The Dmitry Pokrovsky Ensemble and Opus‑Posth

And when the earthly sphere, burnt out,
Becomes harsher and asks “Who am I?”
We shall create “The Lay of Igor’s Host”
Or something similar.
V. Khlebnikov

By the late Middle Ages, music had begun to betray its quadrivium – arithmetic, astronomy and geometry. Music came closer to grammar, rhetoric and dialectics – disciplines that formed the trivium, for which it received a harsh punishment, having fallen into the realm of literature. Throughout the entire new age, like Khlebnikov’s mermaid, music struggled and grew faint in these perfidious confines. It became rhetorical, it became dialectical, and, ultimately, it became literary.

But what is literature? Is literature not just darkness born of the darkness of the night? And if that is so, then the time of literature is but the time of the darkness of the nigh, and this entire epoch of literature is but the night that has enveloped a wayfarer in the forests of Galicia. However, the night is not endless – dawn comes, the darkness of literature fades away and the music becomes free. Dawn comes and with it the time of a new alphabet. The time comes for a new epos, a new folklore, new ritual. A time will come where there is no place for composers. At the whim of these tyrants, the free flow of music was transformed into a cunning irrigation system of weirs, bodies of water and reservoirs. For a long time, music shared the gloomy fate of all of nature, made submissive and destroyed by man, as, ultimately, composing music is just as unnatural as subduing nature. The sphere of the world has almost burnt out from the labours of subjugators of nature and composers.

So we will not interfere with the coming of dawn with its dull inventions. We will discover ourselves for the natural flow of the source of music, and then we will be able to see how the mermaid of music comes to life.
Vladimir Martynov