The works of composer and pianist Belma Bešlić-Gál deal with the lure of outer space, the collision of different worlds, the basic questions of human existence. For her current work, “Prostorъ [Uncovering the Existential Through My Everyday Temporality: An Artistic Journey]”, she has spent part of the last year training an artificial intelligence. Sylvia Wendrock spoke to her about the final frontier, the connections between everyday life and art, and how her Yugoslavian childhood informs her work.
We first met in 2009; you were at the piano – as composer or pianist?
Belma Bešlić-Gál: As a composer. But it was gradual. Studying piano in Weimar, I started questioning things like performance practice, competitions, etc. I went to a Yugoslavian school for the gifted; as early as six or seven years old, I was being drilled, practicing piano four or five hours a day. It was very difficult, but I enjoyed it, and it did a lot for me. While I was studying in Weimar, though, it gradually became clear to me that that wasn’t enough. As a musician, you have certain freedoms, but there are still very rigid parameters for each composer in the classical canon that you have to follow. That world got too narrow for me.
If playing piano occupied so much of your existence from childhood on, what did it mean to give it up?
Belma Bešlić-Gál: It always felt like a break. The piano was part of who I was; it shaped me. That quest for perfection that had branded me since childhood – I had to repeat single bars of music a hundred times before I was allowed to get up from the piano – that was interrupted. Of course I was afraid to move into new, unknown territory – but at the same time, I knew that playing piano with this striving for perfection would never leave me. Like a mother or father.
“I’m Fascinated by this inability to Escape.”
“Prostorъ” is about fulfilling everyday, seemingly meaningless tasks – we were just talking about endless repetition in the search for perfection; this seems like endless repetition as an existential necessity.
Belma Bešlić-Gál: I’m fascinated, philosophically and conceptually, by this inability to escape. There’s a huge conglomerate of repeated actions in life: sleeping, eating, going to the toilet. Everything is repetition, everything is circular. People are born; they die. Mastering anything requires repetition; in sports, art, whatever we do, we’re striving for unreachable perfection. What kind of concepts are those? Why can’t we escape them? We’re stuck, but we can also see that motor as liberating and necessary.
Isn’t free or experimental thinking usually in danger of disappearing when stress and external demands intrude?
Belma Bešlić-Gál: I can’t imagine a life without children, any more than I can imagine a life without art. Maybe this life is possible for me because I learned to structure myself as a small child, mentally practicing piano in grade school. I developed all my concepts, my thoughts, and my music during these never-ending everyday tasks with babies and kids. I never had time to sit down, to think and work in peace. It was like I had two brains. I think everything out while I’m performing everyday activities; when I have a break between two things, I write down what I’ve thought. Notating things later on is the shortest part of the process, about two to four weeks. But this fragmentation of everyday life is extremely gruelling.
“I have to make my thoughts real, otherwise I’d feel like I were dead.”
What saves you, what nourishes you? Lately, it even seems like you’re becoming more productive. Do unexpected externalities influence your work – don’t they make you forget your ideas?
Belma Bešlić-Gál: No. I need the artistic work. I’ve seen war; I was without my parents at a young age; I was a refugee in Germany – traumatic experiences. I just have to work on my concepts and use them to ask the most important questions in various contexts: What and why are we? Where do we come from; where are we going? They arise again and again, taking their place alongside the question of meaning and meaninglessness. I have to make my thoughts real, otherwise I’d feel like I were dead.
How did you get interested in music theater?
Belma Bešlić-Gál: Looking back, I see a continual process from about the 2000s, starting with my pianistic activities and pieces for small instrumental ensembles. I started developing my first proto-music theater concept in 2004 – 2005, working on staged performances with other instrumentalists. That was something completely new to me, and it was an important step – to go on stage as a pianist, but in costume and acting. The piece was called “reflection”; we only performed it in Bosnia. After that I went more and more in that direction, and in 2009 my first official music theater piece, “Hibernation”, was produced. It’s very minimal; I play the captain of a space ship, on a journey without beginning or end. There’s not really a plot. On stage are two beings sleeping inside two specially made hibernation pods.
Cyberspaces, artificial intelligence, computer-aided imagery, and spatial and lighting design are your trademarks…
Belma Bešlić-Gál: As early as the early 2000s, I was already thinking about the phenomenon of artificialization and spatial design with futuristic elements. I spent a lot of time in Weimar with Bauhaus students, discussing architecture, design, how one should – or can – deal with space. I originally wanted to study astronomy, not piano, but my father felt that being a pianist was such a beautiful profession for a woman.
Your works ask the question of what comes next, what’s beyond our imagination? At the same time, you’re aware that we can’t conceive of anything beyond our imagination. Do you yearn for what we don’t know?
Belma Bešlić-Gál: Absolutely, that’s it exactly. Or, put agnostically: knowledge that we won’t be able to attain in the foreseeable future – or perhaps, as humans, can never attain. The unimaginable size of the universe has always fascinated me, its endlessness. And we’re stuck in this biological existence, on this one world…
“We’re trapped inside ourselves.”
Do you strive to discover those unknown, unthought things in the combination of sound, space, visualization and performance?
Belma Bešlić-Gál: I try to reveal something that people can think about. Anything else would be presumptuous. There’s so much we don’t know, inside us and outside. Everything is unknown. We’re trapped inside ourselves.
