Alexey Retinsky

Good afternoon, Alexei! Your composition is built on the metaphor of breath: tell us how inhale and exhale are tied to your music.

(AR) – The self-evident connection lies in singing and playing wind instruments, when sound can only be produced through inhaling and exhaling. In this piece, inhale and exhale are scrutinised per se under a "auditory microscope". I have long reflected on various verbal expressions related to breath. A Russian writer, Varlam Shalamov, has a short story called Cherry Brandy (dedicated to Osip Mandelstam), where he describes his own experience of eye-witnessing the poet die. As the poet's respiration stops, Shalamov sees his last breath, his inspiration, his spirit leave him. Respiration, inspiration, and spirit (from Latin spirare, “to breathe” — Trans.) are innately connected to breath — that connection is what draws me.

Apart from singing, my piece will include a Russian folk instrument kuvytsi. It is a type of pipes somewhat similar to a panflute, though the pipes are not tied together; they are held separately, three or four pieces in each hand. Kuvytsi are spontaneously combined with voice, which creates a mosaic effect of rapid timbral change. This principle is found in folk music worldwide, for example, in many African cultures pipes are similarly combined with singing. The sharp contrast between voice and flute produces distinct, accentuated sound elements, which form a kaleidoscope of timbres coming from just the one performer. Thus, the inhale-exhale principle transcends the confines of performance, becomes a dramaturgical force that shapes the form of the piece, and generates layers of meaning.

How did you approach working with folk sound? What do you have in mind for your piece?

Generally, when folk elements are incorporated into the so-called academic music, they are left untouched, in their original form, only slightly highlighted or shadowed, shrouded in electronic and ensemble sound. Working with folk sound often feels akin to building a bridge between some archaic tree and the present day. I have occasionally worked this way myself. For example, the piece I composed for the ballet Duo with Diana Vishneva and Darya Pavlenko included songs from various regions of Russia. I worked with electronic sound as well as a piano trio and deliberately left folk elements mostly intact, only gently splitting them.

Here, however, the idea is different. I take the principle of sound production along with the timbre, authentic to Russian and general Slavic folk music, as a foundation for writing music that is authentic to me. This timbral palette has a distinct quality — an open, unrefined sound — which is rooted in the living context of traditional vocal practice. Folk singing emerged and existed in the open air, rather than indoors or, say, in the space of a cathedral. Thus, the timbre's recognisable intensity was born from the need to cover swathes of land with sound.

Just the other day, we talked to Tatiana Khalbaeva, a Buryat artist, and she shared a curious observation, relevant to our current conversation. When she arrived at a small village in Buryatia from Moscow, people thought she was arguing or being loud, so she had to metaphorically strip away the city from her voice and intentionally speak more softly than usual. The lack of noise pollution outside the city not only makes you speak more quietly, but also lets you hear more — more nuances, timbres, and overtones. Similarly, to sound refined and less direct in such places, you need to change the timbre of your voice, rather than loudness.

Yes, it's quite interesting how the acoustic landscape itself shapes music. For example, echo in the mountains. It seems that polyphony was born from imitating or artificially prolonging echo, as the basic polyphonic form is a canon — a repetition of the same melody with a certain delay. Conversely, if you stripped a church organ of its long reverberation, the instrument would be castrated — completely deprived of its meaning. Though I digress.

At the core of my piece lies the very idea of using the folk timbre, the principle of sound production, as well as heterophonic polyphony characteristic of Russian folk music. It is an acoustic phenomenon when voices move so closely to one another, their spectral characteristics literally rubbing against each other, that they generate a particular tension. In Russian folk music, we can witness it firsthand.

I only quote a real folk song once. Mostly I combine the folk timbre with electronic sound and wind instruments — I will play the flute myself, for example. The music of kuvytsi is inherently rhythmic, but I always felt it lacks duration. Therefore, I plan to turn a part of my composition into something bordering on repetitive minimalism.

Here's what I can say so far: there will be voices and kuvytsi — inhale-exhale, all about breath; a wheel fiddle and minimal percussion. The piece will be continuous, undivided, forty to fifty minutes of uninterrupted musical flow that mutates and slowly morphs into something entirely different from where it began.

