Il Nome

Il Nome is an electroacoustic piece (soprano + magnetic tape) composed by Richard Karpen in 1987, based on lyrics from "Il Nome di Maria Fresu" by A. Zanzotto and a verse from Monteverdi's Orfeo.
Maria Fresu was one of the 84 people killed in the August 2, 1980, attack on the Bologna train station. Nothing remains of her (Karpen spent several years in Italy and worked at the CSC in Padua).

The sound material consists largely of processing of the soprano's voice. Broken glass, a single violin note, and a tam-tam are also used. The processing consists largely of pitch changes or temporal stretching without altering the pitch (in some cases, the duration has been extended up to 20 times the original) + filtering. Great attention is paid to the overlapping and concatenation of fragments.

Text

E il nome di Maria Fresu	And the name of Maria Fresu
continua a scoppiare	continues to explode
all’ora dei pranzi	at lunchtime
in ogni casseruola	in every saucepan
in ogni pentola	in every pot
in ogni boccone	in every bite
in ogni rutto – scoppiato e disseminato –	in every burp – bursting and scattered –
in milioni di dimenticanze, di comi, bburp.	in millions of forgetfulnesses, of comas, bburp.
[A. Zanzotto, Il nome di Maria Fresu, da Idioma, Milano, Mondadori, 1986]

Tu sei morta, mia vita, ed io respiro?	You are dead, my life, and I breathe?
Tu mi hai lasciato per mai più tornare, ed io rimango?	You left me, never to return, and I remain?
No.	No.
[Monteverdi – Orfeo]

Richard Karpen – Il Nome (1987), for soprano and magnetic tape – J. Bettina, soprano

Richard Karpen is a native of New York, where he studied composition with Charles Dodge, Gheorghe Costinescu, and Morton Subotnick. He received his doctorate in composition from Stanford University, where he also worked at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
He has been the recipient of many awards, grants and prizes including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the ASCAP Foundation, the Bourges Contest in France, and the Luigi Russolo Foundation in Italy.
Founding Director of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington.

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