Though these numbers do not represent the average age of this quartet‘s
members, they actually refer to the certain transitional period from what
we know as 20th century, with its modernistic (in the neutral sense of
this word) outlook, to what is happening right now, as well as what may
happen tomorrow. Performance of this ensemble could be called concert as
exhibition, or a retrospect of graphic musical notation extended with the
graphical materials of non-musical origin, that are read as musical script
and, through collaborative efforts, transfered into the sphere of live
electroacoustic sound.

Concert of twentytwentyone consists of four laptop musicians performing
onstage a combination of these graphic notation scores: Having Never
Written a Note For Percussion by American composer James Tenney, Draw a
Straight Line and Follow It by American composer La Monte Young, A Heap of
Language by American conceptual artist Robert Smithson, Treatise by
English composer Cornelius Cardew, Morphology of City by architect/sound
artist Tomas Grunskis, Expansia by Lithuanian composer Vytautas V.
Jurgutis, Renaissance in Music by artist/composer Arturas Bumðteinas and
the silent b/w film Symphonie Diagonale (1924) by swedish-german
experimental film pioneer Viking Eggeling treated as a moving graphic
score (the program is in the ongoing process of update). All the scores
are projected on the screen for the audience‘s observation.



Selected pages from 'Treatise' by Cornelius Cardew

Subjectivity is a synonym for Treatise. This piece, written from 1963 to
1967, is one of the most famous and most often performed graphical
notation scores, consisting of 193 otherwise unrelated pages that are
united by a single dominant symbol at the bottom of each page – a double
staff (an allusion to the reduced piano score?). Although the author has
later indicated that the score‘s horizontal space does not literally
correspond to time, but because of this mentioned piano staff the score
will be read in the traditional manner - from left to right. Treatise is a
collection of graphical notation symbols without any further explanations
or comments how they should be interpreted when they are transferred from
paper into the sphere of sound. How should one interpret a line, a dot, or
a circle?... You can only create your own answers to these questions by
setting your own rules or, in other words, a model for collective action,
which can remind us of a futuristic vehicle (p.50), or a spaceship
(p.134), carrying its crew through “the mess of potential sounds that
permeate this planet and its atmosphere”.



[ liner notes by Arturas Bumsteinas ]

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