New music is inconceivable without the revolution of percussive instruments. And what gave a magically powerful pulse to prehistoric music if not the rhythm of percussion? This evening with Hungary's Amadinda and Taiwan's Ju Percussion Group will be the occasion for a number of Hungarian premieres, while conjuring up the Far East, pre-Columbian South America, and a Russian village wedding. All these will be preceded by a Futurist-Cubist film score.

Avant-garde artists - Dadaists, Surrealists and Futurists alike - saw a great opportunity in film, the new medium of the 20th century. Cubist painter Fernand Léger made a single foray into cinema, but his 1924 Mechanical Ballet became an essential work of experimental film. Léger joined the short cuts together in accordance with a carefully calculated rhythm. "In this film the eye habit received quite a blow,” he wrote. "My actors were a straw hat, shoes, bottles, bicycles, artificial limbs, faces, eyes, machines, lots of tricks and finally, a washerwoman. I subjected each to the same, unified process. I wove the human and the objects into a given, rhythmic basic pattern.” The like-minded music for this visual world was composed by the American George Antheil.
Written at around the same time, Igor Stravinsky's The Wedding was no less of a daring attempt: experimenting with a particular fusion of the cantata form and ballet, it employs an orchestration surprisingly similar to Antheil's piece, a band of pianos and percussion.
Compelling parallelisms will be the reward of those who attempt to establish links between Solar Myth, a piece with special visuals that balances on the fine line between theatre and magic, and Ginastera's composition, The Songs of Magical America.

Presented by: Palace of Arts