A Q&A with Vladimir Gorlinsky about Orphic Games. Punk-macrame, a new-processual project.

Question: The musical aspect is crucial to this project. How was the composers’ work organized in Orphic Games? What special work did you do? What was your goal?

Vladimir Gorlinsky: There is much to say about the project’s organization, because, indeed, it directly involved music... The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice - the very figure of Orpheus - assumed a direct treatment of musicality and music. So the first thing to point out is that composers Dmitri Kourliandski and Kirill Shirokov were attached to the project from the earliest stage. From the very beginning of the MIR-5 class (Boris Yuhananov's Studio of Individual Directing), we were invited to attend all the students’ showings as musical consultants - we watched all the scenes and gave advice, recommendations, and sometimes even practical help right on the spot. That is, our work began much earlier than the preparations for the premiere of Orphic Games. We weren’t only teachers, but, rather, co-authors of the students. Everything happened in co-authorship. So the first thing to point out is that there was a huge stage of growth.

Q: Sometimes a director says, “Come up with some sentimental music for me in this spot.” As I understand it, this was a whole different kind of collaboration. 

A: Initially, we did not come in with our own music, although sometimes the students used our music, so that we discovered it had already entered the project on its own. This was quite interesting, sometimes humorous, sometimes right on target. The collaboration was based on the following principles: first, do no harm, that is, don’t offer anything that that might hinder the director- composer initiative, because many students took on the initiative of composer themselves and suggested music on their own for the project. The slightest gesture can destroy such an initiative if it proposes something that is good and will definitely end up being used, but is not what is needed. It was important for us to avoid that kind of thing and carefully, through advice, without insisting on our proposals, to try to remove some things that were overly obvious. Generally speaking, if you have a sentimental scene, sentimental music will be of no help; on stage it will act as competition. In such moments we would point that out and offer alternatives.

Further, the composers offered various performative pieces, acquainting the students with some of John Cage's works, trying to introduce them into the already existing context. Some of the students responded really well to this.

The project gelled very quickly. The transition to the production part was absolutely fantastic, because all the existing lines that previously were hidden, not manifest, suddenly appeared and were very powerful. For example, the segment about the construction of instruments was really interesting, for which many thanks to Mikhail Taratin, who made instruments such as special tubes connected by hoses with balloons for pumping air. Kirill Shirokov also took part in this, and what came together was truly an electro-orchestra of monster and mutant instruments. This also happened in a very short time, just three months from the inception of the idea to the completion - people worked as if in a trance.

There are approximately five cardinally different aspects in Orphic Games that the composers had to assimilate: sound design, the construction of instruments, the composing of leit-arias, and arias for Orpheus and Eurydice, which tie the entire project together. There was also work related to the specific inclusion of the sounds of the performers in the space of the hall. This was a whole class of activities that we had to instigate and implement.

Q: How did you go about collecting street sounds and other natural noises?

A: That is sound design. This was very interesting for us, too: we took eight recorders and went to a train station or a construction site, scattered and began to record. In fact, we created a soundscape that functions spatially; in the hall it recreates the atmosphere of a construction site. We worked with a lot of technologies that we haven’t worked with before.

Q: Did you come up with them by the principle of “let’s give this a shot” or did you work off of content?

A: Let's be specific. Let’s say we had the task of recreating something like the Butovo region, that is, the notion of ​​a harsh bedroom community in Moscow. We didn’t have to record this in Butovo, finding a completely different area, which, it seemed to us, corresponded to the characteristics of acoustic rigidity. Since I knew that the hall was spatial, we decided not to record everything on one recorder. We have incredible spatial possibilities on the Main Stage: this project has 38 different sound sources throughout the hall and all are used equally. So we decided to record, not on a single recorder as usual, but on the largest number of recorders we had at the time - there were eight.

Q: Did you do this in collaboration with the participants of Orphic Games?

