Drum and Bass

July 24
8:00 PM
Drum and Bass

Bass guitar and drums—two instruments that long remained in the background—will take center stage at the AZ Museum. The bass guitar was traditionally regarded as a modest accompanying instrument, while drums were expected merely to keep the beat, rarely stepping into the spotlight. Everything changed in the second half of the 20th century, when jazz fusion innovators such as Jaco Pastorius and Tony Williams demonstrated that these instruments were capable of far more. Yet academic composers continued to pay them little attention, leaving them largely to the realms of pop and rock music.

The experiments of Steve Reich and Fausto Romitelli proved that percussion and bass guitar can function as fully autonomous instruments, expressing as much depth and complexity as strings or piano.

The "Drum and Bass" Program takes the next step. The composers whose world premieres will be presented this evening have written works specifically for this unconventional ensemble. The program is built around two central ideas: monolithic unity—the pursuit of an absolute fusion of timbre and rhythm—and polyphony, in which elements of popular and contemporary classical music intertwine into a unified whole.

Composers:
Dmitry Bazhenov, Valentin Bezdetko, Evgenia Bril, Anzhelika Gabibova, Liliya Iskhakova, Ulyana Kuprovskaya, Vladimir Ladomirov, Anna Mikhailova, Karina Nesteruk, Alexander Perov, Mikhail Puchkov.

Performers:
Anton Izgagin — fretless 6-string bass guitar, effects pedals, voice
Yuri Posypanov — drum kit


About the Performers:
Anton Izgagin is a multi-instrumentalist (bass guitar, double bass, viola da gamba), composer, and co-founder of the contemporary music ensemble Kymatic. He graduated from the P. I. Tchaikovsky Sverdlovsk Music College (2010), the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music with a degree in double bass (2016), and completed a postgraduate assistantship at the P. I. Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory in contemporary music ensemble performance and composition. He has participated in masterclasses with Uli Fussenegger, Joëlle Léandre, Paolo Pandolfo, Frank Gratkowski, and others. He has performed with Studio for New Music, MCME, Pratum Integrum, Questa Musica, and Opus Posth ensembles. He is a soloist of the Kymatic ensemble and a member of the Novoselie ensemble. In 2022, the Melodiya label released his solo album of contemporary music for viola da gamba. He won the Russian Composers' Union's "Notes and Quotas" program (2023) for Natalia Prokopenko's Hypnogram for bass guitar and electronics. As a composer, he is a laureate of the Open Space laboratory (2022) and a finalist of the Kinorex competition (2022). He has participated in the Re-Musik and Folk's composition laboratories, MCME composers' reading sessions, the Inhale–Exhale wind instruments laboratory, and was a fellow of the Composers' Academy in Tchaikovsky. In 2024, he contributed sound design for a performance at the 40th Venice Biennale.
Yuri Posypanov is a percussionist, drummer, vocalist, researcher, and reconstructor of musical traditions from different historical periods. He graduated from the M. M. Ippolitov-Ivanov State Musical Pedagogical Institute, where he studied under Mark Pekarsky. He performed with the Mark Pekarsky Percussion Ensemble and is a soloist of the contemporary music ensemble Kymatic. He is also the artistic director of the early music ensemble Alcántar, which specializes in reconstructing European music of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque. He has participated in international festivals, including masterclasses at the Boswiler Künstlerhaus in Switzerland.