Tatiana Gerasimenok — "sancti888" for performers and performing audience (2021)
World Premiere, September 9th, 2021 at ZiMMT Leipzig & Künstlerstadt Kalbe, Germany Written for Michiko Saiki & Frauke Aulbert DARK WEB A collaborative project by Michiko Saiki and Frauke Aulbert. «In this performance, the audience will witness different states of human emotions and the lack thereof. Despair and hopes, from emancipation of female expression in the Romantic era to futuristic utopias of reproduction – a wide range of themes are interwoven and told in a non-linear narrative. These partly autobiographic experiences are presented from a female perspective. In addition to the performers’ own works, there will be works by young composers such as Tatiana Gerasimenok (commissioned work), Sarah Nemtsov, Beste Özçelebi and Jue Wang as well as an arrangement of a song by Fanny Hensel/Mendelssohn. The music is combined with electronics and video as well as the human body as an instrument.» This project was generously supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. Michiko Saiki and Frauke Aulbert talk about Tatiana Gerasimenok’s sancti888 — www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMt_NeXr3wA sancti888 — www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw6scYF7RBo "I shall start the conversation about Tatiana Gerasimenok with the quote of doctor Breed from 'Cat's Cradle'. On the question whether he was the Head of laboratory where famous scientist Felix Hoenikker worked, Asa Breed answered: 'If I actually supervised Felix, I'm ready now to take charge of volcanoes, the ties, and the motions of birds and lemmings. The man was a force of nature no mortal could possibly control.' Exactly the same phenomenon of nature — an element that you have to try very, very hard to channel in the right way! — is Tatiana! The grade of brightness and originality of Tatiana’s creative ideas doesn't concede the brightness and originality of her appearance and behaviour. But there is not the slightest hint of cheap self-promotion in the seeming epatage, much less the substitution of eternal values with something immediately fashionable.
Tatiana is thinking, deep person, and the extreme emotions never overshadows the work of mind, it just sharper and probably helps to feel more accurately the world around us and everything that happens at that time. In my life I have met hundreds of definitions of music as such. One of them says that the music is abstract structuralization of emotions. This is a good working definition for many romantic composers. And in certain expressions, whether consciously or intuitively, Tatiana fully shares the views of Robert Schumann: 'the mind errs, the emotion never'. If we talk about the music in mathematical terms, the Euclid defined parallel lines as never intersecting. Lobachevsky extended the boundaries of Euclidean geometry, defining parallel lines as those that intersect at infinity. Tatiana, excluding non-Euclidean geometry to have exhausted itself, accepts the postulate that parallel lines intersect infinite number of times in the infinite number of infinities! Tatiana belongs to the cohort, preferring continuous sounding space and far from academic voices, and I see a deep symbolism that her latest tools scores corresponds exactly to that with which people built houses and other architectural structures. Intellectual work is not just reflected in each of her score, but finds the most unexpected and unusual forms of expression!" Yuri Kasparov Composition professor at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory "The New Russians: what young composers are doing in Russia today.
The younger generation under the age of thirty looks much less homogeneous than their older colleagues. Today, the "image" of a composer is becoming blurred, and the activities of representatives of this profession are often not limited to music alone. What do the guys who grew up in the 90s do, and what distinguishes them from their older comrades? Nowadays, Gorlinsky's improvisation circle is attended by a significant part of actual young musicians. Among them is a composer from Belarus, Tatiana Gerasimenok, a fourth-year student at the Moscow Conservatory. Tatiana finds the strict division of genres unnatural, and in her work she favors the synthesis of the arts. Some of her works become music "for the eyes" as much as "for the ears". Gerasimenok prefers "primitive unrefined sound" as the most "honest", which is why her works often contain noises of natural origin. Whereas for composers of the previous generation the search for new possibilities of sound production was an end in itself, for Tatiana it is part of a philosophical vision. However, her other creative intentions also have an extra-musical rationale, sometimes linked to religion. For an avant-garde artist it is quite non-trivial to talk about God in the context of her work. The 25-year-old Tatiana is not afraid to be herself and is not shy in her formulations. So, for example, comparing a creator to a parent, she suggests that he should use contraception more often: "Creators should be responsible for their actions, and therefore — put a condom on their creativity." The simplicity with which Gerasimenok expresses her pathos is not typical of her creative environment, and her bright external image sets Tatiana apart from the gray student mass of the conservatory. She "breaks several patterns at once", as her older colleagues say, and remains one of the most interesting musicians of the new generation." knife.media Tatiana Gerasimenok receiving the winner's prize at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory Composers' Competition.
