Category: Acousmatic

(2010) electroacoustic music based on a poem by Edoardo Firpo with an appendix by Edoardo De Giovanni [3’]

Premiered at Miso Music Portugal, Auditório Philippe Friedman, Lisboa, April 15th 2010

Commissioned by Miso Music Portugal

This work was commissioned by Miso Music Portugal Festival for its 25^th birthday. It belongs to a Cadavre Exquis made up by 50 different composers.

There are some similarities between Genova and Portugal, among these the sound of the language.

Therefore my present  is Edoardo De Giovanni (half Venetian, half Genoese) voice reading a poem in Genoese dialect written by Edoardo Firpo. Each declaimed verse is like a blow to the West, jumbling up 25 different frequency components I am filtering from a sound recording of Duarte Lobo Audivi vocem de caelo. This is a masterpiece of Portuguese Polyphony from the XVI Century and it is a six-voice setting of a verse and response for Lauds from the Office of the Dead.

Although Edoardo did not know it, he added to Firpo’s poem a “coda” which hints at the world that is still beyond “the Pillars of Hercules”: I am grateful to him.

Idillio

Quande in te lunghe séje là da stâe
veddo a farfalla gianca ch’a se posa
in sce-o fiore da-o gambo lungo e fin,
e l’aa ch’a ghe fa veja un pô a s’imbosa
comme a barchetta sott’a-o ponentin,
e se barcollan poi tutti doï
mentre da l’erba vegne un son sottï,
a muxica che sento a l’è tanto ata
che no çerco ciù ninte intorno a mi.

                                             Edoardo Firpo

When, in the long summer evenings,
I see the white butterfly alighting
on the long and fine stemmed flower,
and her wing swells like a sail
on a small boat under the westerly breeze,
and both of them then slightly sway
while a thin sound comes out from the grass,
the music I hear is so loud
that I do not search anything around me anymore.

Veneziana n. 1 per Luigi Nono (2007) electroacoustic music [8’40”]

Premiered at EMUFest, Sala Accademica del Conservatorio “S. Cecilia”, Roma, November 14th 2010

Veneziana n. 2 per Mario Messinis (2007) electroacoustic music [17’ 10”]

Premiered at Sala Tartini del Conservatorio “Giuseppe Tartini”, Trieste, November 24th 2010

Veneziana n. 3 per Alvise Vidolin (2007) 6 tracks electroacoustic music [8’ 40”]  

Premiered at Conservatorio di musica “F.A.Bonporti”, Riva del Garda, May 3rd 2008

The “Veneziana” series rises from my unconscious as a symbolic farewell to Venezia and to three persons who played an important role in my professional development.

March 2007: I am preparing the “choirs” for the revised version of Un avatar del diavolo, a musical theatre work based on Antonin Artaud text and commissioned to me by the Biennale di Venezia in 2005. The idea is to add vocal tonal harmonies to three scenes in order to evoke the image of the bourgeoisie, who judges and finds Artaud guilty. These “choirs” are randomly broken into atonal gestures by the passion of the male actor voice on the scene. It is natural for me to take inspiration from Jean-Philippe Rameau who set the rules of tonal harmony. On the other hand he is already present in the 4^th interlude (called “xilophonie”) to mention Artaud love for XVIII Century French dances.

The starting point for these choirs is the recording of Marianne Pousseur singing – extremely slow as I asked her – the melodic line of Vénitienne, an harpsichord piece by Rameau. “Veneziana” (Vénitienne) was the name for a composition form of satirical and burlesque content, a form practised also by Andrea Gabrieli.

As I am working on this sound material using some of the techniques experienced by Nono for his last compositions with live electronics – delays, resonant filtering, riverberation – I feel more and more the results as a nostalgic farewell to Venezia. As a matter of fact after 30 years I am leaving this incomparable town to come back to my birthplace, Genova. So I decide to select three different structures from the obtained materials to be arranged ad libitum according the desired “harmonic” stream.

