
Composer, born in 1993 in Cracow. Her pieces were performed during Krakow Accordion Festival (2020), Warsaw Autumn Festival (2020, fringe events — 2015, 2017, 2018), Pulsar Festival in Copenhagen (2020, 2019), International Festival of Krakow Composers (2020, 2018), Panorama Festival in Aarhus (2019), RAMA Festival in Aarhus (2019), Musica Electronica Nova Festival in Wrocław (2015, 2017, 2019), Darmstadt Summer Course (2018), Young Composers Meeting in Apeldoorn (2017), Organ Music Days in Cracow Festival (2015, 2016), Ostrava New Music Days Festival (2017), Festival Aktuelle in Nuremberg (2018). She collaborated with ensembles: Aarhus Sinfonietta, Airborne Extended Ensemble, Current Resonance Ensemble, Duo van Vliet, E-MEX Ensemble, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Recherche, Gośka Isphording, Henrik Bendstrup, Kompopolex Ensemble, Lutosławski Quartet, Małgorzata Walentynowicz (Ensemble Garage), Melos Ensemble, Orkest de Ereprijs, Ostravská Banda, Sort Hul Ensemble, Vocal Federation 6, W/L Duo. She also participated in workshops: Donaueschinger Musiktage Next Generation (2016), SYNTHETIS (2016, 2017). She broadened her skills during master-classes with: Mark André, Richard Ayres, Marco Blaauw, Zygmunt Krauze, Johannes Kreidler, Bernhard Lang, Martijn Padding, Stefan Prins, Rebecca Saunders, Marco Stroppa, Jennifer Walshe, Agata Zubel. Szpyrka received a scholarship of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage 'Culture Online’ (2020), the prize of The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage for the best students (2017), Sapere Auso scholarship (2017/18). She graduated in composition from the Academy of Music in Cracow, where she was studying with Anna Zawadzka-Gołosz. She also holds a Bachelor’s degree in theory of music. Currently, she is doing her PhD on parental Academy and studying on soloist program with tuition from Juliana Hodkinson, Niels Rønsholdt and Simon Steen-Andersen at Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus.
About Project:
In my piece In Constant Rapid Collisions, I focused on temperature, which I found the most interesting in the pandemic context. At first, I started my work by constructing the holistic structure of the form. I used all average monthly temperatures in Poland, consider-ing the beginning of the lockdown in March as a starting point and ending in December 2020. I divided the whole piece into ten inner segments, which corresponded to tempera-ture consecutively. Another step was to emphasise the correlation between sound and temperature, which affects its speed. Molecules at higher temperatures vibrate faster and sound waves can travel more quickly. In effect, the sound is more bright and crisp in lower temperatures and opaque, damped in higher. As a result, the sound was being filtered de-pending on the level of temperature in each segment. Constant micro-transformations of grains assisted it in different types of sounds, which were imaging vibrating molecules. The piece's main idea was to oppose two perspectives, macro and micro, and create a mu-sical relation between found parameters. The crucial element was also a reflection about processes that last constantly, but one is not always aware of that and usually cannot change them.