Alen Ilijić, 2016 |
The
twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed an extraordinary and almost
indefinable cross-fertilization among artistic disciplines and styles. New
technologies have facilitated new ways of creation and new ways to present
works to audiences. Much of this activity has occurred in the theater, and some
of the most impressive achievements have included a significant role for music,
for instance Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Licht
cycle (1977–2003), John Cage’s Roaratorio
(1979/1983), and the so-called video opera of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, Three Tales (2002). The creative
activity of the Serbian composer and artist Alen Ilijić—and in
particular his most recent project Ongevarfen (“Disordered”), which takes as its departure point homage to Arnold
Schoenberg—belongs to this tradition but extends it into altogether new terrain
with respect to both theater and technology.
Indeed,
Schoenberg’s life and work present a congenial, albeit preliminary, introduction
to Ilijić. Schoenberg
engaged deeply in the artistic movements of his time—he was for a time equally
committed to both painting and music—but he never turned his back on the world
he lived in. He was a Jew living in the twentieth century, and he lived through
the horror of the rise of fascism and World War II. He was also wholly
committed to the establishment and safety of the Jewish state, and his return
to Judaism was borne out of a genuine revulsion for the evils of the world
around him and a feeling of certainty that he needed to make a profound
connection with his heritage.
Ilijić, too, engages
deeply with the artistic movements of his time, but in ways that Schoenberg
could scarcely have imagined.
After studies in as well as
composition (including film music), orchestration, electronic music, and sound
engineering, he
worked in London as a
singer–songwriter and guitarist. His band Zealot greatly affected artists
involved in experimental rock and noise of the 1990s. In the music that
followed, he has continued to make use of the techniques and gestures of his
work with Zealot, but integrated these with more varied post-tonal materials.
Like Schoenberg, Ilijić also works in visual art; whereas
Schoenberg felt he had to make a decision between art and music, however, Ilijić’s work includes extensive and ongoing activity in visual
art, which in turn informs and is informed by his music and his performance. And
Ilijić’s profound Jewish faith, as expressed in his work, speaks
out against new and almost unthinkable acts of destruction and bloodshed as new
forces of extremism stand poised to threaten world peace again.
Indeed, it is in performance that
the various strands of Ilijić’s work
coalesce, and through which a most important connection with the artistic
present can be made. The forcefulness and extraordinary range of his work
emerges most clearly when one sees him perform, as in the recent work Red Faces, most recently staged in
January 2016 in Tel Aviv. He makes use of his entire body during the course of
the twenty-minute work. At first, he stands silently, sometimes moving his arms
in wide, elegant gestures; his hands execute complex rhythms on the piano case;
the music alternates sweeping glissandi, slower and lyric melody—often doubled
by his voice in the extreme upper register—and violent, often disturbing stabs
of sound and tortured passagework. In involving so much the visual element of
performance with his body and stage lighting, Ilijić suggests parallels with classic and recent work in
performance art, but his expertise in music and visual art creates a more
holistic union of the various components.
Audiences
may find some of the work troubling, but can respond to this music because the
force and ineffable authority of his artistic personality demands complete
attention; like Schoenberg’s free atonal compositions, Ilijić’s music
is guided by an unerring intuition, revealing unexpected connections among the
wide variety of utterances that mark the extraordinary richness of the total
musical world available today. But, like Schoenberg, Ilijić has
forged from the materials around him a new and consistent world entirely his
own—what’s more, his engagement in visual art, performance, and theater
promises a renewal worthy of the great multidisciplinary works I mentioned
above, but one that exceeds the sum of its parts because they all originate the
single source of his inspiration.
Rob Haskins, D.M.A., Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Music, College of Liberal Arts
University of New Hampshire
Associate Professor
Department of Music, College of Liberal Arts
University of New Hampshire