A deep sense of gratitude to Luigi Nono goes with Veneziana n. 1, to Mario Messinis with Veneziana n. 2, to Alvise Vidolin with Veneziana n. 3.

(2005-2007) 4 tracks electroacoustic music (voice: Giorgio Bertan) from Un avatar del diavolo [24’ 15”]

This work is not simply a reduction of the theatre piece Un avatar del diavolo I wrote in 2005 for La Biennale di Venezia Music Festival. The theatre work was based on the last Antonin Artaud text “Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu”. The word “avatar” stood for the idea of the “double”: God as Lucifer’s double, excrements as double of spirit, the electronic avatar as digital alter-ego, etc. The music was using digital technologies to transform the two (Giorgio Bertan and Marta Paola Richeldi) actors’ voices in real-time, always suspended between logos and melos, the word and its musical double.

So, which is here the missing double (In the absence of the double)? The voice as a word. What does it remain? The voices’ resonances in extraneous bodies: animals, percussions, brass and string instruments, sighs and screams. It remains the music was arising on the stage from the resonances the voice excitation produced on vocoders and convolution algorithms.

The overall form, if halved in its duration, is the same of the theatre piece. Consistent with Artaud original text, it is made up by 5 scenes with 4 interposed xilophonie – as Artaud called his  short percussive interludes – plus a coda of handwriting sounds I added to stress the current  importance of Artaud writings.

(2002) three electroacoustic pieces from “Sopra i monti degli aromi” [6’ 32”]

“Sopra i monti degli aromi” is a journey into the Song of Songs through Gregorian Chants, Medieval polyphonies and electroacoustic compositions. It has been realized with the Ensemble Oktoechos conducted by Lanfranco Menga on a project by Emanuele Pappalardo, Paolo Pachini, Lanfranco Menga and Roberto Doati.

The guide lines for the compositions of my five pieces are suggested by unity and dualism concepts: the ille and the illa of the Song text, eroticism and sacred love, the human and the sacred. The vocal score is built on a few pitches, very often repeated to point out a sense of belonging to the earth. Nevertheless this kind of hochetus is sometimes broken by highest notes to mean the spiritual, the aim – not always achieved – to conquer the heaven, or it is broken by short speeches and non-singing vocal articulations. These articulations and recordings from everyday life of the two singers (Alessandra Vavasori and Antonio Bortolami) complement each other, so that each performer unfold oneself by means of the singing (the spiritual) and the speech (the corporeity). It is within the electronic part that I ideally accomplish the unity concept by using signal convolution technique. The frequency components of a male voice (or choir) are spectrally shaped by a female choir (or single voice), underlining both the physicality of the closely recorded voice and its fading into the reverberant space of a church. All the sound materials are coming from Ensemble Oktoechos performances of ancient music based on Song of Songs. From the five original pieces (d’yn, n’yn, b’yt, spyrty I and spyrty II, d’yl) I present here:

d’yn e n’yn are convolutions between men and women performances of  “Jam hiems” and “Veni electa mea” antiphonies;

spyrty I is built upon “Tota pulchra es, anima mea” by Heinrich Isaac and is scored for electroacoustic tape with long static vocal resonances alternating lively sequences of voice grains.

electroacoustic version (2001) [11’ 42”] [CD Stradivarius STR 33634]

Premiered at Festival “Il Giardino della Musica”, Palazzina Liberty, Milano, June 13th 2001

Realized with a Fellowship from Rockefeller Foundation

The five fragments that form the whole work come into the world thanks to my admiration and friendship with Elena Casoli. They have been realized for the purpose to serve as interludes, in the theatrical sense,  for her guitar concerts. My aim was to create something that could be at the same time a continuous allusion to different – as concern time and language –  styles and kinds of guitar, and as much as possible abstract to be suited to whatever piece from other composers she is playing during the concert without affecting its listening.

