It’s hard to fully articulate the explosion of ideas, conversations, and musical performances of the Ostrava Days Festival in the Czech Republic. I’ve just returned from my second time attending as a composition resident of the Festival and Institute, and I will be reflecting on and unpacking insights from this incredibly meaningful experience for months to come. For Ostrava Days 2023, I had the opportunity to compose a large-scale new work for choir, two narrators (yours truly and Eric Wubbels), organ, and two brass players entitled “ZBYHOŇ//Mythopoeia.” You can listen to that work and learn more about it here.

In addition to composing, performing, taking private lessons, and attending performances and rehearsals, all of the Institute's residents attend lectures by numerous composers, conductors, and select performers. I deeply appreciate how each lecturer shared their aesthetics and musical stances with candor – and I’d like to share some especially thought-provoking quotes from my personal notes, which I took in real-time. One caveat: these notes are extraordinarily selective, as I missed several lectures to attend rehearsals and lessons. Additionally, I left for Los Angeles the day after my piece premiered as I’m beginning my doctorate in composition at USC’s Thornton School of Music. There are substantial gaps, but those who are curious can find the full list of lecturers here. Luckily, Ostrava Days creates a thorough yearly report of each festival, which includes full lectures and will be available physically and as a PDF later this year. If you enjoy what you read below, I’d highly recommend also perusing the Reports from past iterations of the Festival, which date back to 2001 and contain lectures of the utmost historical significance.

On Choice

“Decision making via intuition – in music, this is essential.”
–Bernhard Lang

[The AACM was] “a beehive of activity…you could do whatever you wanted to do.”
–Amina Claudine Myers

“Intuitively working out.
Intuitively being interested.
Intuitively not being interested in other things.”
–Petr Kotik

“The individual choices of what I do with these pieces, or voices, are far from automatic. There’s a lot of choice. When I started working with this [system] I realized that there’s not a way of objective translation. There is no objective choice, I always have to make an individual choice.”
–Peter Ablinger

“Sometimes you have to get rid of your instinct for symmetry. It’s a bad instinct.”
–Petr Bakla

“I think of these roles within the field we work in. What does it mean for an ensemble to follow the leadership of the conductor, or even the composer?”
–Raven Chacon

On Change

“As I see it, contemporary classical music could be a real world music. It’s not right now, but it could be. We need a new new complexity that will end up adopting a new creative depth.”
–George E. Lewis

“Art is a paradigm of emergence.”
–Bernhard Lang

[I’m interested in setting] “two opposed forces which cannot exist without each other”
–Ana Sokolović

“I like a rock garden. Give me something that won’t change, I’ll move. What does the horn do? I’ll spend months trying to figure it out.”
–Eric Wubbels

“There is no way to hear or notate what you have in mind. The only option is to find or create a notation system that has an interesting dialogue with what you have in mind. Or what you think you have in mind. What you have in mind is an illusion, a cloud. When it goes through a notation system it creates something that was not in the cloud.”
–Peter Ablinger

On Orchestration

“I’m not going to put the flute at the bottom or the base at the top, but I want to question those kinds of things.”
–Raven Chacon

“You must orchestrate, and sometimes orchestrating means writing for one instrument and not orchestra. I don’t know about you, but for me, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is a masterpiece when played at the piano. And the orchestrated version by Ravel, despite him being a master, is nothing more than a showpiece.”
–Peter Graham

“When you want something rhythmic in the orchestra, woodwinds are the best. Strings? Goodbye.”
–Bruno Ferrandis

“Balance the percussion within the percussion. If you think of the quality of the attack, you will solve many issues.”
–Bruno Ferrandis

On Harmony

“It’s good to know about other people, many other composers have not understood traditional harmony.”
–Petr Kotik

“You, as a composer, can never be strong in every area. My strengths are rhythm, color, dramatics, and other parameters. I’ve never liked harmony. When I understood that, it was very helpful. If you want to be perfect in everything, it will be grey.”
–Ana Sokolović

“I have a different harmonic language depending on the instrument, which I think is unusual.”
–Eric Wubbels

“Intonation is the devil. Even if you have an ear, you must address the problem correctly. If I were you, I’d think from the low register to the high register. It works that way – vertical, always.”
–Bruno Ferrandis

“A lot of people think about the technical aspects of harmony, but it’s all about freedom. All of the tones are equal.”
–Miroslav Beinhauer on the sixth-tone harmonium

“If you’re not sure [what you’re hearing], you always add something. Something that is not really there. That’s what perception is – not just receiving, but projecting. A kind of counterpoint. This kind of illusion I paint is also a self-portrait of my way of hearing.”
–Peter Ablinger

On Instruments

“I love the [classical] instruments, so much so that I rarely even process them.”
–Raven Chacon

“It’s about creating a new instrument out of the two of them. I like to think of an instrument as a sieve – draining the trombone through the piano.”
–Eric Wubbels on “contraposition”

On Meaning

“Meaning is also creating a barrier. By not going into meaning you embrace the person even closer, sometimes.”
–Peter Ablinger

“Silence functions as more than a piece of art.”
–George E. Lewis

“I never thought of this as a documentary, just a way to view people moving.”
–Phill Niblock on ‘The Movement of People Working’

On Failure

“Don’t worry about it if your music is terrible on the first listen, don’t worry about it! Don’t try to please yourself. If you’re going to be interesting, it’s not going to be about you. Attitude, it’s all about attitude.”
–Petr Kotik

“Have you heard of African Pianism? No? Go home and ask your professors why not.”
–George E. Lewis

On Playing

“To play also means to enact, to simulate, to lie. If a performer plays a musical piece it’s an enactment, a kind of theater.”
–Bernhard Lang

“Composers don’t communicate with the audience. They speak with the performers, and the performers are the ones who communicate with the audience.”
–Peter Graham

“The blues is from the creator. Whatever you play is from the creator.”
–Amina Claudine Myers

“Acknowledging your pulse in the world, your speed. I want them to just feel it. To acknowledge that they are doing something together – a shared pulse and alignment.”
–Raven Chacon on starting a piece with a bar of rests

On Text

“If you listen to the texts melodically, rhythmically, harmonically, you’ll find that the most interesting musical moments also correspond to the most interesting moments in regards to content.”
–Peter Ablinger

“The text gives you the form.
The text gives you the rhythm.
The text gives you the duration.
The text gives you the everything.
It flows, it goes.”
–Petr Kotik

Recommended Reading & Viewing:

Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador) (rec. Ana Sokolović)

Mary Bauermeister’s Ich hänge im Triolengitter: Mein Leben mit Karlheinz Stockhausen (rec. Bernhard Lang)

Arnie Cox’s Embodying Music: Principles of the Mimetic Hypothesis (rec. Eric Wubbels)

Donald Francis Tovey’s The Main Stream of Music, and Other Essays (rec. George E. Lewis)

Leonard B. Meyer’s Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-century Culture (rec. George E. Lewis)

W. A. Mathieu’s Harmonic Experience: Tonal Harmony from Its Natural Origins to Its Modern Expression (rec. Thomas Bruckner)