Татьяна Герасимёнок получает премию победителя конкурса композиторов в Московской консерватории имени П.И. Чайковского. Tatiana Gerasimenok with her composition teacher Yuri Kasparov after Tatiana’s composition exam at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory.
Татьяна Герасимёнок со своим преподавателем по композиции Юрием Каспаровым после экзамена по композиции в Московской консерватории имени П.И. Чайковского. Tatiana Gerasimenok with composer Philippe Leroux during a discussion of Tatiana's new piece at the Royaumont Abbey, France.
Татьяна Герасимёнок с композитором Филиппом Леру во время обсуждения нового произведения Татьяны в аббатстве Ройомон, Франция. Tatiana Gerasimenok with composer Alvin Lucier after their public composition class at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory.
Татьяна Герасимёнок с композитором Элвином Люсье после их публичного занятия по композиции в Московской консерватории имени П.И. Чайковского. Tatiana Gerasimenok’s piece "The Creed" performed by percussionist Marina Lafarga García at Marina's final recital at the Conservatori Superior de Música de les Illes Balears, Spain.
Пьеса Татьяны Герасимёнок "The Creed" в исполнении перкуссионистки Марины Лафарги Гарсия на выпускном экзамене Марины в Высшей музыкальной консерватории Иллес-Балеарс, Испания. Winners of the "Ad Libitum 2019/20" composition competition. Four composers were commissioned to create new works for the Musikschule Offenburg.
Победители конкурса композиции "Ad Libitum 2019/20". Четыре композитора, получившие заказ на создание новых произведений для Musikschule Offenburg. Sergej Newski: write to Tatiana Gerasimenok. But she's already in Baden-Baden
Petr Pospelov: Tanya. Yeah, I'm thinking about her Sergej Newski: Yeah. Go to her Instagram, it's a real eye-opener!) Petr Pospelov: I’m talking about her music)) Sergej Newski: Instagram is now a part of artistic expression Oleg Gudachev: I found her instagram — it's fire!!! wow!)) Tatiana’s instagram — https://www.instagram.com/gerasimenok.tatiana/ "The exhibition "SOUND GRAPHICS" is prepared in cooperation with the Russian National Library and the St. Petersburg Museum of Sound and is a chronologically organized exposition that gives an idea of the development of musical graphic notation from the early 20th century to modern Russian music.
In the 20th century the main musical categories were rethought: sound, pitch system, space and time, and the forms of music recording were also rethought. Thus, experimental (various non-unified) forms of written recording of music appeared, which were used in the works of twentieth-century avant-garde composers. Works of composers presented at the exhibition: First avant-garde — A. Scriabin and color music as a means of artistic expression, notations by N. Obukhov. Second avant-garde — A.M. Volkonsky, S.M. Slonimsky and others. Border theme: interpenetration of music and painting: theoretical works by N. Kulbin on the need to transform the musical language, V. Kandinsky on the concept of "inner sound". Works by contemporary Russian composers: Yuri Akbalkan, Tatiana Gerasimenok, Vladimir Gorlinsky, Sergey Zagnii, Dmitry Kurlyandsky, Alexey Najarov, Sergey Nevsky, Antonina Pozdnyakova, Marina Poleukhina, Mark Kommer, Vladimir Rannev, Nikolay Rubanov, Elena Rykova, Alexey Sysoev, Sergey Khismatov, Nikolay Khrust, Alexander Chernyshkov, Dmitry Shubin, Kirill Shirokov. Exhibition curator: Dmitry Shubin." "Bohemian Algae" Татьяны Герасимёнок в Нью-Йорке в исполнении Пола Пинто (голос), Глеба Канасевича (кларнет) и Тристана Кастен-Краузе (контрабас).