I worked with the idea of cross-breeding in mind. Cross-breeding of instruments and styles, of  acoustic excitation signals and resonances. So the first step was to record guitar pieces taken from different repertoires – classical, blues, flamenco, jazz, baroque, south-American, rock – all played by Elena Casoli, both with original instruments and “unfamiliar” instruments and manners. Therefore Eric Clapton performance of Crossroads was played on an archlute, a Paganini Minuetto with a distorted electrical guitar and pitch bending technique, a flamenco siguiriya with “tambora” technique on a metal strings American instrument, a Sor Studio with wah-wah effect, and so on.

Then I started to digitally transform these recordings with Marcohack program that allow to separate excitation signals and resonances characteristics from a soundfile. So, for example, the excitation signal from an electrical guitar playing Django Reinhardt Nuages, is cross-breeded with the archlute resonance of a Barrios Choro. Next I worked through filtering and analysis-synthesis algorithms in Soundhack and Csound environments to supply different degrees of abstraction to the original materials, changing and sometimes contorting their noticeable characters.

From the formal point of view I used the following drawing, where it can be seen the increasing duration of each fragment (30”, 1’, 2’, 3’, 5’) as well as the increasing voices number (7, 6, 9, 18, 28), where each voice is a singular style/instrument.

L’apparizione di tre rughe has been realized during a residence at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio with the facilities of its electronic music studio and SoundHack, MarcoHack, Csound programs.

(1999) electroacoustic version [11’ 54”]

Premiered at Auditorium Cordoba University (AR), April 29th 2006

Realized with a Fellowship from Bogliasco Foundation, Centro Ligure per le Arti e le Lettere

The work has been realised during a residence at the Fondazione Bogliasco thanks to a Fellowship from the Liguria Study Centre for the Arts and Humanities. The idea of the work (in his original version  for violin, rainsticks, electronics and interactive system ad libitum) arises from the admiration of certain monochromatic paintings where, according to different matters and techniques, successive paint’s layers give rise to a surface that make “disappear” the raw material. They can be perceived as sculptures or as comprising different changing shades, depending on the light incidence on the colour.

I am struck by the little perceptual bursts due to a strong abstraction.

As in other works of mine, I started here with sound materials that include both concrète [earthly] and abstract [heavenly] elements. I have tried to realise the idea of a monochromatic surface electronically transforming the impulsive sounds of two palo de lluvia (rainsticks), a popular instrument of the South American Indian cultures. It is this granular monochrome that constitutes this electroacoustic version. The violin – as played by Marco Rogliano and submitted to certain transformations – is heard just at 4’38” for a minute, isolated from other sounds.

Thanks to Xavier Serra for his SMS program and Davide Rocchesso for his BaBo program: together with Csound I used them for the transformations of rainsticks. From the formal point of view the work follows 12 within 63 computer-generated drawings I received as a present from my very friend Gianni Revello. Some of these drawings have been submitted to the GraphSco program by Riccardo Bianchini for the extraction of musical parameters both for violin and electronic part.

I am finally indebted to Franco Avicolli, poet of abstract lands to whom I owe the discovery of pouring sounds and lasting friendships in Argentina. I wish to dedicate to him bastone armonico.

(1998) electroacoustic music for a silent movie by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy [5’ 19”]

Premiered at Accademia Musicale Pescarese, Pescara, 1998

«Our century’s reality is technology… machines have taken up the room of the past transcendental spiritualism. All of us are equal facing machines… Within the technology nor tradition nor class consciousness: we all could be masters, but also slaves.»

Moholy-Nagy, 1922

The “Lichtrequisit”, which is shot in the film, is a half sculpture/half machine made of chromium-plated metal, glass, wire and metallic bars. Moholy-Nagy always tried to interpret space within its relationship with time. Therefore all the sculpture movements – most of them slow and circular – are realized with the consciousness that the screen is nothing but flat, like a picture or a painting. Sometimes Moholy-Nagy realizes “virtual” movements through image processing techniques: negative and positive images superimposed, different shapes lightings, dazzling lightings which project shadows of sculpture parts on a white background.

