SUAL Archives | 2016
Belma Bešlić-Gál: Echo II — For Piano and Video Projection
Duration: 3‘06“ (excpt)
Featuring: Belma Bešlić-Gál, piano
Type: Recorded live at SUAL 2016
Credits: Audio recordings by JF, editing by BG
Echo II
The idea was to test interactions between visual inputs and generated shadows, real and false images, live generated and pre-produced sounds. Final goal was to create a picture of one parallel reality. An analysis of Fellini’s movie ‘La dolce vita’ brought to light three different sound layers. Each one represents specific visual component of the movie. The music is the reflection of the story, but focuses on philosophical, psychological and sociological aspects of it. It reflects the emptiness and the fake happiness of the post-war jet-set society.
[Belma Bešlić-Gál]
Belma Bešlić-Gál
Born on February 7th, 1978 in Tuzla (SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SFR Yugoslavia). Austrian / Slovenian / Bosnian composer, curator, artist and pianist, living in Vienna. First music studies (piano) in Tuzla with Professor Planinka Jurišić-Atić. In year 1993 she moves to Germany, ten years later to Austria. 1996-2001: Piano studies, Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar (Gerlinde Otto, Lazar Berman). 2003-2009: Studies of composition, music theory and music theatre, Kunstuniversität Graz (Bernhard Lang, Klaus Lang). Selected active participant at Darmstädter Ferienkurse and Akademie für Neue Musik – Meisterkurse an der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München (2012) where she works with Rebecca Saunders and Wolfgang Rihm. Additional master classes with Brian Ferneyhough, Raphaël Cendo, Germán Toro-Pérez. Co-Curator of the Festival shut up and listen! in Vienna (www.sp-ce.net) since 2011. The fundamental component of her artistic work is an intensive intellectual confrontation with the aspect of musical time within the deconstructed compositional form, as well as the (destructive) impact of reactionism and nationalism on post-Yugoslav art and culture. Further important fields of interest within her transdisciplinary approach to various representational forms of contemporary electroacoustic composition are integration of nihilistic and futuristic ideas and concepts into the web of compositional structure and influence of manned spaceflight and space sociology and psychology on the hypothetical compositional concepts of tomorrow. Bešlić-Gál’s music has been presented in concerts and radio portraits in Europe and both Americas and was commissioned and performed by famous ensembles such as Ensemble Kontrapunkte, Ensemble Reconsil, mise en ensemble, oenm ensemble, szene instrumental, Ensamble del Cepromusic, I z M Ensemble … Her compositions have been premiered at festivals and venues such as Soundings Festival at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, Styriarte Festival (Graz), Musikverein (Vienna), Arnold Schoenberg Center (Vienna), ICMC – International Computer Music Conference (Ljubljana), Festival Sláturtíð (Reykjavík), Encuentro 2 del Arte Sonoro Tsonami (Buenos Aires). Her composition flut was representing New Music from Austria at the ISCM World Music Days in Bratislava (2013). For her work she received awards such as the Staatsstipendium für Komposition 2014 (Austrian Ministry of Culture), I z S-Kunst & Kulturpreis 2011 (Ingrid zu Solms-Stiftung), Internationales Arbeitsstipendium ‘Composer in Residence – Komponistinnen nach Frankfurt 2011’ (Archiv Frau und Musik), Arbeitsstipendium of the State of Salzburg 2012, Kompositionsförderungen, City of Vienna 2014, 2015.
[info as of 12/2016]