A: Yes. It should be noted that almost all the work, with rare exceptions, was shared among the participants of the project. We had an absolutely wonderful assistant in Anton Oschepkov, who was in charge of the entire musical part: he gathered information on all the different disciplines that I listed, and he did that quite brilliantly.

Q: How did you - as a composer and co-author of the project - interact with actors and directors during the production period, that is, with those who would implement everything, would have to be in the right place on stage and correctly reproduce certain sounds?

A: I think about obstetrics, because the most important rule here is to do no harm. Do not try to realize every proposal at all costs if it interferes with what is transpiring, or if people are not ready for it yet. The most important quality, I think, is simply the ability to hear what is happening at all times - Boris Yukhananov urged us to be sensitive and attentive to the environment that was coming into being. For example, we created quiet music for the cafe because we didn’t want to overload the drama. Yukhananov immediately asked us under no circumstance to be too quiet - otherwise the proper atmosphere was not created, it seemed that everything was in a vacuum. An aural sensitivity to the environment, the situation, was required of us, and we tried to be in tune with what was happening.

Q: Musically speaking, Orphic Games is an outstanding work in Russian theatre. Is that true in terms of the degree of complexity and the variety of tasks that you carried out?

A: Yes. First, I think you have to look at the way everything was done in its entirety. That is, we have 12 performances, an absolutely incredible volume of work. Of course, it's hard for me to speak about it, because I'm deep inside the material. But almost everything that has been done - be it an atmospheric background, the writing of a song, or the score for an instrument - is all living material. This indicates to me that everything has turned out well.

Q: Can you call this a score?

A: Yes, and now we approach a very important topic in our conversation - the participation of Oleg Makarov throughout the entire work. Oleg Makarov is a sound designer, composer, and just generally a genius of sound. This is the person who picked up on our initiative related to spatial sound and applied technology to it. He helped us implement it clearly, accurately, with no technical overlap, which is usually impossible for this kind of work, particularly because he never had the luxury of run-throughs to work with. It all came together because of him.

Q: So will everything be performed precisely as it was during the May showings?

A: We’re talking about a Max MSP computer program written from scratch. It can program all sound processes. We created a patch containing all the sounds that are distributed throughout the hall - it's actually a computer score, which is played by uploading each file to its matrix. Plus there are scores for participants, for example, that include segments recorded live; basically Kirill did those. We had - this is another interesting point - a kind of internal division, but a very smooth one. Kirill rehearsed with the students, that is, he met and cleaned up things related to the action itself. My work basically concerned everything involving the acoustic filling of space.

Then there were the electric instruments, the Orphic line in the music, Dmitri Kourliandsk’s Radio Orpheus. That’s a huge computer program, into which virtually any audio material may be downloaded where it is acoustically atomized. We downloaded the most diverse materials of the performance and came up with interesting results: some of the children's songs in the work produced electro-acoustic compositions. I had a specific list of tasks that I made myself, so as not to go crazy, and one by one I simply crossed everything off until we reached the end of the project.

Q: Did you need to train and equip people who sing and extract sounds so that they could perform certain kinds of vocal tasks?

A: That’s a real mystery. This was done by chorus master Dmitry Matvienko. There were chorus rehearsals, but even for me, inside the whole thing, it was astonishing to see the students sing a cantata almost like professional musicians. My extenuation of “almost” is quite minimal and, most importantly, it is included in the score. The score itself does not require any super pure musical pronunciation. It is, of course, unique that they absorbed everything quite professionally - the costumes, the music, the performance, the acting. The result is a whole universe.

Q: How did you go about the work on the operatic parts of Orpheus and Eurydice?  

A: Mitya Kourliandski and I worked in parallel. This parallelism is very interesting. I also worked in parallel with Kirill. Fyodor and I only heard the cantata at the end. That is, we found out about a lot only when we reached the stage. This was the most thrilling part for us, because we did not know in advance exactly how things would be connected. Only intuition and our presence at the creative sessions could give us results. So we were not sure everything would come together.

