To Keep Time from Standing Still

This joint project by the composer Martin Smolka and stage director Jiří Adámek combines and experiments with linguistic, musical and performative elements which exemplify “music as speech”, and vice versa “speech as music”. Sentences are broken down into words and syllables, and then inserted into the composition. Through repetition, for example, they demonstrate how individual text segments can mutate into musical elements.
For the project “To Keep Time from Standing Still”, the two Czech artists have developed a format combining concert, theatre and instrumental opera genres. At the invitation of and in close cooperation with the ensemble ascolta, the artists have composed a piece which incorporates texts by Franz Kafka and Albert Camus. The artists sought a more profound encounter between speech and music. By concentrating on, reducing or wholly dispensing with external media and augmented technology, they were able to tap the potential of the existing material. Only in rare exceptions did they integrate pure singing, orienting the instrumental parts to the expression, tempo and rhythm of the spoken word. Smolka and Adámek avoided using texts to musically express sweeping, abstract ideas, which led them to the literature by Kafka – master of poetic detail, concrete metaphor and natural acoustic quality.
The world premiere of the project has been performed at the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik (Witten New Chamber Music Festival).

Artistic director: Erik Borgir
Project manager: Florian Hoelscher
Composer: Martin Smolka (CZ)
Author: Jiři Adámek (CZ)
Musicians: ensemble ascolta

Additional Venues:

Premiere in Switzerland at the Lucerne Festival, Lucerne: 14 September 2019;