"В субботу, 13 апреля, присоединяйтесь к MATA в бесстрашном путешествии из нашего настоящего в постчеловеческое будущее с Future Perfect. Завершающий фестиваль MATA на главной сцене "Кухни", спектакль "Future Perfect" открывает мир андроидов, ботов и зомби, где вчерашняя научная фантастика становится завтрашней реальностью." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2bpISZ8ep4 Tatiana Gerasimenok as a scholarship holder of the Künstlerhaus Lukas in Germany. Angela Merkel at the Künstlerhaus Lukas at a meeting with the fellows.
Татьяна Герасимёнок в качестве стипендиата-композитора Künstlerhaus Lukas в Германии. Ангела Меркель в Künstlerhaus Lukas на встрече со стипендиатами. Program about Tatiana Gerasimenok on Pulsar CISM radio (Montreal, Canada).
Программа о Татьяне Герасимёнок на радио Pulsar CISM (Монреаль, Канада). Recording/Запись: soundcloud.com/tatianagerasimenok/program-about-tatiana-gerasimenok-on-pulsar-cism-radio-montreal-canada "Friends, on March 1-2 Stravinsky.online goes offline for the first time and opens its spring season with a symposium in the New Space of the Theater of Nations. In this first conversation, we would like to map the landscape of contemporary music ideas and capture today's trends. The symposium will open with a lecture by Professor Tatiana Tsaregradskaya and a general discussion among musicians, artists and humanities "What should be the media resource about new music?".
From 14:00 in the New Space of the Theater of Nations twenty young composers will talk about their work, current trends in contemporary art and much more, as well as answer your questions. We offer you a selection of statements of composers - participants of the symposium. Tatiana Gerasimenok: "My listening experience is quite extensive, I simply have no right to deny myself to listen to talented works and, importantly, completely different poles, with different aesthetic backgrounds. Fortunately, modern musical art provides us with a huge choice. The main thing is to learn to understand what is "spoiled" and what is "suitable", without necessarily limiting oneself to "suitable", so as not to suffer from excess sugar."" How has your music changed over the years?
I started out by composing deathcore music and performing pop music. Then I learned Western musical notation and composed sheet music in the academic tradition. Later I created textual instructions for performers, giving them the right to choose their instrument and the freedom to express themselves without much restriction. At this time I began studying at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory as a composer. At that period I perceived art as the human body, and music as one of the sensory organs of that body, as hearing. Gradually, I became interested in engaging the other senses of the audience — sight, smell, touch, taste and the vestibular apparatus. So I added other artistic mediums to music and began to work with the senses of the human body as instruments of a musical ensemble, which led me to the experience of synthesizing the arts. What do you fear most as a composer? As a composer, my biggest fear is the inability to speak freely about what worries me as a human being. Without the ability to express oneself freely, there would be neither science nor art. Such freedom is good for a person’s psychological health and helps people feel valued. I consider respect for personal space and choice to be an important element in the development of a person’s creative potential. Why do you still compose? I keep composing because creativity is one way of marking territory in space and time. I mark that I was on this planet and at this time. My personality and my perception of reality is embodied in my artwork and is a particular illustration of the circumstances I experience as a human being. You can mark your territory by using different tools according to your interests. It could be art, genetic engineering, programming, human creation, politics, building an interplanetary transport network. By your own actions you improve the topic you choose. What is the signature of your pieces? I describe my music as a ritual and a dose of infernal high. I like to study Homo sapiens as if it had just come out of the womb, with no culture, no language, no experience of being in a new space. I am interested in exploring the universal human language: crying, coughing, laughing, moaning, facial expressions, body movements. I perceive these primary signals of the human body as pure energy through which it broadcasts its inner state and communicates with the environment. What are the future trends in music? Future trends are shaped by events affecting most of the population, such as ecology, the need for new ethics, the regulation of new technologies, protection from discrimination, and everything related to the question of our coexistence on this astronomical object. Pandemic, which is a 2020 trend, has pushed us to move more confidently to online platforms. This trend will not go away, because it is part of the idea of new technologies. Moving online will also help solve the problem of overconsumption, because to socialize online you only need to buy clothes for your upper body, and you can be naked underneath. Offline, all a person needs to do is go to the store or get a coffee, take a walk to the park or the gym, where wearing one and the same thing is enough. As long as we pollute the Internet and our heads, the planet will try to recover. How do you compose? What is the process of composing? I formulate my task, study the chosen topic, reading both official research and opinions on social media. I analyze the information received, select sound, visual and other material for future