‘With an image, people are more likely to find contemporary music beautiful’

The ‘visual album’ has long been a phenomenon in pop music. A Hard Day’s Night (1964) by The Beatles is considered the very first. In visual albums, film adds an extra artistic dimension to the music. The classical world is lagging behind in this area, and contemporary music is especially so. The Hague ensemble Kluster5 is changing that with the visual album Perceived Reality: those who buy the CD will receive a QR code with which the accompanying film can be seen online.

‘As far as I know, this form has not yet been used in new music’, says violinist Isa Goldschmeding. Perceived Reality started as a show. The musicians of Kluster5 play guitar, violin, saxophone, piano and percussion, an unusual combination. ‘When we started there was no music at all for our line-up, so everything is written especially for us,’ explains Goldschmeding.

Often the lecterns contain short pieces of 6 to 10 minutes. ‘We thought it would be nice to give a larger commission to young composers and we thought of two pieces of half an hour.’ The Dutch Celia Swart and the Georgian Alexandre Kordzaia, both born in 1994, were given the assignment: ‘Make a work that consists of music, a visual element and also a performance element, so that we have a function on stage in addition to producing of sound.’

black wrote Elevation of Self-Validation, about a young woman who struggles with the blurring lines between her real self and the perfect image she presents on social media. Kordzaia enters 1999 (Don’t you wanna go?) back to his childhood in Tbilisi, of which he has sunny memories, despite the aftershocks of a civil war. Still, it turned out that he had sensed something from the tension. On old cassette tapes, as a 4-year-old, he heard himself talking about an imaginary underworld that he often visited.

Goldschmeding: ‘We immediately saw an overarching theme in the diptych – the perception of reality. That’s how we came up Perceived Reality† In 2020, the performance could only be performed five times due to corona. ‘We wanted to make a new product with the same material. And it couldn’t just be a CD, because the music was written with a story and with images.’

Goldschmeding wrote the screenplay for the film with pianist Tim Sabel, which will be directed by Gijs Besseling. In Elevation of Self-Validation she plays the main character, a fashion-conscious violinist who drinks from the thumbs and hearts of her followers. ‘The piece starts with a real violin, but pretty soon a tape violin is added, which you can see as an alter ego. At some point they are hard to tell apart. When her made-up image falls apart, the violin sounds without reverberation or other effects. You hear and see her ‘real’ for the first time. At the end, the tape violin comes back for a moment – ​​an open ending. Does she dare to choose her true self now?’

In his eclectic piece, Kordzaia incorporates his own childish voice, pop music samples and videos made by his mother. Even his Lego toys are animated. ‘Musically it is a kind of suite, with eleven short movements, as if you are leafing through a picture book,’ says Goldschmeding, who figures in this picture book with the other ensemble members. ‘I see us as passers-by in the memories and places from his life.’

Kordzaia’s music is predominantly cheerful and at first sight a carefree childhood is sketched. ‘Yet you see that every now and then something just isn’t right. We wanted to show the printed layer.’ The trouble arises during a lullaby on a TV screen with news images of unrest on the street. Or in the form of a failed birthday cake.

Goldschmeding realizes that many people are wary of contemporary music. ‘But if there is an image, they often think it’s beautiful. They hear György Ligeti at a movie and think: Great music! I hope that with this visual album we can build a bridge to a new audience.’