Find out what winter sounds like or why the music in the dome is worth listening to / Article

At the center of the Aula Magna of the “Cēsis” concert hall there will be a dome, or room within a room, equipped with a surround sound system for concerts and numerous loudspeakers, and seats for the audience will be located inside it.

For the first time, the dome of the “Cēsis” concert hall was built and opened to the public in January 2022, introducing the audience to space music as a special genre, and including contemporary sound models specially created for the event in the program. This year the event has become more international: composers from the Nordic and Baltic countries will take part.

“The sound installation in the room can be created in different ways, and in cooperation with the representatives of the Cēsis concert hall, we decided that the concert on the dome will focus on the winter theme, or on the northern theme,” says the curator of the project – Lithuanian composer, sound artist, associate professor of the Composition Department of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater, Mantauts Krukauskas. He also reveals that the program is ambient music soundtracks – it will be minimalistic aesthetics of the Baltic and Nordic countries, and the purpose of this musical story is to create a wintery atmosphere for the listeners.”

The choice of composers this year is linked to the Baltic and Scandinavian countries. Latvia will be represented by Platons Buravickis and Krista Dinter, Lithuania by Mantauts Krukauskas himself and Gedmintė Samsonaitė, who currently lives and works in Great Britain and mainly writes film music, Norway by Tine Surel Lange, Estonia by Theodore Parker, who lives in the USA. All the soundtracks put into music the sensations we experience and the nature we look at in winter.

Mantauts Krukauskas also points out that one of the composers who will “participate” in this concert will be Antonio Vivaldi, because in this program one of Vivaldi’s best-known works – “Ziema” from the “Seasons” concert series – will be transformed into postmodern winter moods. It was created with special sounds by Krukauskas together with his colleague, and in this recording he will not play a real baroque orchestra, but a modern synthesizer. The recording will also have a voice, and it will be the Latvian singer Monta Martinsone, who is an excellent baroque interpreter. “So, it will be a true reproduction of Baroque temperament and tuning, but not with Baroque instruments, but with modern synthesizers, and that could be extremely interesting.”

Last year, when the Ambisonic Music Concert in the Dome was performed for the first time in the “Cēsis” Concert Hall, it was illuminated with a bluish light. Does light and its color play an essential role in an ambisonic music concert? “Decidedly!” argues Krukauskas.

“Because every day we hear sounds and perceive them in connection with what we see. Therefore, in the concert, light and its color will help our brain create images that would be closest to the winter atmosphere. Light will be the one that will contribute to create winter mood together with music.”

Together with Platon Buravicki, Latvia will be represented in this project by Krista Dinter. “First of all I am a sound artist, secondly a teacher. At the Latvian Academy of Music, I teach everything related to sound art and the application of sound technology in more unconventional ways: both how to create ambient sounds and sound design, both as thinking about how sound affects people and how we perceive sound in general I’m still very active in Liepāja University, where I work in the art research laboratory – we have the “New media art” program, of which I am a Master’s graduate. But the cooperation with the Music Academy is quite old, because the composer Rolands Kronlaks and the sound artist Voldemar Johansson are my professors,” introduces Krista Dinter.

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Last year he was in the audience at the dome concert in Cēsis. “I was very happy with the result and with the fact that these technologies and the way of expressing sound in general have also reached us. Already in 2019, in Liepāja in collaboration with “Dirty Deal Audio”, a held large concert of ambisonic music, and which, in my opinion, was the first such large-scale project of this kind – the “Baltic Trayl” electronic music talent camp, the finale of which was a concert created in collaboration with Mantautas Krukauskas . of Baltic sound artists and electro-acoustic music composers has formed in recent years in an ever closer cooperation and is becoming more and more interesting and more intense”, thinks Dinter.

What exactly is the extraordinary thing that the public has the opportunity to experience while sitting surrounded by this dome? What creates the extraordinary feeling that Cesis is worth going to? “In my opinion, such a spatial reproduction somehow appeals much more to our auditory senses, because

even in everyday life we ​​spatially perceive the world around us – we perceive sound from all directions. We may not even think about it every day, but in fact, how we feel in a given room depends in many ways on the acoustics of the room and the acoustic markers we perceive.

Therefore, if composers or sound artists are given the opportunity to work with sound in one room, that’s wonderful!”

Does such an acoustic experience also affect the physical side of a person? Krista Dinter is inclined to think so. “In recent years, immersion in various media has become very popular – both in virtual reality and – as in this case – in the immersive sound that surrounds you. In my opinion, listening to this type of music is another level where you can afford yourself to form around your space.”

Krista Dinter’s composition entitled “When all the clues are missing” will be played in the project “Eskaujušća ziema”. “In a way, it’s related to winter and this time when everything around is quiet and we have enough time to reflect,” says the composer. “The work was created in 2020, but its ambisonic version will be played for the first time in Cēsis. We can adapt the pieces – just like Vivaldi’s ‘Seasons’. In this case, my piece is about how, listening music, listening to sounds, a person can get rid of worries, worries and tensions.This work originally came from the project “Art for a Longer Life”, where we invited people to think about how to improve their lives through the use of ‘art.

The piece consists of registered clicks, rattles and thumps created by the… knitting process. In the process of knitting, you can see the result very quickly, and it has also been scientifically proven that knitting and other handicrafts help to calm down, they also have a beneficial effect on blood pressure.

In this case it is a meditation on the theme of knitting, which begins with completely natural sounds – clicking, rattles and crackles, culminating in a meditative sound composition in which knitting needles are used to play stringed instruments. “