![]() Lukas Ligeti, electronics, marimba lumina The communication in question is one that is mediated by technology, the language of music that allows artists to cooperate, but also one that travels through time and space – to districts that have disappeared from rebuilt cities and memories of those who are no longer with us. Yet among them, speech becomes a pretext for abstract sequences of sounds.Īlthough the relation between the participants in the event developed through abstract musical activities, improvising and listening to sounds, in which meaning was replaced with sound and rhythm, the impression that communication was the pivot and the means in the creation of Ligeti’s piece remains. It is hardly accidental that, as it seems, narrations of identity constitute the starting and final points for the composer, the audience and the voices telling stories. But the experience of a family history being discontinued because of the Holocaust and, later on, the homogenizing social and historical policy of socialist states or migration must have created a field of shared experience for Lukas Ligeti and his interlocutors. The notion that the awareness of ethnic roots and the identity they help to develop is a condition necessary for human existence is obviously questionable we should not consider ethnic identification as a necessity faced by individuals. A majority of his parents’ and grandparents’ generation perished in death camps after Hungarians and Germans had implemented their murderous plan to exterminate Hungarian Jews in 1944. "Although Lukas Ligeti never lived behind the Iron Curtain, his family story is akin to Polish biographies. The result is a touching composition situated somewhere between performance art and concert. Those, in turn, were asked to respond intuitively to what they heard and continue the conversation by their, musical means. By way of a precise musical notation, these memories were fed to musicians via headphones in the form of speech, rhythm, and melodies. All interview partners were also asked to sing songs. He conducted numerous interviews with people between the ages of 20 and 98 to talk to them about Jewish life in Warsaw. The history of Polish Jews, which is the POLIN museum’s mission to transport and convey, led Lukas Ligeti to contemplate his own (Hungarian-) Jewish background. Music as meta-memory: In 2015, when he was the artist-in-residence at Warsaw’s POLIN Museum, the internationally renowned percussionist and composer Lukas Ligeti created a unique document in words and sounds that is being presented on this album.
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