Stochastic Fantasy / Epitaph Bazyli Matysiak in memoriam

Programme note

Fantazja stochastyczna was not renamed. It was transformed.

In autumn 1992 I began work on a piece provisionally titled Fantazja stochastyczna. My point of departure was neither melody nor a traditionally understood musical form but my own mathematical models, which I sought to translate into the structure of sound. I created functions describing relationships between numerical values and calculated their successive courses by hand. Numbers gradually became pitches, rhythms, dynamics and further parameters of the music.

The process, however, did not move in one direction only. If the resulting music or phrase did not ring true, I returned to the mathematical function. I reshaped it, shifted its boundary values, and then began the calculations again. It was not easy to find a function that would generate non-repeating pitches over a long span of time, while at the same time producing an equally non-obvious, non-periodic rhythmic structure. Both layers were born from that same function from the very first calculation.

I made most of these calculations in pencil, in a notebook.

In this way a work emerged, derived from the logic of numbers, yet from the very beginning leaving space for intuition, chance and musical imagination.

On 11 November 1992, my first double-bass teacher, Professor Bazyli Matysiak, died. This did not interrupt the work on the piece. It did, however, change everything the piece was to mean from that moment on.

The mathematical skeleton of Fantazja stochastyczna remained intact. Motifs drawn from Etiuda, which the Professor had given me in 1989, gradually found their way into it. It was not a second theme, nor a quotation in the traditional sense. It was rather a musical inlay — the mutual interpenetration of two worlds, like Czarna Woda w Białej Wodzie. Logic was not abandoned. It was permeated by memory.

On 6 March 1993, in the concert hall of the Filharmonia Śląska in Katowice, during a concert of graduates of the Państwowe Liceum Muzyczne, the work was already heard under the title Epitafium Bazyli Matysiak in memoriam. The premiere fell between performances of Mozart and Beethoven. In that company, the solitary voice of the double bass was surrounded by a multichannel sound space.

I built the electronic layer of the work with the help of a Commodore C64, an Amiga 500 and recordings I had prepared in my home studio. Three stereophonic tapes were started by hand by three assistants standing beside separate tape-machine setups, as nearly simultaneously as possible, so that a six-channel sound projection could arise around the audience. Each tape developed the same mathematical function along a different path. The double bass entered into dialogue not with a ready-made accompaniment but with the parallel worlds of its own logic, unfolding along different paths through the six loudspeakers. Today one might call this solution a prototype of a live electronics environment. In the reality of the early 1990s, however, it was above all a creative technical improvisation, realised by almost entirely analogue means.

I dreamed of an eight-channel sound projection. I managed to prepare six loudspeakers, although not all of them worked properly. Such was the reality of making electroacoustic music in Poland at the time. Many solutions were born of trials, intuition and improvisation. I often heard then that “this is not how it is done”, and still more often — that “this is not how it is done anymore”. All the more, I wanted to see where such a path might lead.

Telewizja Katowice later broadcast a fragment of that performance, giving it the erroneous title Fantazja stochastyczna Lux in tenebris. Most likely, the working title of the composition became entwined at that moment with the title of my earlier electroacoustic work. Today the surviving recording is above all a trace. Despite the imperfect image quality, it remains the only film witness to the first life of this composition.

Today I look at this work as the moment when two directions of my later development met for the first time. On one side, a fascination with mathematics, technology and structure; on the other, the conviction that even the most rigorous construction can be transformed by memory, gratitude and the experience of loss. This transformation, more than the compositional technique itself, became the true subject of the work.

Fantazja stochastyczna was transformed. Perhaps that is exactly why it also began to transform me.