OUT-LOUD

The CODES Festival of Traditional and Avant-Garde Music aims to present music (along with other related media) as a sphere of ideas, signs, and phenomena of both the oldest origin and those brought about by modernity. For the festival, the centre of reference is local and indigenous culture entering into dialogue with other cultures – not in a syncretic and “averaged” way, but by evoking their specificities. CODES tries to harmonise the participants of the festival events in the face of memory and the current moment. They track the persistence of meanings and their transformation.

The 15th CODES Festival of Traditional and Avant-Garde Music reveals creative and human attitudes towards a process of progressive quantitative and qualitative change. The world seems to be less stable than before. We feel an urgent need to evoke values and ways of realising them, if only through a shout that warns of disintegration but also through a sign and gesture. The artists seem to be “speaking out-loud” more than before. Their message through the events of the festival is a clear accession to cognitive truth, naming reality and interpreting the reservoir of culture-reading the matrix of values. Ideas seem to persist, but their forms of expression are changing. People of culture are speaking more “out-loud”, less through abstract and artistic conventions, both doing everyday life the justice of their own recognition and expressing their greatest longings – for a coherent world and the intuitions of the spirit; in favour of an authentic rather than an instrumentally evoked community. The 15th CODES Festival presents themes of Poland and the Polish neighborhood which are intertwined with outright antipodal themes – Pakistani, Iranian, or Norwegian. In this way, the festival does not cultivate political divisions, but breaks them down – it serves social and cultural understanding, dialogue, and bonding.

At the 15th CODES Festival, forms of expression include traditional music in the music and dance idiom, improvisation, contemporary music, as well as jazz or completely alternative forms. The programme of the 15th edition of the CODES Festival consists of six concerts, including eight premieres and world premieres, which has always been a quality and characteristic feature of CODES.

The artists who are invited to the 15th CODES Festival of Traditional and Avant-Garde Music “Out-Loud”, using their distinctive means of expression, will talk about love in exile (Arooj AFTAB, Vijay IYER, Shahzad ISMAILY); about separation from The Beloved (Fozié MAJD & flow unit); present the legacy of Iranian legends, songs and poetry (Anahita ABBASI, Martyna KOSECKA, Farzia FALLAH, Farnaz MODARRESIFAR & flow unit); they will manifest against war (Królówczana Smuga); they will push the boundaries of sound and self-expression (Jérôme NOETINGER, Audrey CHEN); they will present the richness of musical ornamentation of northern culture (Lasse THORESEN & BIT20) and they will lean into the mystery of death (Ørjan MATRE & BIT20).

An integral part of the Festival is Noc Tańca (The Night of Dance), which will be preceded by workshops on learning traditional dances (both events led by the excellent Ukrainian trio, US Orchestra). We have also prepared a special exhibition that summarises the 15-year history of the CODES Festival.

And the „out-loud”, is also the headline…. What will happen next? Let’s see and – above all – let’s hear it together.

Piotr Franaszek
Jerzy Kornowicz
Grzegorz Paluch

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The Festival of Traditional and Avant-garde Music CODES whose first edition took place in 2009, has gained the opinion of a great creativity initiative. Its formula is based on the idea of finding common issues and determining similarities between distant cultural phenomena.

The yearly event confronts the latest music pursuits with the still vivid archaic musical forms. Old music is re-discovered in unexpected present-day contexts and avant-garde experimental artists listen intently to the voices of the past. The combination of two distinctive canons of aesthetics forms a completely unique experience where the magic of archaic melodies and the artistry of contemporary music co-exist.

The Festival provides a rare opportunity for the outstanding composers, representatives of the avant-garde jazz, instrumentalists and artists reconstructing archaic music traditions to meet, perform and take artistic risk together.

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