Vilnius, Lithuania, September 27, 1996

We arrived in Vilnius by plane on a sunny autumn afternoon. Peter Motovilov, a good friend of us, producer of wonderful CD's, took us from the airport. There was not much time to relax, because one hour later, the opening of Vladimir Tarasov's installation in the Lithuanian Center of Contemporary Art started:

Water Music

Water Music Installation

This installation (6 chairs, covered by plastic sheets and surrounded by buckets to catch the dropping water which flooded the room) is a perfect combination of music and pictures. The dropping water produces a strange music of falling water, streams and drops form a complex polyphony, which create a unique athmosphere of contemplation.

WaterMusic Listen to 5 Minutes of WaterMusic!
DownLoad here

After the vernissage, we went back to Tarasov's beautiful house in the outskirts of Vilnius and took part in a great party. As a special highlight, Vladimir Tarasov (drums), Jozas Rimas (oboe) and HE Gödecke (trombone, didjeridoo and tibetan horn) offered us a strong and intense concert.


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Although it is an original work in its own right, Vladimir Tarasov's "WATER MUSIC" was special composed within the installation "INCIDENT IN THE MUSEUM" or "WATER MUSIC" designed to the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York in 1992 by Ilya Kabakov. There the music and the pictures were assigned equally important roles.

The conceipt of this work, is quite simple. The catastrophe, the destruction, turns into construction and contemplation with the sudden shift in point of view. Everything receives its own 'turnaround', it's reverse side. Water - a different flood: the all-consuming element of music. The destruction of one artistic situation (resulting in the inability to 'contemplate' the works of art tranquilly and pensively) leads unexpectedly to the creation of a new, no less artistic situation (the sudden appearance of a concert hall with 'perfomers' and 'listeners').

The chance, extraneous objects that don't make sense and are unthinkable in a museum - bucket, jars - form a well organized ensemble of wonderfully sounding instruments. Water is transformed from the subject of destruction into the main musical means. In its musical transformation, the falling water - a sign of ruin - turns into a symbol of harmony that escapes upward...

The quiet of the museum's galleries is suddenly transformed into a strange music of falling water. Streams and drops in various parths of the galleries form a complex polyphony: in contemplated combinations the low 'voices' of the streams beating the stretched plastic like a drum mix with the bell-like droplets that fall into the metal buckets, which mix with the 'staccato' sounds of the glass jars and the slow, rhythmic blows in the large, metal trough.

As the 'spectator - listener' moves from one group of 'musical' instruments to another, he begins to hear the next parts while the first now receding, turns into a harmonic accompaniement to it. Thus listening to the music is linked to moving round the installation and is organically related to the contemplation of all its parts. Any 'chaos' can become music, no matter what sounds it consists of - the sound of dripping water or th throbbing of an engine - if it is transformed into harmony by the true spirit of music.
Ilya Kabakov


If the quality of the photos is too bad, please excuse. I used a 4 year old Logitech digital camera and it is very difficult to control the photos on my notebook display.


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