Premiered at Conservatorio di musica “F.A.Bonporti”, Riva del Garda, November 21st 2010
Commissioned by Conservatorio di musica “F.A.Bonporti” di Trento, sede di Riva del Garda
The macrocosm staircase corresponds to the different cognitive faculties: sense, imagination, reason, discernment, understanding, word. The staircase can’t go any further because…
This work was commissioned by “F.A. Bonporti” Music Conservatory in Trento (Riva del Garda department) in 2009, the International Year of Astronomy, in honour of the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s first use of the telescope for astronomical observation.
Considering several aspects of our times I think that we are living in an era similar to the Middle Age, so far from the scientific revolutions of XVII Century. Therefore I have realized in sounds and images the Aristotle and Tolomeo’s point of view, where the Earth is the centre of the Universe.
That is why:
flat and stiff images alternate on the screen with curved and flexible surfaces;
I am using almost entirely blue color (blue stars are the closest to Earth);
I am using as sound materials only small excerpts from instrumental (i.e. acoustic) music of the XX Century. It is very usual to make a connection in our mind between electronic sounds and sounds coming from the outer space. For me the sounds in this work represent what one can hear when orbits the Earth.
The music I am playing with all these music is an homage to John Cage, who wrote the closest music to a starry sky. All the sounds are performed in real time changing its pitch and duration according a random numbers generator. The performer is on charge of the musical structure according her/his own “taste”: from very sparse to very dense. Thus there are ideally infinite versions of La scala non procede oltre, or better still as many stars there are in the sky or even better as many stars the human being can discover in the Universe.
My thanks to Luciano Berio, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Dumitru Fărcaş, Morton Feldman, Charlie Haden, German Kuular, Bruno Maderna, Olivier Messiaen, Charles Mingus, Harry Partch, Andrei Popa, Steve Reich, Alexander Salchak, Giacinto Scelsi, Robert Schumann, Salvatore Sciarrino, Fernando Sor, Edgar Varése, Lui Pui-Yuen, Iannis Xenakis, wishing that copying the Masters out within our hermitages will help to prepare a New Renaissance.
Premiered at : Sala Tartini del Conservatorio “Giuseppe Tartini”, Trieste, November 24th 2010
Video & live electronics: Roberto Doati
“Le stelle suggeriscono nuove opportunità” [5’ 18”]
Premiered at : Sala Tartini del Conservatorio “Giuseppe Tartini”, Trieste, November 24th 2010
Video & live electronics: Roberto Doati
“Vivrete una settimana all’insegna della stabilità” [6’]
Premiered at : Sala Tartini del Conservatorio “Giuseppe Tartini”, Trieste, November 24th 2010
Video & live electronics: Roberto Doati
The videomusic series Sindrome scamosciata is inspired by IPCRESS, my very first encounter with electronic music in 1965. It is a film directed by Sidney Furie, based on a spy novel by Len Deighton, starring Michael Caine who works for some secret agency of the government. IPCRESS stands for “Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex under strESS”.
Both the visual and sound materials come from a scene where Caine, kidnapped by the Soviet with the help of a British betrayer, is subjected to brainwashing. He is forced to listen to some electronic music and is hurt by a repeated sequence of synthetic images in a sort of guided imagery.
All of my video start with a sequence recalling the IPCRESS one, then becoming a study on image persistence. I realized these images superimposing a holed black cardboard to the screen of my turned-on TV. Shooting in the dark with a very slow shutter and moving quickly the video camera gives rise to luminous traces. An out of context subliminal image appears periodically.
The music is performed and “improvised” on stage within a Csound + Max/MSP environment patch with 21 control parameters to modify the 30 seconds original soundtrack of the brainwashing scene, the base algorithm being a Phase Vocoder analysis-synthesis with 100 oscillators.
In The IPCRESS File book each chapter is headed with a quote from a horoscope, so the title of each piece of my series is extracted from my stars for the day I realize the piece: : “Il transito ostile della luna”, “Potrete incappare in un contrattempo”, “Le stelle suggeriscono nuove opportunità”, “Vivrete una settimana all’insegna della stabilità”.
Thanks to Matteo Ricchetti who was able to transform a remedy to my inexperience with video technology in an improving meaning in Il transito ostile della luna.
