GAME: The Beginning

It is truly surprising: GAMEnsemble (Gallery of Actual Music Ensemble) has released its first CD only now, in 2018. It is surprising because GAMEnsemble is a music group with established professional reputation, widely known and respected, invariably sought-out and known for long as one of the best interpreters of foreign and Russian music of the XX-XXI centuries. For prestigious festivals of new music, museums, concert halls, international organizations, conservatoires and centres of modern art it is an honour to invite this ensemble. The music group has successfully toured the largest cities of the country and presented its performances to half of Europe. The group gives birth to original projects, performing numerous premiere opuses, impressing the spectators with variety of performed compositional styles and manners.

The diversity of creative strategy of GAMEnsemble is self-evident. This includes postmodernist fusion, postmodernist urge to combine, often within one concert, the purity of solo tradition, the academicism of the chamber genre, the exactness of ensemble performance with paradoxicality of performances, conceptual еpatage, freedom of improvisation, specific musical commenting on popular films and animations, unpredictability of the instrumental theatre. This involves discovery of new composers, when creative plans and opportunities of young Russian authors are realized owing to GAMEnsemble to a great extent. It is no coincidence that GAMEnsemble was the first in the country to introduce the practice of annual invitation of resident composers — those who are in for successful future, who break new ground and are in search of fresh musical solutions.

This involves as well the heightened interest in performing of what has just been created, here and now — this explains the accentuation of current music in the name of the ensemble. The ensemble is distinguished by the invariable urge for multimedia synthesis, the confluence of different kinds (genres) of arts, the intersection of different and opposite things, sometimes incompatible and unimaginable, in a single space. And much more… But still, for me, GAMEnsemble is, first and foremost, a populariser and extensionist of new music. More often — of difficult, controversial music requiring considerable emotional and intellectual effort, complicated for listening and originally seeming vague or strange. Less often — easily accepted, comprehended and welcomed. It is probably for that reason that GAMEnsemble is one of those infrequent groups that regularly apply and introduce in their performances the practice of lecturers’ or authors’ comments, turning a concert into an exciting and intriguing history of the new music.

As the composer Sergey Pavlenko once said: “Every concert of GAMEnsemble is either an Event or a Phenomenon”. So it is up to you to decide whether the first GAMEnsemble’s CD is an Event or a Phenomenon.

— Rauf Farhadov

The Gallery of Actual Music Ensemble / GAMEnsemble was founded by composer Oleg Paiberdin in 2010. The mission of GAMEnsemble is to perform new music, particularly works written over the last 15-20 years by contemporary composers, and to initiate interdisciplinary projects on the crossing of musical and visual aspects in arts. Works of domestic and foreign musical avant-garde classics of the XX century are also featured in GAMEnsemble’s programs. One of GAMEnsemble’s main purposes is the development of dynamic zones in the current art of music where its major strategies – the newest chamber music, improvisational music, visual-acoustic performances and video art – can coexist and blend into a united process. GAMEnsemble closely cooperates with contemporary composers, artists, choreographers, directors, animators, word and theater masters.

GAMEnsemble regularly collaborates with Moscow State Philharmonic Society, National Center for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), Pyotr Jurgenson Welfare Fund, Association of Contemporary Music, Russian Composers Union, Music Forum in Moscow, Monopoly Records Independent Label, Polish Cultural Center in Moscow, Record Cinema Centre in Nizhny Novgorod, Autograph New Music Workshop in Yekaterinburg, Sterkh Contemporary Arts Gallery in Surgut, GULAG Museum in Moscow, and others. In a concert season 2010-2011, GAMEnsemble toured through the cities of Russia, Ukraine and France under the aegis of Moscow Philharmonie’s program of actual music The Other Space, participation in philharmonic subscriptions The Live Track I (Chamber Hall of Moscow Philharmonie) and The Live Track II (NCCA), The Opposite Part Of Ural Ridge (Grand Hall of Sverdlovsk Philharmonie, Yekaterinburg),

and also in festivals The Contrasts (Lviv), The Music Panorama of Russia (Moscow), III Prigov Contemporary Arts Festival (NCCA, Moscow), The 47th St. Petersburg Musical Spring, Contemporary Arts Festival dedicated to The Sterkh Gallery’s anniversary (Surgut), The Boomerang Biannual Exhibition (PERMM, Perm), What We Hear And What Faces Us (Centre des arts of Enghien-Les-Bains, France), The Opus 52 International Night Open Air Contemporary Music Festival in Nizhny Novgorod, The Night In GULAG Museum-2011: In Dialogue. Audio And Vusual Improvizations (Moscow), and others.

In 2011 a young Russian composer, Alexander Khubeyev, became the composer-in-residence of GAMEnsemble; in 2012 it was Lyubov Terskaya, in 2013 — Sehyung Kim, in 2015 — Nikolay Popov, in 2018 — Andrey Besogonov. Such an initiative has appeared for the first time in Russia. In 2012, their project The GAMEnsemble: Young Russia – Young Europe was supported by Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung (Germany), and was also included in the All-Russian Philharmonic Seasons program of the Russian Federation’s Ministry of culture. GAMEnsemble, in collaboration with the Moscow State Academic Philharmonic, initiated a series of educational concerts and lectures “The Worlds of Contemporary Music”, in the season 2018-2019, it will be continued.