harmonies.

VIOLETTA ROTTER-KOZERA: It is certainly not easy to follow you. These are all very interesting,

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: I am trying as quickly as possible...

VIOLETTA ROTTER-KOZERA: ...very important issues. And thanks to you, I think, many people who do not know these meanders of contemporary music at all can discover something new.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is worth following the achievements of Aleksander Gabryś, who lives day to day in Switzerland, in Basel, but does not forget Poland. The Silesian Days of Contemporary Music, all the events connected with music that comes from here... As for your father's activity: these compositions are also an extremely important element of your activity, I suppose.

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: The work that opens my compact disc is my father's An die Freude. I have already played this work, I think, a hundred times all over the world; besides, it is now the anthem of the European Union. In my father's version it is a somewhat grotesque and somewhat bitter, but also funny, paraphrase of that paradigm.

Besides, chance has arranged here that my friend owns the book Deus Irae. Reading page 82 today, I find that Tibor McMasters remembered: "Ah, friends!" - he recited aloud, translating into English the beginning of Schiller's An die Freude. This thread appears in circles, again and again, in my life - whether Dad writes it, or whether I once wrote a work entitled precisely Deus Irae, performed at Warsaw Autumn in 2002, and An die Freude permeates all of this - somewhere there, this Beethoven is embedded in our foundation.

And I must say that Dad created about eight works for double bass for me. He is such a second double-bass father of mine, because the first, let us say, is Scelsi, who also created eight or nine works for double bass, only on completely different principles. Without knowing one another, we come into contact through the double bass, and we find, I would say, not a vertical homeland - but a horizontal homeland. We simply find friends, and in this way I know where my homeland is; and the fact that I love Poland and Katowice is my private matter.

VIOLETTA ROTTER-KOZERA: Ladies and gentlemen, let us follow, let us try to follow the actions of Aleksander Gabryś. For now we have this record in our hands and we certainly will not be able, so to speak, to be suspected of not noticing your progress. I am very glad of that. I am convinced that we will hear many more times about your activity. Thank you for visiting the studio. Thank you all for your attention.

ALEKSANDER GABRYŚ: Thank you very much.

VIOLETTA ROTTER-KOZERA: See you next week.