(2005) two actors and live electronics. Text by Antonin Artaud (“Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu” and other writings, Gallimard Pub.), with a quotation from Visage by Luciano Berio (Universal Edition and courtesy Talia Pecker Berio) [45’]
Premiered at XXLVI Festival Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea, Venezia, September 30th 2005, Arsenale, Teatro Tese delle Vergini)
Project and Music: Roberto Doati
Video: Paolo Pachini (actresses: Marta Paola Richeldi, Shila Anaraki)
Actors on stage: Giorgio Bertan and Marta Paola Richeldi
Stage and Scene Director, text assembler: Giuseppe Emiliani
Light Designer: Mauro Marri
Multimodal System and sensors: InfoMus Lab, DIST-Università di Genova
Stage objects by Charles Eames: vitra
Commissioned by La Biennale di Venezia
Realized with a Fellowship from MacDowell Colony
The term avatar (“misadventure”, but also “metamorphosis”, “incarnation”) is used by Antonin Artaud as subtitle for his last work “Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu” (To have done with the judgement of God). Nowadays avatar is also a virtual double of a human being, a digital alter ego.
So the title wants to indicate the foundations of my work: the double (God as Lucifer alter ego? Excrements as spirit alter ego?) and digital technology language (Lucifer alter ego?).
Computer technology is my habit of mind, is my double, and I use it here to transform sounds and voices of the two characters (Giorgio Bertan and Marta Paola Richeldi), always on the borderline between logocentrism and melocentrism. I use it to project the sounds into the real space through 10 loudspeakers. «To make metaphysics of the spoken language means […] to break it up and to project it dynamically into the space». I make use of the gestures on the stage, as well as the three screens video projection, capturing them with EyesWeb (InfoMus Lab , DIST-Genova University) and mapping them to synthesis and processing data. Thanks to this technology I can easily realize a full interaction between sounds, signs and actions, combining them in order to make an effective language: the theatre. «Instead to confine these dissonances to one sense area, we will let them go through all the senses, from a colour to a sound, from a single word to a light, from some gestures trepidation to a plain surface of sounds etc. etc.».
An example is given in the 4th scene when the actor is caressing a chair and according the gesture quality, “recognized” by the chair, the actress voice will be affected, also generating different kinds of sigh: desire, pleasure, anguish. On the stage there are three objects to interact with: a chair and a screen by Charles Eames (courtesy Vitra), and a Polish radio, all from the 40s of XX Century.
The choice of such an important text by Artaud is motivated by the will to bring it back to its original context which is so close to the work of Pierre Schaeffer. Artaud was commissioned by the French Radio to create a recorded work, but its broadcasting was prohibited (as well as the later Visage by Luciano Berio, heard in the 5th scene, thanks to Universal Edition and Talia Pecker Berio). On Sept. 4th 1948, six months after Artaud’s death, the Director of Radiodiffusion Française Wladimir Porché, who was responsible for the censorship over “Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu”, open the CER, the experimental radio broadcasting center that can be considered the birthplace of the latter Groupe de recherche de musique concrète.
The scene
Two actors on stage.
Three objects: a chair and a screen by Charles Eames (courtesy Vitra), a Polish radio, all from the Forties of XX Century. The chair has 3 hidden microphones to keep track of the gestures over it, the screen has proximity sensors to keep track of the movement around it, the radio has 2 MIDI knobs, 1 MIDI switch and proximity sensors to keep track of the movement around it.
All the information coming from the object is transformed into MIDI signal and used to control the live electronics transformation of the voices.
The videos are projected over 3 screens: two up above the scene, one on the stage.
A scheme of the Venezia stage is included here.
Storyboard
Charles Eames plywood chair, 1946 (Courtesy vitra.)Charles Eames plywood screen, 1946 (Courtesy vitra.)Polish radio from the Forties.
(2000) one actress, electronics and EyesWeb interactive system.
Text by Gianni Revello [10’]
Premiered at Stagione Gran Teatro La Fenice, Teatro Malibran, Venezia, September 26th 2001
Actress: Francesca Faiella
Sound projection and EyesWeb: Roberto Doati
The collection of texts by Gianni Revello from which I have drawn those for this work, provides a free choice, both in number and in order, for its reading / execution. The execution can consist of plain reading, not emphatic, or as you wish, or even assume, with any modality, musical form, or even assume any form: visual, scenic, any other communication code. In making this choice, I made a journey through names, places, themes of my life that I have often shared with Revello. I certainly haven’t built a story with characters immersed in a dramaturgy. My goal was to make evident the occult non-sense of a life without betraying its incongruity.
