In this conversation for Polish contemporary music outlet, Yurii reflects on how he experiences his own music, how a young composer can integrate into the musical infrastructure, and the new challenges Ukrainian musicians face during the war. Author is Tetiana Novytska.
in your music, performers become co-creators, and as a result, pieces can exist in various independent interpretations?
YP: It seems to me that music is always bigger than its author. Especially since I’m still a “young composer” — most of my pieces are receiving their premieres. You write and you don’t know how it will sound live. It’s always interesting to hear your music in different interpretations.
TN: In the context of which music did your style develop?
YP: In the early years, I looked at many scores, listened to many recordings, but didn’t understand much. It was a long process: I felt that I wanted to find some “strange” texture, some strange harmony, but I didn’t know how. Even when I saw how others did it — how could I do it myself without copying anyone? It was only when I could fully grasp the essence of new techniques and use them the way I wanted that I truly made them my own. It’s like learning a foreign language.
At different times, different composers have influenced me. The classic set: Ligeti, Sciarrino, Grisey, Feldman, Xenakis, Haas… When I started analyzing Lutosławski’s scores, I gained an understanding of how to work with an orchestra. It is a living organism. Like clay being shaped into vessels as you go — Lutosławski’s orchestra seems to be a single element, an organic force that grows from within itself. And it is so refined.
With composers of earlier generations, it is easier to choose reference points — they have passed through the filter of time: the greater the historical distance, the more reliable they are. Concerts of contemporary music, on the other hand, resemble a lottery.
TN: What, for you, is a marker of musical contemporaneity? There are formal criteria, of course — music written now, in our time. But even now, one can write very different kinds of music.
YP: At the beginning of my studies at the academy, it seemed to me that contemporary music meant lots of dissonances, unpleasant sounds, molto espressivo (smiles). I remember participating, in my third year, in my first composition masterclass, “COURSE,” in Lviv. Among the participants were two composers from Turkey, one from Belarus, and among the Ukrainians — Kateryna Gryvul, who was studying in Poland at the time, Marta Haladzhun, Mykhailo Chedryk, and myself.
All of them were writing something like “vzhzhzh pshhhh phkh phkh phkhhh tttt piu piu.” They knew how to write that kind of music — I didn’t. I was the only one whose score actually contained notes. I felt like something of an ugly duckling among them. And recently I listened again to that piece of mine — it’s perfectly fine! Of course, now I can see what could be improved, but it’s entirely good. That’s how much context can affect perception.
Here’s another similar situation. During masterclasses in Warsaw, Bernhard Lang told a story that really resonated with me. He had a student in Graz from Serbia who wrote music using folk material. Lang liked his music very much and valued that individuality. A month later came the disappointment: the student brought in a score full of nothing but “khhh pshhhh chchch” — because his classmates had explained to him that this was how one is supposed to write music today.
TN: And yet compositional techniques are far from the most important factor.
YP: Viktor Domontovych — a Ukrainian modernist writer — has a phrase: “to be contemporary is precisely not to be contemporary.” When you try to hit the mainstream, you become similar to those you orient yourself toward — you end up repeating them. Contemporaneity, according to Domontovych, means turning in a different direction. In the mid-20th century, composers proclaimed the emotionlessness of music. It seems that today, emotion and sincerity are returning once again.
I think about this when I listen to contemporary composers who work with noise, with ostensibly unpleasant sounds — and yet the result is beautiful. It seems to me that the composers who proclaimed the emotionlessness of music were like explorers who burst into unknown territory and tried absolutely everything. Now, with the change of generations, a new civilization is taking shape. And in general, if there is a paradise for scores, they enter it without dates.
TN: How do you assess your own path? What changes do you see in your writing?
YP: I didn’t try to write “contemporary” music — I wrote the way I could. As my knowledge accumulated, the result was different each time. My main point of reference became elusiveness in space, textural looseness. I like how Lem describes the ocean in Solaris. In the novel, this ocean reads human consciousness. All of a sudden, various symmetriads and asymmetriads would grow within it… I would like my music to be like that too — without clear contours, with different images flowing into one another.
TN: It seems to me that for you, what matters is not so much the constant search for something new as the refinement of an already discovered musical language in each subsequent work.
YP: Lutosławski has a series of works titled Chain, where form is constructed according to the principle of a chain. I like this metaphor. That’s how I try to work: in each new piece, I take what I learned from the previous ones and try to add a new link to the chain. Sometimes it seems to me that I am writing one long work in the hope of eventually writing the perfect one.
From time to time I conduct a kind of test: I listen to one of my pieces that I was satisfied with at the time. If I am still satisfied with it, it means I haven’t changed. If I am no longer satisfied, it means I have moved to a new stage — either aesthetically or technically.
TN: How do you work with sound material in your compositions — do you make calculations, or do you rely on intuition?
YP: I use a combined method — analytical and intuitive. At first, certain numerical proportions emerge. For example, I often use the Fibonacci sequence. But each time you have to find a new way to apply them. Once the material has accumulated, I no longer follow algorithms but trust my intuition. So I usually begin by constructing the structure and finish intuitively.
TN: Do you draw diagrams?
YP: Yes, I try to. It’s good when you experience the compositional process tactilely — writing, playing, entering things into the computer. You engage with the material in different ways. Once I had to write a piece and the work simply wouldn’t move forward at all. I just drew the stage and how the performers would be positioned — and that helped me imagine what they should play.
Lately, my circumstances are such that I work only on a laptop. This affects the process — possibly not for the better. Roman Lopatynskyi, a Ukrainian pianist, brought me a gift from Berlin — a beautiful music notebook and a set of very fine pencils. And I still haven’t written anything in it. I keep postponing it, thinking: right now I don’t know what to write, but someday I definitely will.
