THE PERCUSSION MUSIC OF PRIMOŽ RAMOVŠ (VOL. 1)

Classical and Modern Music

Format: Digitalno

Code: 117848

EAN: 3838898117848

ZKP RTV Slovenia, Slovenian Percussion Project and Radio Slovenia – ARS Programme are releasing the album The Percussion Music of Primož Ramovš, Vol.1 by Slovenian Percussion Project (SToP) and guests. The track-list of this album is chronological, allowing the listener to trace the composer’s development and his discovery of the possibilities offered by percussion instruments. It offers today’s generations, especially percussionists, an almost forgotten type of open and improvisational form. This release was made possible by the Slovenian Ministry of Culture and  Municipality of Ljubljana.

"Primož Ramovš (pronounced “rahm-OHSH”), who even today is remembered by musicians and music lovers as an especially friendly person, occupies a special place in the history 20th century Slovenian music. He was the last student of Slavko Osterc and internalized the more recent European musical trends his teacher had promoted in articles, concert reviews and polemical essays over thirty years. Ramovš’s own artistic path combined these influences, most prominently neoclassical and neobaroque approaches sprinkled with small traces of expressionism or New Objectivity, together with a deep understanding of his teacher’s lessons sending the young artist on his way in search of something new that was uniquely his own towards a modern sound. A special quality of Ramovš’s music is that, in both its neoclassical brilliance and relentless modernism, it nevertheless preserves the composer’s own distinctive energy. It is an artistic identity that can be heard already in his earliest works – from his youthful works to his more mature pieces he was always drawn to contrasts, sudden caesuras and spontaneous changes. At the same time, Ramovš’s oeuvre is exclusively instrumental, one of the few such cases in Slovenian music. He began to teach himself piano at age seven but had a stronger desire to play the trumpet. He studied horn for four years at the Ljubljana Academy of Music and percussion for one year. Among all instruments it was the organ, on which he played and improvised in churches around Ljubljana, which held a special place for Ramovš. He wrote for a wide variety of instruments and instrumental combinations with great pleasure, and it always seems as if his personal experience of playing an instrument and improvising is woven into the compositional process. These are compositions that are both a precise reflection of the composer’s sonic imagination and an invitation to spontaneous expression. Ramovš’s works for percussion mirror the evolution of the composer’s stylistic, sonic and musical personalities in general. The Prelude and Fugue from his neoclassical period is cast in a historical form but in a similarly motoric way as with many of his works composed around the same time. His turn in the 1960s towards a new and liberated sound world was triggered by his discovery of the Sonorism of the Polish modernist composers. In Warsaw, he found “a completely new world of instrumental color, a whole new harmonic world, chords you’ve never heard before.” The piece 3:2 unravels the possibilities that arise when rhythms begin to bend over time and melt into a texture. This and subsequent works for percussion such as Transferences and Episode display Ramovš’s effective use of contrasts between dense sequences of passages and the space measured with echoing beats; contrasts between musical action and the sketching of emotions. Percussion music can fully come to life in such a world of sonic and formal possibilities. Noises and strokes that are merely embellishments or ornamental in the world of tonality become fundamental elements in this new sonic plain. Musical qualities such as density, intensity, articulation, texture and color that are only implied in traditional music are already at the forefront in percussion music. From this starting point, new musical forms and instrumental concepts can be more easily constructed. In other words: the nature of percussion instruments themselves invites one towards a more modernist intensity and richness of color, into a world inhabited by most of Ramovš’s music throughout his artistic career," said about him musicologist, radio editor and music critic Primož Trdan..