Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Alex Pozniak (b. 1982) is currently in his final year of a Masters in
Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium. Working with Anne Boyd, Nicholas
Routley and lan Shanahan, Alex went on to obtain First Class Honours and the
University Medal in 2005, the year in which his mentorship with Matthew Hindson
began. Alex completed a BA alongside his music studies in which he studied
philosophy, psychology, art history and theory, while majoring in English
literature. His musical inspirations come from such wide sources as
contemporary classical music, avant-garde rock, heavy metal, Merzbow's Noise
music, electronic/computer music and free improvisation. Alex participated in the
inaugural Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra's Australian Composers' School in
2006.
Construction is a setting of the final poem from Blaise Cendrars' Elastic Poems.
Written in 1919, the poem encapsulates the excitement of the early twentieth
century Parisian artistic circles, which included the rise of abstract art, the birth of
cinema and of the burgeoning machine age. The poem first presents the material
nature of paint and colour, and the process of paint in flux as it dries. ln the
second half, the painting suddenly comes to life, infused with the locomotive
energy of 'la machine'. The reference to a 75mm. cannon recalls the recent
memory of the war in which both Cendrars and Fernand Léger fought. As Léger
noted with keen hyperbole, 'the breech-block of a 75mm. cannon lying out in the
sun did more for my development as a painter than have all the museums in the
world'. A musical setting seemed a fitting supplement to a poem whose subject
matter is visual art: a way of constructing through the cross-pollination of
aesthetic lines.