Performed by the Ensemble C Barré, direction Sébastien Boin
8th St. Petersburg International New Music Festival reMusik.org
31.05.2021

«Strange dreams» was composed for C Barré ensemble in frames of Composers Lab of «reMusik.org» festival. This piece explores transition between conditions of being awake and falling asleep. I tried to recreate some thoughts and images emerging at this moment, which are extremely chaotic and elusive. Rhythmic structure is inspired by Myoclonus phenomenon – irregular twitching of muscles when person is falling asleep. This element creates ostinato background for brief phrases and passages, which improvisatory nature reflects the main idea of irrationality and unpredictability of this boundary state of our consciousness.

image credit: Georgia Turner

Strange dreams (ensemble, 2021)

Alexey Logunov was born in Leningrad, Russia. He graduated in 2014 from Saint-Petersburg State Conservatory of Rymsky-Korsakov, where he studied composition with Vladimir Tsitovich and Gennady Banshchikov and was later assistant to Sergei Slonimsky. Logunov studied piano performance at Saint Petersburg Conservatory, mentored by Ekaterina Murina from 2016 to 2018. In 2020, he earned a Master of Music degree in Composition from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he studied with P. Q. Phan, Eugene O’Brien, and Tansy Davies. Logunov is now a doctoral student and associate instructor of composition at the Jacobs School.

Logunov’s compositions have been performed at numerous festivals in Russia and internationally, including From Avantgarde to Present Days, Children’s Earth, Sound Ways, reMusik.org, Musica Futura (Minsk, Republic of Belarus), New music-new reality (Ekaterinburg), Composer 2.0 (Yaroslavl) and the Midwest Composers Symposium 2019 (Indiana University, USA), Performing Media Festival 2024 (South Bend, Indiana) and SEAMUS@40 (Louisiana State University, USA). He collaborated with artistic groups “Musica Futura” and “Dialectic of Sound” from 2010 to 2011. In 2016, he participated in the “Roche Continents” program in Salzburg, Austria. The following year, he joined a concert tour of France’s Atlantic coastal cities as part of the Dinard Réunit les Jeunes Virtuoses festival. He was respectively a scholar of and a student of the X and XI International Young Composers Academy in Tchaikovsky-city and a participant of 2023 Splice Institute (Kalamazoo, Michigan).