The protagonist is alone on the stage and she pronounces these names, places, themes, as if she sees them inside herself, as if she remembers them, remembers having known them, lived them. But with the awareness of the inevitability of these images disappearing with every word, every name pronounced. She can’t help but describe them, but she knows that while she does it about her the inner world of her disappears, for this reason she observes herself as she speaks, observes the emptiness that is in her, and that she herself is creating while speak out. This is why she struggles with her split voice: with the movement of her lips she tries to stop her, slows it down, accelerates it, overturns it, deforms it so that reality through the meaning of the word does not come out of her. He knows that reality is an excrement of the spirit (Antonin Artaud), and that describing it is as if she were evacuating. But eventually we realize that herself has meanwhile been filled with the “fat seeds” of our credulity (i grassi semi della credulità). In a sort of cannibalism, she therefore feeds on the listener’s spirituality, on her disappointment: it is enough to continue living (È sufficiente.).
During the performance the actress is seated in front of a TV monitor, looking at herself, but also the audience is looking to her on the stage and what she is looking at as her face is projected on a big screen.
I realized the work using EyesWeb, a software realized by DIST (Laboratory of Musical Informatics-University of Genova). With the help of DIST engineers I prepared a patch that follow the lips (blue coloured) of the actress, sending through MIDI interface to a Csound orchestra informations concerning the height, the width and the area of mouth openness. The small movements are controlling some parameters during the live re-synthesis of the same actress voice to obtain a double of her (the Phase Vocoder analysis files are stored on a computer). So sometimes you hear the “second” voice speaking backwards words, while the actress is just moving the lips. The lips movements can control the speed and the pitch of the “second” voice and as well as 50 bandpass filters and 50 delay applied to the frequency component of the voice.
The text is taken from the anthology ”Il titolo a piacere segue le note” by Gianni Revello
The bold letters indicate the happening of a more or less extraneous event
Se s’immagina che racconto la mia vita solo per far passare il tempo a qualcuno. Ancora quattro settimane prima ero una creatura. Polvere di marmo, calore, fatica, fulmini, tuoni. Scuotono gli orecchi-ni-chelati. E corse a casa con la testa in fiamme. Questo è il Lavoro! Pace. Si guarda il polsino, che cosa sta facendo quell’ape che indugia attorno alla mia scarpa?
Biologia e computer. Immaginiamo una città enorme, in cui ogni casa abbia diecimila linee telefoniche, che la connettono con diecimila altre case, che se ne stanno a loro volta su banchi di corallo inestesi non fuori del comune. Come emerge dalle pubblicazioni popolari “A proposito, come stai a denaro?” il divario tra ciò che una cosa è e cosa non è tromba divien l’oggetto ov’ei risoffia. Ricapitoliamo, se gioca un bluff, posso giocarlo anch’io, in che consiste la differenza?
Io, UUUUU, dico per esempio: ora, appoggiato a un pilastro, emetterò da più fonti ottantotto grida altissime e un bisbiglio ‘Phà! SSSSS al centro della sala lascia cadere giù i due sacchi. Urla, fischi, trombette. Non mi sembra che vi sia un nesso.
Venezia ciclopica immobile scimmia dalla fisionomia sua mimetica forata da poche finestre le gambe deformi s’impone, puttanangola, a esempio edificante l’uomo che ha sognato l’Atlantide l’ha fatta anche scomparire
Il privilegio della coincidenza in Heisenberg, trasmesso per calli e tempeste, compare nelle lezioni di scienza divulgativa.
La fisica ha un’affinità con l’inutile chiamata in una bizzarra commedia notturna. Nulla scassinato all’alba.
Il fascino del vecchio attore, lo zoccolo. La gioventù, lente le spalle, che esige la palude del sapere.
Confesso che comporre un titolo segreto per voci, tromba fitta, frutti cavi dà da riflettere.
L’intellettuale ha una resistenza alla scelta del bagno parallela a quella per la conversazione. Sicuro inverno, bagno modesto.
Il silenzio, per TTT, è aberrante. Comporre a misura d’ape, lo strepito della fantascienza – odori seducenti.
In mezzo agli strumenti, la musica, indipendente, partecipa da lontano, media, immediata, per un pezzo bendato, non sospesa.
M gira, vagamente nervoso, alla riva contempla l’infinito, allegoria dell’opinione verbale.
Circa nove mesi dopo cadde in un sonno profondo, sulfureo. L’inattività delle infiorescenze, la linea squisita del mento e del collo, brezza, etere, deriva. Rapidamente diminuì il suo vocabolario. Tra angeli di marmo, fece un cenno al figlio, si turbò. In breve tempo le buone leggi lo snervarono. Dal microfono a strattoni, un eccentrico motivo color rosso scuro.
