Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, Warsaw

Pure Intuitive Act

The search for a new language has often resulted in analysing the ancient vibrant songs and rituals. Such analysis can be found in Jerzy Grotowski’s practice, whose ideas of Poor Theatre and Art as Vehicle are precious examples of a practice open to real-time creation. Unfortunately, the practice often involved precise mimicking of the ancient elements or learning and repeating only a few chosen fragments from an improvisation-based process. There is also Konstanty Stanisławski’s theory of the several degrees of actors’ initiation, where the highest possible degree is described as the ‘opening to the higher forces’. Thus the artist becomes a channel for external energies, he or she is open to receive and be led by this stream in the creative process.
Today, as we face the challenge of creating sound tissue navigated by the heart, instinct or the cosmos, we are undertaking an extremely difficult task. It is necessarily related to all kinds of experiences accumulated in one’s lifetime. Sometimes it can be experienced as a total surprise, a strike of miraculous power and energy which then needs to be properly channelled, according to one’s own creative will. At other times it can be hard work, which consists in creating tension, breaking certain associations and joining various or opposing images of music. An act of ostension based on improvisation can become the basic source of experiencing truth for the artist and researcher in the 21st Century.

Biography

Intuitive artist, improviser, and cellist Robert Jędrzejewski (1976) is a Doctoral candidate at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, Poland. He holds degrees in performance, composition, and pedagogy from the Krakow Academy of Music and is a former Fellow of the Polish Ministry of Culture. His diverse projects and compositions are regularly performed all over Europe, in Canada, and in the USA. His goal is to determine to what extent the truly free and pure improvisation can become the basic creative method in music, which itself is part of an extremely dynamic performative sphere of the modern world. He would like to test which elements constitute the main engines of this kind of practice and how people behave under these kind of conditions, and if an act of ostension based on improvisation can become the basic source of experiencing truth for the artist and researcher in the 21st Century. He is co-founder of SALULU – duo of improvising composers, organiser of MUSIC IN A NEW KEY – Conference – Festival in Warsaw, Poland, and member of ISIM – International Society for Improvised Music and Ring für Gruppenimprovisation.