Mitya and I worked like that, too. At first there was a proposal for just Eurydice’s part, then I realized I had material that truly appeared in an orphic moment: I dreamed a vocal intonation that eventually became a fundamental part.

Q: You actually heard it?

A: Not exactly. I woke up and it is what came of my dream. For me there was nothing trivial about it, I got quite excited and thought: "Why is this happening right now?" I proposed the part for Orpheus, and it went into the structure in parallel.

Q: There are, in several places, if I'm not mistaken, ready-made musical sounds such as pop hits and standards. First, how do you feel about this in the context of a modern performance? And, second, how did this happen? Whose idea was it?

A: It varied. If you ask me: "Is this your music or Kirill’s?” I can’t answer because everything is so chopped up and interpenetrated. It really is of a single piece. This undividedness is probably the most important result of our work.

There are pieces in there suggested by the students. As I mentioned previously, we worked on them so that they would not interfere. We had an excellent instrument at our disposal - space which we pushed as far away as we could, so that sounds seems to be coming from the audience. When you hear music from afar - it doesn’t have such a direct impact. Sometimes these are the songs of the students themselves - for example, the songs of Sveta Sataeva, who unexpectedly revealed herself to be an electronic composer. She performs with Denis Prutovin in an ensemble of ambient performers in one of the performances. The group Krovostok was supposed to perform, but something happened during negotiations, and we began to think that Sveta's work could fit in here. It is absolutely wonderful music!

Then there was the part of Zhenya Dal, who recorded his own pop song a number of years ago. This, too, is wonderful pop music. We worked with a number of pop songs: Kirill did the processing of "I'm Taking You to the Tundra.” It was a happy low-fi moment for all of us, we did whatever we wanted.

Q: What happens in terms of the impact on the spectator when a complete composition appears in the performance? It is a violation of the structure of the performance that has a direct impact on you as a spectator - for some it’s irritating because they hate this song, for some it’s great because it's a song from their youth. How does that work?

A: This can be considered a structure of displacement. For example, the high passes into the low, then rises again. This kind of movement in the performance carries the spectator with it. In fact, this is an important tool, not merely some waste product of the production process. But you must control the dosage if it’s going to work. You must choose the precise dosage and have everything in its proper place, because you can kill everything really easy with this. This is probably a crucial point - discovering the dosage of this kind of music in the performance. As it is, it is a very cool thing.

Q: Am I right in thinking that the composer's work today is not merely a component of a performance, but is something that has penetrated into the essence of a performance?

A: Yes, absolutely. First, this is true in regards to our theatre – it’s a very important topic! Because sometimes I watch theatre and I see that music is  just some pragmatic thing that shows up in moments set aside specifically for it, as if in a ghetto. When you realize the true scale of how music can function in theatre, how it can reveal meanings, how it can exist in parallel and on its own level, you begin to see what an amazing instrument this is for a director. It can’t be separated from the whole.

Q: In other words, composers are co-directors, co-authors of the performance?

A: Yes! In actual fact the territories are absolute equals, just as lighting and video are equal components. No one divides them or raises one over another, because everything works together to achieve meaning. This is the main reward, when each element is in its proper place and does not interfere with others. As such, you can’t call this a composer's or a director's theater - everything exists in harmony with each other.

Q: Speaking of your generation of composers, those who are active now in theatre, is it right to say you are greatly influence by the ideas of Cage and other American performers of the 1950s who treated time frames and structures in new ways and transformed the figure of the composer into a kind of engineer who builds a theatrical act or performance according to special laws?

A: Unlike them, we came from the academy, the conservatory. But we were very interested in any performative transitions that were made in art. Cage is inside us because that was our education and the experiments we conducted in relation to him. We write academic works, we present them at concerts and festivals. But theatre, precisely, is a huge field for research that you could never do in the realm of a concert, often simply because of time and technical restraints. Everything on the field of theatre penetrates everything else and has a tremendous enriching quality.