Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.08.17.00.01.58 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica
A funny realization of Alvin Lucier’s “I am Sitting in a Room”, made by Christopher Penrose using the following text:
“I am standing in a long line at a crowded urban supermarket holding a bright yellow fly-swatter. I feel judged and mistrusted by many in the store as if I were brandishing a high-caliber firearm. There is even a dog here in the store barking at me. He knows that I am a premeditated killer of flies.”
Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.08.16.01.49.23 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica
Track 6 from E.A.R.’s 1998 “Data Rape”.
Circuit bending involves taking cheaply available electronic soundmaking toys (in this case mostly Texas Instruments’ “Speak & Spell” human voice synthesizing toys from the late ’70’s, but also applicable to all sorts of keyboards, effects boxes and samplers) and adding extra wires, knobs and switches to make new connections between parts of the internal circuitry and chips. This sends data and electronic signals to previously unrelated circuit board points - inducing through a strange sort of “Data Rape”- astounding new sounds, chance evolving compositions and textures, phoneme freezing and looping, random glottal pulse and phoneme generation, complex lattice filtering and unique pitch shifting techniques.
Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.05.17.21.46.04 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica
Gerd Kühr: Trans, from Revue instrumentale et electronique (2004/5 according to the composer’s site, not 2007 as stated in the video)
Austrian composer Gerd Kühr is a professor of composition at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Graz; he also works as a conductor and once studied with Sergiu Celibidache. Kühr has also taken composition with Hans Werner Henze.
Kühr’s piece Revue instrumentale et electronique is divided into six sections. It is scored for nine spatially divided instrumental groups and electronics.
The transitions between the electronics and live sections is seamless; you are listening and you gradually realize “we are hearing electronic music now” as opposed to the live instruments. Kühr is very effective at devising novel instrumental timbres, such as the palpitating percussion and fleeting winds in the opening “Intro” and in the alien atmosphere of sustained notes in “Trans.”
Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.05.12.00.44.37 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica
And this is the second pièce from the cycle Du Cristal…à la fumée, by Kaija Saariaho.
The last sound of Du Cristal – a cello trill played sul ponticello – becomes retrospectively the first sound of its successor, …à la fumée, which features solo parts for cello and amplified alto flute in addition to large orchestra. Saariaho has commented that
to my way of thinking, Du Cristal … à la fumée is a single work, two facets of the same image, but both fully drawn in, living and independent.
The difference between the two works is already manifest in the title: crystal is a classic example of repeated order, symmetrical, tense, stable mass. Smoke, on the other hand, changes its form constantly, an unpredictable, developing state. Crystal and smoke, like order and entropy, chaos. The title is inspired by a book by Henri Atlan, Entre le cristal et la fumée (Between the Crystal and the Smoke).
The single most important element in the music of Kaija Saariaho is tone colour, attached inseparably to harmony. In this sense she can be thought of as continuing the French orchestral tradition. Her music does not, however, only feast on beautiful sounds. The starting point of composition for her comes from a carefully studied theoretical basis. The origin of her music is a single sound which she penetrates, trying to uncover its structure and the laws that govern it. With these laws, just by changing the scale, the composer builds colours, harmonics, forms, rhythms - music. This starting-point ensures that all the works of Kaija Saariaho have a strong sense of unity. Elements that seem different fit together, because they are basically born from the same source.
Rather than associate Kaija Saariaho’s music with mathematical formulae or computer programs, it is more fruitful to compare it with nature - its biological and physical models. The composer herself has spoken of arctic lights, water-lilies, crystals, spirals: forms and materials which in themselves are perfect and beautiful and create aesthetic experiences, but which offer endless grounds for even scientific study. Observation of how the inner relations of organisms are built, how they change and multiply; how forms that seem simple and natural are of endless variety when examined closely: chaos and order can be closer to each other than we first suspect.
The tensions in Kaija Saariaho’s music, its dramaturgy, are built on pairs of contrasts. One important pair of contrasts is formed by sound and noise. This is manifested, for instance, in the sonority of the cello: when the bow is moved towards the bridge, adding bow pressure, the sound breaks and turns into noise. On the flute, when you blow into the tube you can create noise (which has its own tone colour) and which changes into a sound when the air hits the mouthpiece at the right angle. In rhythm, a simple pair of contrasts is created between repetitive and irregular patterns. Gradual movement between two opposites, interpolations, create and release tensions in the same way as do chordal functions in traditional tonal music.
