Mark Buloshnikov.
Moments
At the centre of Mark Buloshnikov’s concept lies an attempt to understand the genre of musical installation not as a static, looped, and repeating form, but as a dynamic one which develops in time and space.
Each of the successive six hours of moments corresponds to a particular musical key. In parallel, the rhythm gradually speeds up, from a slow to a fractional pulse, while the instrumentation becomes more and more diverse.
Musical material is repeated only once in this over-large form—a slow foxtrot is heard at the very beginning and at the very end of the composition. Its melodic echoes are heard throughout the piece—changing duration and timbre coloration, fragments of this foxtrot, lasting from 3–10 seconds, appear and disappear against a background of long notes by string instruments separated by pauses. This “background” to the installation has a double meaning: it both resembles the process of tuning musical instruments itself and, metaphorically, suggests a tuning to something higher.
The space of location and time is inevitably filled with events—often fleeting and barely perceptible, but hinting at something more. It is as though we had awaited a downpour, but found only fine rain. The storm approached and passed us by, but all the same our memory picks up the signals and knows about the storm, just as a leaf stores information about the entire tree. In short, even the most modest of material has its own DNA and rich information. Moments is a space of the possible in which the understatement and fragmentation of the message, coupled with the softness and care of presentation, refer to the anticipation and expectation of our listener’s perception, reacting to musical signs. In this case we take signals as a kind of narrative. However, such forms can also be perceived as non-narrative, as a peculiar enumeration of musical moments.
Precisely which elements of the pre-recorded material will sound out at any given moment is determined by a computer programme, making all the harmonic combinations of Moments unintentional, and allowing the piece’s soundscape to endlessly renew itself.
Mark Buloshnikov (Nizhny Novgorod, 1990) is a composer. He is a graduate of the Glinka Nizhny Novgorod State Conservatory, where he studied composition under Boris Getselev and musicology under Tamara Leva. He went on to complete an assistant-traineeship with Boris Getselev. He is a laureate of the Step to the Left international composing competition. He is the NoName ensemble’s artistic director and pianist, and the Chairman of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the Union of Russian Composers.
Audio-engineer: Andrey Titov-Vrublevsky
Performers: Moscow contemporary music ensemble