My music idea was to give sound to the silent sculpture. So this is the reason why:

• sound materials are determined by sculpture materials: metal (a scratched and beated metal plate, a synthetic “saw”, a washing-machine drum), glass (scraping with broken glasses);
• sound transformations derive from Moholy-Nagy lighting technique: filtering with parameters values often taken from film frames spectra;
• I have tried to render bi-dimensional the three-dimensionality of the acoustic space. Most of the circular movements are evoked by the material – formal, timbral – character, rather than by actual sound moving.

The entirety of Moholy-Nagy experimentation led him to plan a synchronization of the “Lichtrequisit” movements with a musical score. We could imagine the rules he would have used to guide his action remembering what he said to a friend while drawing his face contours: «I can play your profile. I am curious to know how your nose will sound.» One of his experiments was to engrave alphabetical signs directly on the soundtrack. This is why on the written words images (“schwarz”, “weiss”, “grau”) appearing at the beginning of the film – like a personal “manifesto” by Moholy-Nagy – I superimposed white noise filtered with parameters (central frequency, frequency bandwidth) which follow the contours of each single letter.

Tribute to Pietro Grossi (1997) electroacoustic music [5’]

Premiered at “Festa per gli 80 anni di Pietro Grossi”, Sala Vanni, Firenze, December 11th 1997

Commissioned by Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, Firenze

1917: Pietro Grossi’s birth in Venice.

1972: the RAI (Italian National Broadcasting) broadcasts “C’è musica e musica”, a contemporary music series edited by Luciano Berio. In one of these television presentations Pietro Grossi, at that moment at the Biennale di Venezia Music Festival, is invited to speak about his computer music experiences. He is the first to promote such field in Italy.

1977: I am starting to attend the Pietro Grossi classes on Computer Music at the “Istituto di Elaborazione dell’Informazione” of CNUCE-CNR in Pisa. The most important teaching I receive is concerning the fact that the formalization of a compositional process is not limiting at all the creativeness of the composer, but extend it. I cannot forget the great emotion I felt the day I write and see my very first and trivial FORTRAN program running.

1997: I am “rebuilding” some of the commands that were part of the TAUMUS software realized in Pisa by Grossi and use them to transform those 100 seconds of the Berio television broadcasting. The Pietro Grossi and Virgilio Boccardi – the interviewer – voices and the very “naive” sounds of the TAU2 – the minicomputer with DAC used by Grossi – are granulized with a TAUMUS algorithm simulation. It generates simple combinations with 19 elements and 17 sub-elements. So the three different materials are submitted four times (each time with different values as concerns grain duration, starting point of file reading, etc.) to obtain twelve voices. I then time stretched – three times – the broadcasting to get the formal structure which reflects the “counterpoint” between Grossi, Boccardi and the TAU2. All of the sound events are achieved through reading and filtering with random controlled parameters the twelve voices. Three times the Berio’s voice in the television broadcasting is superposed to the TAU2. So I used it as amplitude modulation and filtering control signal over the TAU2 “voice”.

Thank you to Davide Rocchesso for the combinatorial algorithm and for BaBo.

8 tracks tape [CD Cybele – DEGEM 7] [13’ 32”]

Premiered at Liège University, July 1997

Sound projection: Roberto Doati

Commissioned by Centre de Recherches et de Formation Musicales de Wallonie, Liège

Felix Regula is a work commissioned by and realized at the Centre de Recherches et Formation Musicales de Wallonie in Liège. When I received the invitation to realize a new piece with instruments and electronics it has been natural for me, living in Padova, to think to Johannes Ciconia (1340-1411). Not only because the great composer and theorician from Liège lived his last years in Padova, but also for the deep interaction between science and music there is in his life and work. As a composer working with computer since long time, I developed a musical thought shaped on this new technology. As technology I do not simply mean here the machine. I am referring to the technology as an ensemble of new scientific procedures to investigate and transform the nature (tekhné = Arts and Crafts).