It is no surprise that the soloists in …a la fumée are flute and cello. These would appear to be Saariaho’s favourite instruments given that many of her solo pieces have been written for them (for the flute, Canvas, Laconisme de l’aile, NoaNoa; for the cello, Petals and Près). …a la fumée however, is not a normal double concerto, in which the solo instruments are contrasted with the orchestra. In this work, flute and cello are like microscopes with which the composer penetrates deep into her material, shedding light from different angles and changing the scale.
György Ligeti, with whose earlier music Kaija Saariaho’s works have certain points in common, has spoken about a phenomenon familiar to most of us. When we go up in an aeroplane, we do not feel ourselves in motion. At the same time, details of the scenery disappear and merge into a whole. A meadow, swarming with inner energy, changes first into fields of colour, then into a bare point in the distance. The amplification of the alto flute and the cello serves this purpose: a whisper from the flute can grow to the scale of a big orchestra, a harmonic from the cello can be outlined above the whole landscape of sound. Is not one of the meanings of music, and all art, simply this? To create illusions, presentiments of a world that could be true.
Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.05.11.00.01.05 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica
Kaija Saariaho - Du Cristal, 1989 - for large orchestra.
Du Cristal was commissioned jointly by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Helsinki Festival, and it was first performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen in September 1990.
It is scored for a standard large symphony orchestra with the addition of an important part for synthesizer, and featuring a highly prominent percussion section. None of Saariaho’s major works to date is without some kind of electronic element, and the presence of the synthesizer is significant in the light of Saariaho’s remark that she tends to the orchestra itself ‘as if it was a huge synthesizer’. The standard form of electronic synthesis is ‘additive’ - that is, each sound is created by piling innumerable pure tones upon each other.
Transferred to the medium of the orchestra, this means that it is as if each individual instrument were analogous to a pure tone in a synthesizer, merely a tiny part of a large, slowly evolving mass of sound. Thus there is no polyphony, nor any melody in the conventional sense, although the music is frequently lyrical in its gestures and the activity within the textures may momentarily suggest polyphony; the important thing to follow is the overall drift of the orchestral mass, and to relate the individual details to that.
It’s an approach which owes something to the dense, multi-layered orchestral works of György Ligeti, such as “Atmosphères and Lontano”, as well as to the so-called ’spectral-music’ of French composers Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, all of whom Saariaho has acknowledged as influences on her music; but her won style is nevertheless thoroughly personal and has distinctly brooding, ‘Northern’ character quite distinct from any of the afore-mentioned.
The harmonic character of Du Cristal is especially focused and clearly defined as the work is dominated by the bell-chord with which it opens. During the first seven minutes, this chord is slowly and methodically dissected: all its internal components are highlighted as its orchestration is progressively shaded and softened, although the basic character of the chord remains essentially unchanged.
There follows an eruption of some violence which breaks up the harmonic continuity of the music; a dialogue ensues between onslaughts of unpitched percussion and further bell sounds from tuned percussion and synthesizer.
After this the texture thins somewhat and the rate of harmonic change increases; melodic tissues briefly emerge on the violins and the woodwind. The increased rate of change precipitates the principal climax of the work, again featuring untuned percussion prominently: chaotic, irregular rhythms gradually merge into a hammeringly regular series of ostinatos for the full orchestra - the simplest and clearest music in the piece - and out of these the sound spectrum is gradually narrowed until a single note (a unison A flat) is heard
As this fades into filigree passages for solo strings, the music drifts closer to the harmonic world of the opening, and the original chord is itself twice restated; far from subsiding, however, the music suddenly veers back to the hammering ostinato of the climax - as if the form of the whole piece thus far had been telescoped into some two minutes. Only now can the music progress to the coda, underpinned by a series of wave-like crescendos on bass drum and synthesizer as the textures dwindle to a single cello trill.
This trill will be the starting point for second work of the cycle called …à la fumée. Saariaho took her title from a book by the French writer Henri Atlan, “Entre le cristal et la fumée”, and for her it signifies the way the same acoustic material is developed in sharply different ways in the two pieces, the turbulent energy and almost expressionist outbursts of Du Cristal subsiding into the capricious, playful double concerto of…à la fumée.
Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.05.07.18.21.16 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica
Jonathan Harvey: “Vivos Voco” (1980) for concrete sounds processed by computer.
Born in Warwickshire in 1939, Jonathan Harvey was a chorister at St Michael’s College, Tenbury and later a major music scholar at St John’s College, Cambridge. He gained doctorates from the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge and also studied privately (on the advice of Benjamin Britten) with Erwin Stein and Hans Keller. He was a Harkness Fellow at Princeton (1969-70).
