Milan Guštar ‎– Les funérailles d’un grand homme sourd (cass)

Milan Guštar is an expert in many fields. He is a programmer, musician and organologist, from the HIS Voice website we can know him as an erudite commentator on news, rarities and interesting contexts from the world of musical instruments. He collaborates with musicians and artists to create software or other new technologies. Mathematics and analysis is often the starting point for him in his own composition, and his compositions thus mostly deal with issues in the areas of tone systems, algorithms and microtonality.
The collection of Guštar’s compositions, now published by the Prague cassette publisher Ascarid, is delimited by two pieces from the long-formed and constantly evolving FLEX cycle, which examines the effects of unstable pitches in various ways. Next to them, there is also a composition DENSATIO IN 128 EDO and another grasp of the concept of Cage’s 4’33 “.
The dominant feature of the album is mainly the monumental FLEX NR.10 (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10) occupying the entire first page of the cassette (41:08). With the algorithm clearly given logic, different tones are gradually layered here. As more and more frequencies are added to this ever fuller chord, their mutual interference reactions begin to occur, and more and more “frictions” increase in the massive flow. However, this permanent drone, which seems endless, does not contain any aggression in itself, its majesty is simply self-evident and does not need to compete with anything. However, we will realize the complete symmetry of the form and the overall meaning of this composition only in the middle. We will begin to find out that this whole sound mass not only expands, but also accelerates with the exact fluidity of the geometric series. In a short moment, this whole colossus accelerates into a single sinusoidal tone which quickly flies up to frequencies inaudible to humans. This insight into the whole and the encounter with infinity lasts only a fraction of a second, but the strong impression remains stored for a long time. The whole process immediately goes back in the same way, the sine wave collapses into pulsating bass again and continues to disintegrate into details. The way back is never the same for a person. Now we are penetrating the very slowly calming and thinning tangle of frequencies with the knowledge that we are really inside the sound and its individual components are revealed to us in a way that would be impossible outside the “laboratory” conditions of this composition. For some time now, a replica of Gustav Mahler from his conversation with Jean Sibelius has stuck in my head: “A symphony must be like the world. It must include everything.
DENSATIO IN 128 EDO, which opens the other side, works with piano sound simulation. Monophonic atonal or microtonally blurred phrases leave contributions to the thickening drone surface. In honor of John Cage (this year we commemorate one hundred years since his birth and twenty years since his death), there are four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, referred to here as SILENTIO IN FUTURUM (MARCHE FUNÈBRE). According to the attached music notation, we can divide this silence in our imaginations into 91 bars in a slow “marching” two-quarter meter. There have been many variations on Cage’s famous tacet, but Guštar connects it with other and older contexts. The stylization of silence into a mourning process, for example, refers to the empty score of the French humorist and nonsense artist Alphonse Allais from the late nineteenth century.
The other side of the cassette also has a clear symmetry, Silentio separates two compositions of equal length per second, and as a result, the footage of both sides is exactly the same. In the final FLEX NR.33 (DO NUT) we work with synthetic chordal arpegia, but their long reverberation is inconspicuously or more significantly smoothly retuned, in accordance with the idea of ​​the whole cycle. The seemingly somewhat static composition thus also contains constant movement.
In short, this music represents an understanding of spontaneous invention with a rationally elaborated realization. In connection with Guštar’s refined sound aesthetics and the magic of the aristocratic medium, a great artefact was created in all respects.