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Born in Poland in 1972, he studied composition in Perth
and Brisbane with Brian Howard, Stephen Cronin, and Gerard Brophy. He is
one of the most prominent young Australian composers, especially due to
his recent international successes. In 2002 he participated in the
Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam, where he received an honourable mention
for his work Glimmer. He was awarded First Prize in the 2001 Andrzej
Panufnik International Young Composers Competition in Kraków for Threads
of Fate. He was also involved in two international events hosted by the
Montreal-based Nouvel Ensemble Moderne: forum 2000, for which he composed
Les Eruptions du Reve; and the 2001 Rencontres de musique nouvelle at Le
Domaine Forget (Canada), where the ensemble premiered Streams of
Consciousness III. In 1998 he won the abc Young Composers1 Award
a major national prize in Australia for Floating on the River of Time.
This year, Karski represented Australia at the International Composers1
Rostrum with the piece Matter of Perspective. The Libra Ensemble is to
premiere his major new work Streams Within for
14 instruments in Melbourne.
Principal works: Les Eruptions du Reve for 15 musicians (1999), Streams of
Consciousness for viola and cello (2000), Streams of Consciousness II for
four instruments (2001), Streams of Consciousness III for five instruments
(2001); the cycle Streams Within includes three earlier works: Glimmer
(for alto flute and bass flute), Inner Stream (for bass clarinet and
contrabass clarinet) and Inner Stream II (for vibraphone and piano).
Streams of Consciousness
The piece is an exploration of the instrumental properties through
integrating the physical actions that are applied to the instruments, in
order to establish a consistent stream of sound-events. The musical
material is gradually being uncovered from one moment to the next, as it
progresses through varied interactions between the sonorities, thus
producing a coherent, and yet unpredictable sound-structure. The essential
idea that determined the nature of the material is the relationship
between line and depth, as the melodic
element of the string writing is combined with a wide range of
sound-qualities. The work examines the possibilities that lie within the
two instruments through varying the interactions between them, whilst
organising the varied options into an ongoing sequence of sound-events. As
a result, the material progresses through several phases that are
distinguished from one another through timbral quality, texture, and focus
on particular areas of register and string techniques all of which
ultimately generates an uneven and ambiguous form. The work was premiered
by the members of Ensemble Offspring Thomas Talmacs (viola) and
Geoffrey Gartner (cello) in Sydney on 30 November 2001.
Dominik Karski
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