May, 3-4th, 2018

Vilnius, Lithuania

Postmodernist representation of the Central European multiethnic milieu.

Marek Piaček: Apolloopera – a melodrama about bombing for the choir, actor and trombone.

PRESENTATION ANNOUNCEMENT 

The need to remember and recollect belongs to the social functions of art. Art contributes to the creation of collective memory in that it transforms the fragments of events enshrined in individual memory into artistic forms, which then become part of collective memory. The content of memory, but also its selection and artistic transformation, is culturally conditioned. The present study examines the work with individual and collective memory in a postmodernist artwork. Apollooperaby the Slovak composer Marek Piaček is a mosaic made up of images of a small Central European town in first half of the 20th century. The poetics of this piece is based on the use of literary and musical canon. The textual scrummage of extracts from the “Golden Fund” of various national literatures symbolizes the typical Central European multi-ethnic milieu. The libretto created from the iconic national texts is accompanied by the musical allusions to the archaic composition techniques. The literary and musical pastiche allows for hyperbolization, or conversely, marginalization of the meanings of events stored in individual and collective memory. The juxtaposition of the banality of everyday life and the pop-cultural cliché and artistic poetics of major national poets develops into postmodern semiotic games with the recipient trough creative melodramatic gestures.

Keywords:

Postmodernist representation of the Central European multiethnic milieu, Marek Piaček: Apolloopera – a melodrama about bombing for the choir, actor and trombone., Reception-Aesthetics of Music, presentation, lecture