The work – composed during Stańczyk's year-long Cursus 2 internship at the IRCAM centre – is an attempt to transfer the optical phenomenon of afterimages into musical material. An afterimage is an image remembered by the retina and superimposed into one's vision after looking away, for example, when turning from the sun to a piece of paper, we can observe red and blue streaks and reflections. The composer created the concept of afterimages of sound, which he called “aftersounds”. His inspiration came from analogical attempts made by artists representing other branches of art, such as Władysław Strzemiński's Afterimages of the Sun series of paintings, or selected fragments from Bruno Schulz's Cinnamon Shops book of short stories.
“The afterimage of a sound can be also, in my opinion, an idea or feeling of the listener – something associated with the sound that stays in our mind forever”, says Marcin Stańczyk.
The concert at the Paris IRCAM is titled Melancolia and its motto (“Et je reverrai cette ville étrange” – “And I’ll see that strange city again”) is taken from the title of one of the last works by Claude Vivier, a Canadian composer who passed away in 1983.
Along with Stańczyk’s piece, the event programme features works by Matthias Pintscher, Salvator Sciarrino, Blaise Ubaldini and Claude Vivier. The audience can also hear soloists from the Ensemble Intercontemporain – Samuel Favre and Herve Trovel – under Pintscher's baton.
The concert will take place on 12th September, 2014, at the Espace de Projection hall and will be recorded and broadcast on Radio France’s France Musique at 20:00 on 24th September, 2014, in the programme Les lundis de la contemporaine.
Marcin Stańczyk was born in 1997 and studied composition in Zygmunt Krauze’s class at Łódź Music Academy. He participated in many workshops, such as with Klangforum Wien and Trilok Gurtu at La Biennale di Venezia (2007, 2008) and the International Summer Course of New Music in Darmstadt (2010). In 2012, he did a year-long internship at IRCAM in Paris and in the same year, his monographic concert took place at the Sacrum Profanum festival in Krakow. In 2013, he was granted the very prestigious Toru Takemitsu Composition Award. He is also the laureate of the artistic residence programme run by Paris City Hall and The French Institute. Stańczyk’s works are distinguished by their complexity and the wealth of unexpected differences between separate parts of the work.
Sources: press materials, edited by fl
Translated by szm 9th September 2014