An invitation from Boulez to work at IRCAM in the early 1980s has resulted in eight realisations at the Institute, or for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, including the tape piece Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco, Ritual Melodies for computer-manipulated sounds, and Advaya for cello and live and pre-recorded sounds. Harvey has also composed for most other genres: orchestra (including Madonna of Winter and Spring, Tranquil Abiding and White as Jasmine), chamber (including three String Quartets, Soleil Noir/Chitra, and Death of Light, Light of Death, for instance) as well as works for solo instruments.
Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.04.18.15.59.01 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica
After the Marco’s master, I publish here the link to the IRCAM video about his works for solo instrument and chamber electronics.
Here you can find excerpts from …of silence, hist whist and I will not kiss you f.ing flag. You can also see Arshia Cont, the creator of the astonishing score and tempo following software Antescofo.
I already posted this link on Dec. 12 2009, but now I point out again because here the students can see some applications of the systems that Marco described in his lecture.
Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.04.15.15.07.43 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica
Vi segnalo l’incontro con Marco Stroppa organizzato dal nostro Conservatorio. Il tutto si svolge in due fasi nei giorni di venerdì 16 e sabato 17: risp. conferenza/concerto a Riva del Garda e Master a Trento
Conservatorio F.A. Bonporti - Trento
Via S. Maddalena 1, Trento
Sabato 17 Aprile 2010 - Ore 9-13 - 14-18
Master
Programma di massima
Strutture di controllo della sintesi del suono via Open Music
Il sistema di score and tempo following Antescofo
Struttura dei patches degli ultimi lavori per strumento ed elettronica da camera, che utilizzano Max/MSP
Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2010.03.22.19.52.26 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica, Net Art
ToBeContinued…
Mercoledì 24 marzo dalle ore 0:00 alle 24:00 (GMT+1)
In occasione della giornata mondiale della lotta alla tubercolosi, l’Officina Globale della Salute di Topolò presenta ToBeContinued, concerto live in streaming della durata di 24 ore con artisti provenienti da tutto il mondo. Per ascoltare basta collegarsi al sito www.stazioneditopolo.it
24 ore di suoni e musiche che percorrono il mondo e che si potranno ascoltare dalla propria casa collegandosi a un sito ora in preparazione. TBC è evidente acronimo di ToBeContinued e anche di Tubercolosi, malattia che uccide 4.500 persone ogni giorno; trascurata perché ritenuta sconfitta, in verità sempre più presente anche nei Paesi più sviluppati. L’Officina Globale della Salute, diretta da Mario Raviglione, autorità mondiale nel campo della lotta a questo flagello, intende creare un ponte tra il mondo della ricerca artistica e le problematiche legate alla salute. La Giornata Mondiale per la lotta alla Tubercolosi ci vede impegnati, lo facciamo a modo nostro, nell’informare circa i danni che la TBC comporta. Nelle 24 ore si ascolteranno suoni e musiche di generi molto diversi ma il flusso non cesserà mai. Per l’occasione la Stazione/Postaja si trasferirà a Trieste, ospitata negli spazi del Teatro Miela che ringraziamo. A coordinare i collegamenti, Antonio Della Marina (che ha dato l’incipit all’idea) e Moreno Miorelli. A breve, la scaletta degli interventi e altre info.
Live from 00.00 hours of March 24th to the midnight of the same day (GMT+1), in occasion of the World TBC Day. Topolo’s Global Health Incubator creates a musical medley linking live the Topolonauts shattered around the Planet… Go to www.stazioneditopolo.it
24 hours of sounds and music that will cover the World and will be listenable from anywhere through the Internet connection to a website we are currently setting up. TBC is obviously the acronym of both, ToBeContinued and Tuberculosis, the sickness that is responsible for 4.500 deaths every day, ignored because it has been considered defeated, it is actually spreading even in highly developed countries.
The Global Health Incubator wants to create a bridge between the world of artistic research and the one of health related issues. The World TBC Day is for us, and we will do it in our own way, an occasion to inform about the reality of this terrible disease. During the 24 hours there is going to be an uninterrupted stream of various sounds and musical genres. For the occasion Stazione/Postaja will move to Trieste, kindly hosted by Teatro Miela, which we thank. The coordination of the connections will be in the hands of Antonio Della Marina (who started the idea) and Moreno Miorelli. The program of the event and more information will soon be available.
A funny realization of Alvin Lucier’s “I am Sitting in a Room”, made by Christopher Penrose using the following text:
ToBeContinued…
Adolfo