The question of a premiere is a particularly pressing issue for any composer. It is a great privilege to be able to write for specific performers — think of Cage, Berberian, Tudor, and so on. This is not your first time working with the Toloka ensemble; please, tell us how your first encounters went. Is it right that you want to work with particular voices individually?

That's right. I think my composition is a one-time dedication. Even a piece written specifically for Berberian can be recreated with a similarly experimentally-minded vocalist. However, each singer of folk tradition possesses an entirely unique set of abilities upon which I build. I am meeting the Toloka singers this week to conduct a thorough investigation that precedes the first steps of scoring. I want to approach each singer as a unique instrument — I mean to fully comprehend their capabilities, their range, the peculiarities of their voice in different registers. Overall, this piece makes for an interesting case. No universally replicable score can come out of it.

We know that you will take part not only as a flautist but also as an electronic music performer. In Russia, unlike many other cultures, incorporating folk elements into electronic music is often deemed tasteless and unnatural. What is the role of electronic music in your composition?

As far as I know, the Western world has incorporated folk sound into music since the New Age movement — from Asian to Arab and African traditions. So-called world music, of which, it seems to me, we have grown tired by now. Once it was declared: we, the Western civilisation, through our technological progress, have reached a crisis; let us then turn to, say, Tibet. We know that the flower children, the hippies, scattered worldwide in search of new truths, as their parents had led the world to ruin — to the First and Second World Wars.

However, as the West reflected on different cultures and encountered unfamiliar traditions, it became apparent that the essence, the je ne sais quoi at the core of archaic traditions is lost in attempts to incorporate them into the contemporary Western context. It is impossible to preserve this essence when you invite a bearer of tradition into a museum; you need to go to the indigenous people of the Amazon, not bring them to a philharmonic hall. If we truly want to encounter some archaic truth, it must be sought in the living context of its traditional practice. That is how I see it.

That is a pressing issue for cultural anthropologists. There is no universal approach that will grant a researcher access to the sacred knowledge. The mere fact of being there is not enough.

I suppose it has to do with our ample civilisational baggage. A certain expulsion from paradise has come to pass. When you are expelled from paradise, the gates close forever. Once you have learned a new alphabet and mastered new technologies, there is no going back. We look at children's drawings and they are often brilliant, mesmerising — but try as you might, you cannot imitate them! Similarly, it is impossible to truly recreate a piece in the style of a Medieval artist while living in the twenty-first century. Consciousness has been completely reformatted.

What will the spatial arrangement be for your performance? Tell us about your drafts or ideas.

Everything may still change, but so far I see the performers sitting in a circle. There is a particular rituality to it: in the circle people see each other; the circle as a perfect form; the circle as perpetual motion; the circle as the khorovod dance. The circle also creates an invisible axis — a root axis, which resonates with the theme of the Russian Pavilion. The circle makes the spectator an onlooker who is almost spying on the unfolding action.

Can we say that the members of the audience become participants or their role of onlookers is more important? Can we interpret it psychoanalytically?

It is curious how we can connect to anything empathetically while knowing that we can never be fully immersed. Even as outsiders of a certain tradition, be it folk or religious, we are still greatly influenced, by the visual, the musical, the acoustic and many other aspects. We are watching an ethereal act, we are not addressed, nothing is being conveyed. When I walk into a forest, it fascinates me, honestly, with everything. Mostly, though, it fascinates me with how it doesn't want to address me or convey anything. The forest is no less beautiful for it. His music lacks the anguish of the Romantic era: hear me, hear my pain, share it with me, we are all people, be embraced, ye millions! My piece has none of that. You are welcome to be part of it or stay far away —as you wish. That is how I feel about it now.

At the turn of twentieth century, Russian composer actively turned to folk music — Stravinsky's Les Noces or Rakhmaninov's Belilitsy-Rumyanitsy first come to mind. Do you see yourself in an implicit dialogue with these composers?

I do not! Quite the opposite. There is a lot of folk tradition in my life right now, I am not distanced from it at all. Usually a distance is necessary: somewhere there is a remote village or region, a composer (possibly of common origin), who graduated from a conservatory (possibly abroad) and is now returning, so let him display our cultural depths on the philharmonic stage! I am much closer — I don't know — I feel no such distance.

You were right to mention Les Noces, there is indeed some common ground. Stravinsky also took the timbres and made with them a piece of his own. It is an accurate comparison, though the music itself, of course, will be something else entirely.