It has been more than a year since an important representative of the alternative art scene, musician, conceptualist, musicologist, artist, author of visual poetry, but above all an unusually wise person and friend, Milan Adamčiak, left us forever. People who knew him will certainly remember his small, slender figure, thick beard, long wavy hair and constantly smiling face from the joy of meeting a loved one. He left us at the age of 70, but during this period he left behind a deep artistic, but above all, an inimitable human mark.
The last time Milan and I were together before I left for the Czech Republic permanently, I asked him with uncertainty in my voice: "Will we see each other again?" And he immediately answered me with his own optimism: "Well, if you want to see me, we will definitely see.” This answer was also so typical of his personality. Distance and time played no role in his life. Perhaps that is why it was he who managed to convince John Cage, one of the most prominent representatives of action art in New York, to come to Slovakia during the Evenings of New Music festival in 1992, just a few months before his death. Already in the 1960s, Cage was a natural inspiration for a whole generation of composers who moved between music, visual arts and poetry. And he influenced Milan with his fellow pilgrims from student days Róbert Cyprich and Jozef Revall so much that in 1967 they founded the music-performance group Ensemble Comp. In 1969, this ensemble performed an extraordinary concert of Water Music for strings and xylophone in honor of GF Handel. It was a collective happening in the premises of the Indoor Swimming Pool of the Juraj Hronec student dormitory in Bratislava, where musicians played with oxygen bombs underwater at the bottom of the pool. A year later, at the castle in Smolenice, as part of the 3rd seminar for new music, Milan realized the concept of Dislocations I – II, which grew out of the principle of a chess game, as a parallel to the board game for two players Checkers, played by 2 x 8 musicians on a floor plan score of an analog chessboard. But in the same period, together with Róbert Cyprich, they also organized the Snow Festival in the High Tatras. In the years of normalization, Milan remained publicly silent for a long time and worked mainly scientifically as a musicologist at the Institute of Musicology of the SAS and simultaneously lectured on the music of the 20th century at the Faculty of Music of VŠMU and the Department of Musicology of the Faculty of Music of the Faculty of Music of the University of Warsaw.
At the end of the 1980s, he was one of the co-founders of the Gerulata association and the European Cultural Club, of which he became vice president. In the same period, he founded the music group Transmusic Comp, whose first performance took place at the Gerulata archaeological site in Bratislava - Rusovce. With Michal Murin and Peter Machajdík, he founded the Society for Unconventional Music SNEH in the early 1990s, of which he was the president, and together with Július Koller and Peter Rónai, the visual art group Nová szávesťť and Flux Gallery. In this period, he also initiated the creation of an album for the Holy Father John Paul II and the exhibition of Scores by John Cage in the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava.
In the second half of the 1990s, he was one of the active members of the Free Art Association ROZETA, which united visual arts, architecture, literature, music and theater. And it was during this period that our life paths crossed. And I am really grateful for the fact that fate allowed me to meet this original and sincere person who could talk for hours in an incredibly interesting way, and not only about art. He was often surrounded mainly by young people, which was proof that even at an advanced age, the restless creative child's soul never died in him. During one of our long conversations outside on the street, he admitted to me that professionals have considered him an amateur all his life, and amateurs, on the other hand, consider him a professional. But that didn't bother him at all. He was worried much more than the melody of the sounds of the castle pavement under our feet. And that was Milan. I believe that even up there he continues to constantly discover what remains invisible to the eyes of ordinary mortals.
Vladimír Dubeň