Master class with Marek Piaček

Film Soundtrack – Inspiration and Recycling
For cost-saving reasons, film directors often turn to simple solutions: instead of original music, they employ sound patterns cut from already existing compositions. In his master class, Marek Piaček will present compositional solutions that presuppose using music that already exists, but employ it into an authentic musical composition in a creative way. He will talk about original ways of working with not only specific musical ideas, but also with transferring meanings, enriching the existing ones and placing them into entirely new contexts – musical as well as cultural. In this case, we are not talking about citation or ‘crossovers’. Musical structures, fragments or style-specific elements taken from other compositions are modified creatively and layered to create a new, often surprisingly different meaning.

Marek Piaček
Marek Piaček is a Slovak composer, artist and pedagogue. The centre of his compositional activities is constituted by multimedia projects synthesising musical expression and naive theatre. Lately he has been cooperating with the Považská Bystrica based PBlog civic organisation. His spatial composition Strojart pour l’Art was realised as part of Považské Strojartne festival while a concert organised amidst blocks of flats in Považská Bystrica Rozkvet je rozkvet je rozkvet je rozkvet as part of Rozkvet festival. His PARADISELOST V – REBELLION spatial composition on which he co-operated with numerous artists in the New Synagogue in Žilina was broadcast on Österreich 1 radio station. He is the author of the operas Last Flight (about the work and life of Milan Rastislav Štefánik), King of the Ghosts, Štós, Lesť rozmyslu (about the dissolution of Czechoslovakia), 66 Seasons (based on Peter Kerekes’s film), Apolloopera (a melodrama about the bombing of a refinery in Bratislava) and The Brief History of Space. The volume of his music production is contained on 22 CD’s. He has composed soundtrack to several films by Peter Kerekes (Ladomírske morytáty a legendy, 66 Seasons, Cooking History) as well as animated films by Ivana Šebestová (Lionardo Mio, Four) and Katarína Kerekesová (Stones, Mimi&Lisa). Apart from his artistic activities, Marek Piačko works as a pedagogue at the Department of Mediamatics at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Žilina, runs workshops of improvised music as well as film and scenic music for children and youth. He acts as an organiser and dramaturge of events focusing on new music and works as the director of video recordings of the Slovak Philharmonic concerts.