The ‘nature’ to be transformed is a virelai by Ciconia (Sus une fontayne) which represents for me an archetype of the interest many composers had and still have on mirror games. So in the five different versions of the piece I realized, I broke and rebuilt the form of the Ciconia virelai with musical instruments (violin, flute-flute in G, clarinet-bass clarinet-double bass clarinet) mirroring not only each other, as in the music of the past, but also in my preferred mirror: the computer technology.

The computer transformation of the instrumental sounds are therefore conceived as a sort of double of each instrument, but differently disposed in time according the esprit de géométrie peculiar of Ciconia’s work. The instruments are also acoustically treated, as the original pitches of the Ciconia’song are changed as concern the modalities of their emission using instrumental contemporary techniques (slap, tongue ram, multiphonics, etc.).

IV Felix Regula is a 8 tracks version of the piece: track 1 (violin recording), track 2 (flute recording), track 3 (clarinet recording), tracks 4-5 (electronics from violon), tracks 6-7 (electronics from flute), track 8 (electronics from clarinet). The performance of the work is totally free as concern dynamics of the different tracks.

The temporal relation between instruments and electronics could be represented as follows:

(1996) electroacoustic music on a Montale-s poem [8’ 44”]

Premiered at Teatro Civico di Savona, December 1996

Commissioned by Comune di Savona for the Eugenio Montale Centennial

I was always struck by the Montale capability to melt the judgements which are crystallized into the words. He uses simple and concrete words providing them with a strong abstract character: the dream of much of my music.

Inventario delle eclissi (Eclipses Inventory) is a work on words’motivation. Motivation represents the sense prehistory; motivation is not lost, it just disappeared in part, it is eclipsed. Moreover I am convinced of the fact that all the transformations on a sound help to understand it, to “explain” it. This is the reason why I choose to work with the single words of the poem. The kind of transformation of the word-sounds is related to its placing on two different formal spaces. The first one is a sonological space for the arrangement of sounds on Brightness and Attack Steepness dimensions. The second one is a semantic space (the dimensions being motivation classification, multiple meaning, phonetic similarity, meaning similarity and meaning adjacency).

The work is divided into three parts, as the poem is if we analize it following who is going to narrate. The time-density score for each part has been generated automatically with different programs – written by the author – following a path that starts with a more or less plain intelligibility of the treated words to reach increasing fragmentation. A higher level of abstraction is then supported by a collage of the original speech.

Gianni Revello, congenial to the Montale spirit of suspension, revolt, abandonment and voluntary exclusion, out of friendship gave me his voice. This inventory I offer to him for his time’s collection.

L’oboe

Talvolta il Demiurgo, spalla di Dio e Vicerè quaggiù,
rimugina su quali macchinazioni
gli attribuiscano i suoi nemici,
i fedeli al suo Dio perché quaggiù
non giungono gazzette e non si sa
che siano occhi e orecchie. Io sono al massimo
l’oboe che dà il la agli altri strumenti
ma quel che accade dopo può essere l’inferno.
Un giorno forse potrò vedere anch’io,
oggi possente e cieco, il mio padrone
e nemico ma penso che prima si dovrà inventare
una cosa da nulla, il Tempo, in cui
i miei supposti sudditi si credano sommersi.

Ma, riflette il Demiurgo, chissà fino a quando
darò la mano (o un filo) al mio tiranno? Lui stesso
non ha deciso ancora e l’oboe stonicchia.

Eugenio Montale

Sometimes the Demiurge, shoulder of God and viceroy down here,
Brood over which machines
the enemies of him attributes him,
The faithful to the God of him because down here
Journals are not coming and you don’t know
Whether they are eyes and ears. I am at most
The oboe that sounds the A to the orchestra
But what happens after can be hell.
One day maybe I will be able to see too,
today mighty and blind, my owner
and enemy but I think you will have to invent before
one thing from nothing, Time, in which
My supposed subjects are credited.

But, reflects the Demiurge, who knows until
Will I give my hand (or a thread) to my tyrant? Himself
He has not yet decided and the oboe is out of tune.