work, and then create a system based on this material. How does technology influence your music? It’s great that technology has become available to everyone at affordable prices. It allows me to express my ideas more precisely and in more dimensions. With the advent of various audio and visual editing programs, phone camera and voice recorder, the creative process has become easier. How has the music landscape changed in recent years? Music has gone from the composer’s high control over the performer to a great deal of freedom for the performer within key boundaries. Due to the large amount of improvisation, unfixed instrumentation, and approximate musical notation, the performer becomes a composer. Composers begin to work with non-professional musicians. There is a fusion of the arts taking place. The composer becomes a multi-artist. Professional musicians become multi-performers, actors, dancers. There is experimentation with space by placing musicians and sound objects in different parts of the room. The musicians descend from the stage and are placed among the audience. The composer invited the audience to interact with the musicians, influence their actions and be part of the piece. The audience becomes the performers. Performances appear outside the concert hall, in shopping centers, nightclubs and private parties. Art infiltrated everyday life, seeking to erase boundaries and merge with it. Composers begin to collaborate with scientists and programmers. As technology allows composers to rehearse with musicians and discuss a planned event online, they have moved to the regions from expensive and crowded capitals. Institutions, festivals, and social constructs have lost their relevance, equating professional composers and amateurs. How has the audience changed over the last years? As part of the audience, I can say that due to the open access to a lot of information on the Internet, people have become very educated. With the huge flow of unfiltered information coming online, people have developed a new type of perception such as clip thinking. This has also influenced the way authors deliver information in order to express their idea as short as possible. Audience attention has become more expensive and insatiable. Scrolling through apps accustoms the brain to instant gratification while searching for information. This accelerates a person’s info metabolism, resulting in nothing remaining in the memory. Thus, neither Trier’s new movie nor flying to Mars becomes an event in this flow. Online activities, such as visiting museums or courses, are becoming increasingly beneficial because they save travel time. If it’s a concert recording, you can rewind the tape or click on the beginning, golden ratio and end to catch the idea. Or watch a lecture at 2x speed and have complete control over the information coming into your head. The world has already moved from an offline platform into new territory. It was as if we had just left the womb and moved into a new space. As long as the Internet has no clear restrictions, no code of law, no Digital Testament and no division into states like Facebook, Google, YouTube, it will be a zone of temporary equality. So Lady Gaga’s Instagram live broadcast may be less popular than the dog’s TikTok account. And when the rules are systematized, the restrictions, institutions, expertise, and the whole hierarchy that shapes our offline activity will appear in the online space. What are the future trends in music? Problems that prevent people from living often become trends because by highlighting them, we find solutions. Everyone can think about what worries them personally and start highlighting it. I like that pre-Internet music of any historical, cultural, genre origin becomes ideologically compressed and automatically updated in the context of the Internet, which gives it new life. When making music for the Internet, one might think about how it will look not in a concert hall with armchairs, but from the phone screen of a viewer sitting in a closet. How it will sound with or without headphones. The relevance of the offline world will not disappear, but it will become an appendage of the Internet and a renewed and exciting field for multisensory experiences. Gradually, virtual reality gadgets will become publicly available. The offline space will expand with the emergence of VR venues where artists can experiment with new technologies and the public can participate in these experiments. What does new music need? Academic systems of art education were born in a pre-Internet environment. The time has come to rethink these systems and expand research topics to new branches of human activity. What is the basic conceptual idea behind multimedia music? The idea is to make the impact on the audience more informative per unit of time. Thus, make the impression more intense by working with more channels of attention. Refresh the perception of music by mixing it with other art forms, especially digital, expand the compositional area beyond music, and experiment by combining independent arts together. What are your favorite multimedia works? I appreciate all of them. How does multimedia composition differ from other types of academic music? The fact is that multimedia music uses more tools and more modern tools to realize an idea. What is a good musical composition for you? If I have a task and I can get the necessary tools to accomplish it. Tatiana Gerasimenok and Ensemble Multilatérale after the premiere of "Bohemian Algae" at the Royaumont Abbey, France.
Tatiana Gerasimenok and Ensemble BRuCH after night shooting of the new project in the forest of Royaumont Abbey, France.
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