Akusma Forum is a project initiated by a recognized Polish composer, and until a few years ago the Musica Electronica Nova’s Artistic Director, Elżbieta Sikora. The project aims to present the audience with a panorama of electro-acoustic music from various countries. This year it will be Germany, Italy, Turkey and Poland.

“Hurry up the machine. I have struck a big bonanza” – was the content of a telegraph message sent by Thomas A. Edison on September 13, 1878 to William Wallace, informing about the progress of work on the light bulb. When composing her work, Annesley Black tried to imitate Edison’s methods, translating them into the process of writing the score. By manipulating sounds, noise, filters or modulators, the author leads to their fluctuations – producing success or failure.

Calder Plays Theremin by Dorit Chrysler was commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art in New York to celebrate Alexander Calder – an American sculptor, member of the Abstraction-Création group, and one of the main representatives of kinetic art. Chrysler took inspiration from two of his works – Man-Eater with Pennants (1945) and Snow Flurry (1948) – using a theremin. The synergy it creates resembles something like the music of the spheres – celestial bodies orbiting in the electromagnetic field of the instruments. In Fracture 22, the composer combines microtones with gestures performed near the theremin antennas and Minimoog filters – a monophonic analogue synthesizer. The colour modulations they produce appear with variable frequency.

Svetlana Maraš has worked with Minimoog, too. The artist emphasises that it was a challenge, “which turned out to be a really pleasant and rewarding experience. Creating densely textured soundscapes with pulsating elements, sounds with little or no reference to exact pitch, going from one starting point to another, returning to the previous state, all seemed to be at odds with anything the instrument’s properties could intuitively bring the composer to. To achieve light and unpretentious sound quality, she needed to break its limits. Only then was it possible to get the structural transparency that Maraš was striving for.

Misha Cvijović’s Iktsuarpok was composed during lockdowns, at a time of unpredictability, constant fluctuation and cacophony. The title refers to the life of the Inuits and refers to a frustrating expectation that the world would be saved by someone. The piece is a continuation of the composer’s work in the field of electroacoustic music and analogue synthesizers. In it, the artist develops a counterpoint based on microtonal melodic lines, extremely dense movements that simulate howling sirens with their hard sound. The climax is the “explosion” of the cluster, symbolising the awakening of the world, which has so far continued with its eyes wide shut.