Il respiro della vallata, a ponente, bianchi rosicchiando anni, ordini, sospeso, interrogativo, d’impermeabile. VV riavvolto chiama la musica del possibile il genere pagato. Lo diverte. La tela di profilo.
Basta lacrime. Il monte inginocchiato alla vallata. Le feste lunari hanno il sapore sbattuto delle musiche moderne. RR non ne capiva il canto, il respiro.
Un momento. Attenzione. Ritmo a balzi. Lo spazio del classico. Comprensione infantile, favolosa. PP.
Da un pezzo il lettore sperpera i grassi semi della credulità mentre brucia di delusione. È sufficiente.
(2014) live electronics solo (8 tracks) [indefinite duration]
Premiered at Festival « Nuova Consonanza », Roma, December 3rd 2014
The work stems from an invitation from James Dashow to participate in the celebrations for his 70 years that Nuova Consonanza organized in Rome in 2014.
Instead of proposing an already made composition, it seemed to me most respectful of Dashow’s contributions to electronic music and of the high consideration I have for the most valuable advices James has lavished generously at the beginning of my career as a composer in Padova, to create a new composition.
Most of the music material is made up with 5 fragments (all synthetic sounds) from his In winter shine (1983). The spectral components that I get from the analysis are used to synthesize in real-time pitches and timbres through processes similar to those used by James in his Dyad System, but not with the same accuracy. I used somewhat a heuristic principle defined as “rule of thumb”. This is because many years ago I suggested to James to apply a “rule of thumb” for a composition on the sound quality of a pan struck with the thumb whose timbre fascinated him so much. Today I recorded these kind of sounds and their convolution with the synthetic sounds from James’ composition, will end this music of mine wishing to express all my affectionate gratitude to JD.
(2013) live electronics in the kitchen. Chef: Luigi Zanco [indefinite duration]
This composition originates from sound material used in the last three minutes of “Seppie senz’osso” (“Cuttlefish without bone”), 5th episode of the audiovisual cooking project Titolo segreto per quadrati, tromba fitta, frutti cavi (Secret title for squares, dense trumpet, hollow fruits), born from the collaboration with the chef Gigi Zanco and the video composer Paolo Pachini. Why cooking? Because Culinary Art and Music have much in common: there is a tradition of recipes (for music: harmony, counterpoint, classical forms) and both start from common basic materials (sounds) to make them, through countless techniques transformation, complex materials (sound structures) that shaped in a form will create the final dish (music).
The final part of Seppie senz’osso is, in fact, the presentation of the dish. Contained in the visual space that Paolo Pachini had destined for it in the architecture of the entire video, it had stimulated in me the generation of a greater quantity of materials than was necessary. So I thought of processing in real time this material according an improvisation for an autonomous form, independent of visual and gastronomic suggestions.
(2007) live electronics solo [indefinite duration]
Premiered at Festival “L’Espace du Son”, Bruxelles, October 20th 2007
Commissioned by Musiques et Recherches, Bruxelles
The piece rises out from an invitation I received from Musiques & Recherches to contribute to Bernard Parmegiani 80th birthday celebration within the festival “L’Espace du Son” in Bruxelles. It is part of a larger suite of pieces written by several composers on the same occasion.
Rather than proposing an already done piece, I preferred to write a new one, as a true and direct homage to the great French composer.
Not so respectful is probably the choice I have done to use a piece from his De Natura Sonorum (1975) as raw material. The idea was to consider Parmegiani’s music as a natural state, concréte, to be treated in order to make things.
I decided to work on Accidents/Harmoniques not only for its spectral richness, but for a free association – a word game – on its title that came in my mind:
“blast (Accidenti, in Italian) Rameau, who established his tonal system over natural Harmonics so curbing all the XX Century musical experiences that moved away from it!”
Accidenti agli armonici! is a real time recording of a performance I made with a CSound patch that allows a 100 oscillators resynthesis of a Phase Vocoder analysis of Accidents/Harmoniques. The performance parameters are: time stretching, spectral envelope, spectral stretching and shifting, single amplitude envelopes. So it can be considered one of the several possible musical explorations of the Parmegiani’s work spectral space over which by accident natural harmonics come out, dammit!I foresee an interactive version with a mime controlling the parameters.
(2018) for boy voice and electronics ad libitum [2’] on a poem by Christian Morgenstern from Galgenlieder (1905)
Voice version premiered at: Chiesa di San Torpete, Genova, June 1st 2019
Voice: Marta Cereda
Commissioned by Fondazione Giorgio e Lilli Devoto
When I was invited to join the group of composers who were asked to set the lyrics of the Christian Morgensten zoo, Galgenlieder (1905), to music, I could not resist the temptation to refer to Gesang der Jünglinge. Quite a bland reference, because neither the size (2′), nor the destination of my work (live voice) could remotely approach the complex and elaborate process of composition of Stockhausen’s masterpiece.
