Miroslav Srnka, a rising star of contemporary classical music
In the sometimes baffling but absolutely innovative world of “contemporary classical” music in the Czech Republic, few young composers have enjoyed the kind of success that Miroslav Srnka has. The 35-year-old’s complex and greatly imaginative work has been performed far and wide by the eminent musicians and conductors of today, and he is endlessly commissioned to produce more for some of the best known orchestras and festivals. His clear talent did not however emerge at an early age, and he told me how it was that he began composing when we met earlier this week in a Prague café.
“It was kind of a personal story that made me write a huge piece. Because I just needed to kind of get rid of some things. It was meant probably just for me, but by chance it went to Milan Slavický, who later became my teacher, and it was he who told me I should enter the Academy of Arts and study composing. And I said ‘no, that’s not possible, I’m not really prepared for that’. And he actually made me take the entrance exam. Then I failed, and he made me do it a second time. So it’s his doing, actually.”
What was that first piece about?
“It was a huge piece for two pianos, it was never performed and I hope it never will be performed, I hope I destroyed all the scores! But I just relate to it as the real beginning of my composing.”
“I did not really feel comfortable with it in the very beginning, because what happens in the very beginning is that you rarely meet very high-profile performers for your music, so what comes out is usually not what you expect and what you’ve imagined. And especially in that period it is very important to hear what you have written, and that usually does not happen. This is a very difficult point in the life of a composer-student, because you don’t get what you need and want; it’s not your fault and it’s not the fault of your fellow students who are trying their best to perform your music, it’s just kind of a coincidence. And if you don’t give up then you come to the point where you work with people who are first-class performers, and they give you a lot of feedback that is important to you. And it is only then, when you have a lot of experiences like that, that you can really say what was your fault, what was not a good performance and what you want done again and better.”
You’ve said that the birth or your son greatly affected your music, how did it change?
What messages would you say are to be found in your music?
“That is a very problematic question, I would say. Music, for me, is about emotion, and that is the most important thing I try to find as a code, let’s say, in music, and to put in my own music. The thing is that at some point you start to see that people do feel something while listening to your music, and what is not important is what they feel – because they feel really different things and give you really different feedback, which is really strange; they have ideas from your music that come from every possible point of view. But when you reach the point where people feel involved in listening to your music, then you are probably going the way you should be.”
How do you explain your music to the musical layman – when you mean someone and tell them you are a composer and they want to know what kind of music you play, how to you boil it down to a lowest common denominator that a non-musicologist can easily understand?
“I always say that I write this unsupportable, crazy music that no one would ever listen to, and people actually start to laugh, and that sometimes makes them even more interested than if you say you are a serious contemporary composer. And while that is a joke, there is some truth in it. Because the way to listen to contemporary music can be really straightforward – sometimes you just experience a piece without any preparation, and it just takes you and you cannot escape it – that’s one way. The other is much more difficult, and this is the one that leads towards becoming a real freak of contemporary music, and that is a very long way to go – to develop a real kind of sensitivity to listening. And I do understand and respect that most people do not have the time or interest to go that long road. But on the other hand it is really beautiful when you meet people who say ‘I was at that concert and it was so interesting to me that it I became interested in that music for the rest of my life. And so this is what happens. It’s very different depending on who you speak to. If they are people who have already made that long journey, you can be quite open about what you really do and go into the structure and into many special aspects. If you speak to those people who really do not appreciate it, or who may have only one or two such experiences with contemporary music, then you cannot really talk to them in the terms we musicians use, because they would not understand you, so you have no alternative but to make jokes or try to describe some images or something like that. Because speaking generally about music is very difficult, and speaking about contemporary music is twice as difficult.”
