MUSICA RICERCATA [re]imagined YOUTUBE RELEASE
I am happy to announce that on Friday, December 30 2022 we will release our film on YouTube!
Don’t miss the Premiere at 8:30 PM CET here!
I have made this film in collaboration with a Ukrainian visual artist Anna Prydatko, who was incredible enough to accomplish this work despite highly intensive war actions and regular power outages in Kyiv, Ukraine, where she resides.
Please support this incredible person via PayPal:
prydatkohanna@gmail.com
The film uses a piano cycle of 11 miniatures by the Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti, the cycle is called Musica Ricercata. Ligeti was a brilliant composer who died in 2006. The film was supposed to be premiered on May 28, Ligeti's 99th birthday, but was postponed because of the war in Ukraine and Anna's difficult living situation.
Photo © Co Broerse
Ricercar is an old style of music, and 'ricercare' in Italian means to search anew, to find again. In this early work Ligeti finds music anew and develops his unique style Ex Nihilo. 'Creatio Ex Nihilo' is a religious term from Latin, meaning divine creation of something out of nothing. Therefore, our idea of the film is based on the image of a certain creator, an artist, and the whole universe we see in the film, all the characters, are his creation.
a screenshot from the film
There is an opinion that in order to create a masterpiece, one must set a fixed framework. Ligeti does just that. In each piece, Ligeti limits himself to a small musical idea and specific notes.
For example, the entire first piece is written in all registers of the keyboard with only one note, the A, and only at the very end does the second note, the D, appear. In the second piece, he uses three notes in E sharp, F sharp, and G. In the third, he uses four notes, in the next five, and so on. Only in the last, eleventh piece does he use all twelve notes of the scale.
An excerpt from the first piece
The entire cycle begins and ends with the note A, so despite the contrasts in the pieces, Ligeti creates an arc that connects the entire cycle. Therefore, although there are very different worlds and characters in each piece of our film, there is a certain connection between them that an attentive viewer can notice.
a screenshot from the film
We don't know if Ligeti had any extra-musical associations, and everything you see today is just our imagination and interpretation.
When I was making this film, I simply shared with Anna the images and stories that came to my mind while working on the music, and she enriched or changed my idea according to her vision and created the visual image. It was very interesting work and an experiment for me, because sometimes Anna reflected things exactly as I had imagined them, and sometimes quite differently.
a screenshot from the film
Thank you for watching, and I hope you’ll enjoy the film!
If you want to kindly support my work, please click the DONATE button below!
