Twelve Memories from My Łańcut

Programme note

Łańcut was my laboratory.

Today, looking back on the summer of 1996, I do not see a score first. I see myself at twenty-two, a young man who for several years has been coming to Łańcut for the whole of July and feeling more and more that this place, too, is becoming his own home. He already knows the park, the paths, the dormitory, the Castle ballroom, Karczma Słupska, the benches at night and the morning paths. He knows the people. He knows the rhythm of the place. He knows what it means to live on nothing but music for a month.

Łańcut had two faces. By day it was alive with lessons, practice, rehearsals and concerts. At night, life moved to the Glorietta in the park, the dormitory, the taverns and the avenues. That was where conversations, walks, student adventures and friendships were born, with the intensity that belongs to people who believe their whole lives still lie ahead of them. We were not testing only our abilities there. We were testing ourselves. That is why today I think of Łańcut not as a summer music course, but as a laboratory. Every July was a new experiment. Everything seemed possible.

I came to Łańcut above all as a double bassist. Every year I wanted to test myself. Not only to learn more, but to see how far I could push my own limits. Playing the double bass was, for me, liberation through physical work. Composing — liberation through spiritual work. I needed both worlds at once.

At that time I almost always carried a blue folder with me, which many years later I would call the Blue Book. It was not a diary. In it I wrote down ideas for the future Garden of Divine Games. Thoughts gathered relentlessly, day and night. I went to the Zameczek only to unload whole railway wagons of everything that had accumulated inside me.

That summer, the composition class was led by Professor Stanisław Moryto. I was his only student. We met every day. We talked about music, but even more often about ways of thinking. He did not try to impose his own artistic language on me. He let me develop my own. After one of our meetings he smiled and said, “Excellent. Keep going like that, Olek!” I remember that smile as clearly as every one of our conversations.

A few years earlier my father, Ryszard Gabryś, had written Aleksandryny for me, an open-form score that left the performer with extraordinary freedom. It was more than the possibility of choosing the order of the fragments. It was an invitation to participate in the creation of the work during performance. Professor Moryto did something very similar for me. He did not give me ready-made answers. He gave me carte blanche.

It was under those circumstances that Twelve Memories from My Łańcut was born.

The number twelve was a conscious choice. At the time it fascinated me as a principle for organizing form. It appeared in parallel in Quadrofonietta; I was also interested in the mandala’s development through twelve degrees. I was not looking for the symbolism of the number. I was looking for an architecture capable of shaping a creative process.

And yet these are not twelve memories about Łańcut. They are twelve memories from my Łańcut. The difference may seem small, but for me it is essential. I was not trying to describe a place. I wanted to preserve the moments I carried away from it.

Each of the twelve parts preserves one of those moments. Waking on the morning after the first night of the courses. Practising Bottesini. Club Remix. A night in the park. A storm. A lesson in which I become, at the same time, the professor and my own student. All these images were transformed by memory. They are not reportage. They are music.

That is why, from the beginning, the work was not meant to sound exactly the same twice. Memory, after all, works the same way. It never returns in an identical order. Each time it reveals another detail, another light, another meaning. The open form of this score is therefore not merely a solution for performance. It is an attempt to notate the process of remembering itself.

The surviving recording documents only one possible passage through this score. It is not a definitive version. It is the trace of a single encounter with a work that is born anew at every performance.

Today I also see something I did not yet know how to name then. Twelve Memories from My Łańcut is perhaps the first work in which I began consciously to compose not only sounds, but also my own memory. Today I see that it was precisely there, between the park, the Castle, conversations until dawn and daily practice on the double bass, that the world I would many years later call the Garden of Divine Games was already beginning.