Music for the Polish Connection Dance – Rolf Gehlhaar

Rolf Gehlhaar, the composer of the music for the dance created for the newest exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, The Polish Connection, is an internationally renowned pioneer in electronic and computer music. He has composed numerous instrumental and electronic works, notably the world first interactive musical environment, SOUND=SPACE.

Rolf at Coventry Cathedral

He talked to DOV about his music, its sources and manipulation.

“The music to Polish Connection has many roots; they reach deeply down to my childhood memories as well as to my developmental years as a young composer, and to my more recent experience of Antoni Malinowski’s inspired work.

From the outset of my professional career in music I have always seen myself as an artist-technician, looking for ways of sculpting sound, turning matter into mind. What I make with my media and its own substance has always been of equal interest to me. During the past 40 years I have been active as a composer, researcher, teacher, creator of interactive musical environments, kinetic sculptures, light installations and designer of new interfaces for musical expression.

Strongly influenced by having performed and recorded Stockhausen’s seminal works  Mikrophonie 1,  Prozession and Kurzwellen many times during the 1960’s, I decided to explore the structure of concrete, physical sounds. These were primarily the kinds of sounds that characterise the above pieces by Stockhausen. They were also the kinds of sounds to which I had easy access. I wanted to get to know them better.

Equally importantly, these sounds were far more complex than any that I was able to ‘manufacture’ electronically in my studio at the time. However, they could be recorded and then manipulated electronically. I had, after all, set out in 1965 to compose electronic music; electro-acoustic seemed a solid step towards that goal.

During this first period of research I discovered many similarities between the special noisy sounds I was able to evoke from amplified gongs, cymbals, bells, sheets of metal, wood splintering, vocal sounds, etc. These special sounds were not traditional, cultivated and refined musical ones but ones which their sources produced as rude physical objects. I subjected each to various technical processes until its spectrum, in its trembling, with its cloak removed, revealed the inner nature of the material in question. I decided to compose with this ‘inner trembling’, to recompose it in order to reveal a music that could be found within. I knew that this music could be ‘unlocked’ through the creation of patterns, patterns shifting and patterns controlling other patterns, and most of all, working in the dimension of time and colour, rather than that of pitch, the stage upon which music generally takes place. I have always considered music to be more an architecture of time – liquid philosophy – than a narrative or a drama.

The electronic composition Polish Connection arises out of a continuing concern of mine, finding the answers to two questions: firstly, what are the physical, theoretical, compositional and aesthetic implications of considering sound – the stuff of music – as an object which may behave as objects behave and may be manipulated as an object and, secondly, what music may be found therein.

In this instance, the physical source of the sounds is recordings of words spoken in English and Polish. These have been subjected to many of the various technical processes available to the contemporary soundsmith, such as time stretching, time compression, granulation, phase shifting, etc. Each of these processes not only reveals different characteristics of the sounds involved but, when pushed to the extreme, also generates entirely new sounds.

Although Polish Connection seems to be a narrative, it is much more a curved line, like an unswerving stroll on the surface of a sphere, which must always return to itself.

The words created by Martin Crimp and read by Katie Mitchell and Antoni were used as a sound source for much of the piece – transformed, dissected, reinterpreted.”

DANCE
Choreography: Yong Min Cho
Dancers: Carlotta Bruni/ Georgiana Cavendish/ Yong Min Cho/ Karolina Kraczkowska
Costumes: Jung Yeon Chae/ Yong Min Cho

Dance Performances
Saturday/Sunday 20th/21st June
Saturday/Sunday 27/28th June
12 Noon in the garden of Dulwich Picture Gallery

See the video of the dance rehearsals

Listen to the music