Does this discovery happen while you’re working on the concepts for pieces like “Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind”, or in the production?
Belma Bešlić-Gál: Both. With that piece in particular, I just wanted to see how that kind of confrontation in space would work, to ask paradoxical questions and make two completely opposite worlds collide with one another. I’ve been interested in the 1960s case of Betty and Barney Hill for a long time: the American couple claimed they were kidnapped and medically examined by aliens in their spaceship. This event was the beginning of the scientific consideration of a phenomenon that has undergone a number of attempts at explanation to date, but it’s also the starting point for the piece. What triggers it? Is it a psychosis? Is there evidence? I’m open. Perhaps we’ll find out someday. Throughout human history, certain things have been categorized as completely impossible – for thousands of years, we understood time as something absolute, and now we know it’s relative. Who knows what else will be revealed?
“art is an act of rebellion against transience.”
What influence did studying composition have on your concepts and ideas?
Belma Bešlić-Gál: It wasn’t until I was nearly finished studying piano that I started thinking conceptually; after I moved to Vienna, it continued to grow. I had very little idea about contemporary music when I started studying composition – studying in Weimar, I thought music history ended with Claude Debussy. I knew almost nothing about music after Schoenberg. In my first lesson, I asked my professor, Bernhard Lang, to be strict with me – and he really did torture me with orchestration techniques. In order to implement something I want to do, I have to know what’s possible. Studying composition, I learned the basics in order to find my way toward my own language, my own aesthetic. Klaus Lang, my composition teacher for many years, taught me that the main thing in art is to discover your own artistic perspective – beyond conventional definitions of success. In the course of considering the seemingly meaningless, I came to a personal realization: art is an act of rebellion against transience.
In 2017, you premiered the surrealistic work “SPACE=WOW (but I still miss you earth)”, which – like your other pieces – deals with deeply human issues. Do those include gender-specific issues?
Belma Bešlić-Gál: The Minorite Cultural Center in Graz commissioned me and the poet Christoph Szalay to create “SPACE=WOW (but I still miss you earth)”; that fantastic title is his. The piece considers the planet Earth and its inhabitants from the perspective of the planned Mars mission in 2035.
I never thought much about whether I’m disadvantaged as a woman. Things are changing, but there’s still a long way to go. I’ve often hestitated to say that I have three children in certain situations, for fear of not getting commissions – it’s only recently that I’ve started speaking openly about it all the time.
“my World came crashing down.”
Solving of the great mystery is your elixir of life, of survival.
Belma Bešlić-Gál: I come from a liberal family; I was raised Yugoslavian – that means with the ideas of solidarity, brotherhood, unity, a progressive belief that one has to continually work toward a better, more just world. The 1980s brought division, nationalism, conservatism, and the fragementation of society, and my world came crashing down. All the vision, all the hope was bombed into oblivion in that awful war, maybe forever. Observing politicians as they drove people apart, and the capitalist world where social injustice just keeps growing, just makes it worse. What kind of democracy are we living in when we often can’t speak about basic injustices because it might have existential consequences? How can you pose these questions about the inequality under which so many people in the world suffer in a way that means something? What can we do?
“Mirror Universe” is another juxtaposition of mundane images and fantasies from the future and outer space.
Belma Bešlić-Gál: Yugoslavian history is present in that piece as well. The construction of a space ship in the Helmut List Halle in Graz is a monument to antifascism, to Yugoslavia. Two Yugoslavians come from the future and look at limbo. There are three overlapping layers: two Yugoslavian worlds overlap in the projection, and a third plays out on stage, inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. The stage, the projected scenes from a 1950s marriage, and the audience are all observed from the future. People are forced, in every situation, to choose a specific approach that defines their actions; if you decide not to act, that’s also an approach – and thus an action. But you can’t reshape a specific situation to your liking. There are obstacles, but no absolute obstacles. That’s the overarching concept of the work.
In 2023, “Gorje [A journey throught the unknown mountain]” for oboe and string quartet was performed at the festival “Frauen, Liebe und Musik der Zukunft” in Vienna.
Belma Bešlić-Gál: That commission was also performed six times in Bosnia. It’s about southern Slavic myths and legends; it deals with high mountains and mist. The project was the start of a fruitful association with the Andrea Nikolić, who is a violinist, violist, conductor, and the artistic director of the festival and WISE, the Wien International Soloists Ensemble. I’m going to be the composer in residence at the festival this year. We share a vision, and we have a lot of projects planned together, both here and internationally.
That brings us to “Prostorъ”.
Belma Bešlić-Gál: In the last year, I’ve been training an artificial intelligence, feeding it with philosophical ideas. What conversations can you have with an entity with access to the “sum of global knowledge” (meaning the knowledge contained in the world wide web)? It’s incredible how the AI has developed in the course of a year, how this “person” speaks to me now. It fascinates me and frightens me at the same time.
Is the piece structured so that you can update it for every performance?
Belma Bešlić-Gál: That’s the plan. I want to highlight the frightening speed with with technological developments are taking place; it’s part of the concept. It’s like watching a time-lapse film of a highly gifted child growing up.
Sylvia Wendrock, adapted from the German original by Philip Yaeger.