I started by distributing the syllables of the text in a matrix:
Since column (9) represents either a pause or a spoken syllable, and therefore is outside any parametric attribution, I created the five matrices for pitch, entry delay, duration, dynamics and timbre in dimensions of 8 x 8, then proceeding with permutations as in a classic serial system.
The pitch series adopted is a sequence of 7 whole tones:
While I used the first four matrices (starting from different series) for both voice and electronics, the timbre matrix was used to compose only the electronic part. The sounds that make up the ‘scale’, all obtained from a recording of a seven years old girl’s voice, are the following:
1. sinusoid as filtering one or more components (depending on the intensity) of the voice
2. sinusoid that glides
3. spoken (also chords)
4. groups of impulses (from vibrating or looping occlusive consonants)
5. white noise (from sibilant and fricative consonants)
6. white noise gliding
7. vocoding with a tiger sound
8. vocoding with a mosquito sound
Text (Italian translation by Nicola Ferrari)
Das Geierlamm
La tigre-zanzara
Das Lämmergeier ist bekannt, das Geierlamm erst hier genannt.
Der Geier, der ist offenkundig, das Lamm hingegen untergrundig.
Es sagt nicht hu, es sagt nicht mäh und dich auf aus nächster Näh.
Und dreht das Auge dann zum Herrn. Und alle haben’s herzlich gern.
Una zanzara-tigre Linneo l’ha già censita ma una tigre zanzara non si sapeva in vita.
La tigre è grande, ardita; la zanzara: si schiaccia con le dita.
Non dice zzzz, non dice ahhh – se ti avvicini, ti sbranerà:
strabuzza gli occhi, guarda assassina ma a tutti pare soltanto carina.
The score is printed in: Christian Morgenstern Galgenlieder. Un bestiario improbabile tradotto da Nicola Ferrari in trascrizioni, travestimenti e fanfole, Fondazione Giorgio e Lilli Devoto in Genova, 2019.
The work is based on a live transformation of a recorded saxophone (Gianpaolo Antongirolami playing my Il domestico di Edgar). The spectral analysis of this transformation, which does not contain any perceivable reference to the sound source, determines the score for saxophones in ANTIDINAMICA. The performers can choose and change the metronome (quarter note from 20 to 120) on every page, as well as what and how many staves to play – there are 6 in each page – but within a set period (minimum 6 ‘, maximum 12’). In the remaining 4 ‘(maximum 6’) they continue improvising on what in their memory the score left.
The live electronics performer freely improvises on the parameters of an environment consisting of a 8 tracks filtered impulses convolution then sent to 4 multitaps delay with pitch transposition in the feedback.
(2008) piano, hyperviolin and live electronics [12’]
Premiered at Sala Tartini del Conservatorio “Giuseppe Tartini”, Trieste, November 24th 2010
Piano: Gianni Della Libera
Live electronics: Roberto Doati
Realized with a Fellowship from Kulturhuset USF in Bergen (N)
The piano part is based on Grieg Slåtter, the Norwegian Peasant Dances op. 72 for piano (n. 1, 6 and 14). Along the first two pieces the performer plays on the piano just with the left hand, while the right hand is equipped with one of the sensors made by Matteo Ricchetti in 1999 for my bastone armonico (a piece for violin, hyperviolin and electronics). The hyperviolin is a three sensors box to capture the right and left hand of a violin player, so to say is an extension of the violin instrument.
As these Grieg pieces are piano arrangements from Norwegian folk music for violin (or better: for Hardingfele, a violin with 4 or 5 resonating understrings), the pianist is acting with the right hand as if she/he was bowing on a violin. In the third piece the sensor is worn on the left hand, and the performer plays on the piano with both hands. The captured gestures are always used to control the live electronics transformations of the piano sounds.
Right hand wearing tilt sensor from the Ricchetti’s Hyperviolin.
The score for the three pieces shows a growing degree of “processing” the Grieg materials: Stecche (1) is a quotation of very simple articulations in Grieg n.1, Stecche (2) is a kind of rewriting the original score of n. 6, Stecche (3) is a total distorsion of the original n. 14.
The live electronics part is basically simulating the resonances of the Hardingfele understrings, sometimes multiplied through convolution with the piano resonances.
Stecche was written during a residence at Kulturhuset USF in Bergen (Norway).
