Timbral Spaces Sound Labyrinths - Edizioni Suvini Zerboni

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New ESZ composer makes his debut at the Biennale with a study focusing on rhythm Posthumous chamber premiere at the Biennale di Venezia, avoiding Debussy 8 Raffaele Grimaldi Land of Crossing T his year ESZ begin their collaboration with Raffaele Grimaldi. Born in 1980, Italian but raised in Switzerland, he gained a diploma in composition at the Conservatory in Salerno with Lucia Ronchetti and furthered his studies at the Accademia Nazionale Santa Cecilia in Rome with Ivan Fedele. He has won numerous international recognitions for both composition and piano – including Valentino Bucchi (Rome) 2005, Progetto Giovani Compositori (Forlì - Milan) 2007, International Composition Competition Toru Takemitsu (Tokyo) 2009, Gaudeamus Music Week (Amsterdam) 2011, Wiener Konzerthaus’s International Composing Competition (Vienna) 2012 –, and has attended masterclasses held, among others, by Salvatore Sciarrino, Brian Ferneyhough, Hugues Doufourt, Georges Aperghis and Michael Jarrell. His works have been performed in Europe, Russia, the USA and Japan, as well as being broadcast by many radio stations and performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra and by groups such as the Neue Vocal Solisten, the Ensemble Algoritmo, the Quartetto Prometeo, and by conductors such as Zsolt Nagy, Tetsuji Honna, Marco Angius, Jacques Mercier, Flavio Emilio Scogna, Frank Wörner and Philippe Nahon. He was selected by Ircam (Paris) for the Cursus 1 in composition and electronic music for 2008/ 09, and obtained the artistic residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts. On October 9 the 56th Festival Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea of the Biennale di Venezia will present, at the Teatro alle Tese, the first performance of Primal (Hypnagogical Extended Space) for one percussionist, with Simone Beneventi. The composer introduces his new work: «Primal (Hypnagogical Extended Space) is the first piece I have ever written just for percussion instruments. While I was working various new, vivid and unexpected horizons gradually opened up before me. My initial approach was extremely playful, detached, maybe unscrupulous, but little by little I was led automatically towards a much deeper terrain, of study dare I say. Immersing oneself in unknown environments often brings about a turning point, a change. Or a vanishing point. The metamorphoses of thought, hand, heart, are necessary for our creative Christophe Bertrand A Harp Against Time I mportant presence of Christophe Bertrand’s music at the Biennale di Venezia, with a posthumous premiere and the first Italian performance of his last work for orchestra. On October 10 at the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale Dall’inferno for flute, viola and harp will be played by the Ex Novo Ensemble. Then, on October 12 Michel Tabachnik will conduct the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR in a performance of Okhtor for orchestra. This is how Bertrand introduced his new work: «Dall’inferno is a sort of race against time, in which all is speed, falls, and transformations. As in most of my works, I first created myself some “prisons of invention”, to take up the expression used by Brian Ferneyhough. The “prison” that I self imposed was tempered by the “rhapsodic” freedom which, in a certain sense, resides in the cells. The general architecture of the piece responds to very precise formal and proportional criteria: I chose in fact to link the Fibonacci series to the wave model. The music is structurally fragmentary, but processual at an ideal level. In addition, some easily identifiable markers are scattered throughout the piece to give it unity, despite the heterogeneity of the ideas set in action. The main difficulty of this instrumentation is the presence of the consciences never to have moments of arrest, of empty repose. This work represented for me a veritable dividing line. A kind of “land of crossing”. My attention focused in a somewhat general way on a sort of “cleansing”, in the sense of clarity, linearity, comprehensibility. The need for the essential. For form, sound, pulsation. Only later, “because of” my wish to involve secondary poetic information (typical of my works), conceptual sparks began to emerge which then exploded into the musical context. On this matter, the subtitle Hypnagogical Extended Space already says much about the work at a conceptual level. The “hypnagogical” state (also called hypnagogical illusion or hallucination) is an experience that occurs at the initial phase of sound, where the senses and the perception of the external world are totally upset, since the subject has difficulty in distinguishing hallucination from reality. Having a set of around 50 percussion instruments available but only one player, I tried to imagine a “doubled” performer, capable of a performance at the limit of human possibilities and of dialoguing with his “double” in a swirling and energetic dance, at the centre of a thousand resonances. The piece is a constant and frenetic alternation between moments of highly pulsating movement and others of extreme platitude. Contrast plays a fundamental role and obviously the intention is strongly focalized on the rhythmic aspect, on that primitive (or primary) relation that exists between each musical object and a “beating”, a vital gesture for all percussion instruments. Primal in fact means “original”. A few months before starting this work I began reading some philosophical texts on the question of rhythm that particularly struck me: Bergson, Bachelard, Bayer and Raymond Court, from whom I will make a quotation that considerably moved me at the time: Rhythm, in its harmonicity, is not however rest or abandon but rather, ever more so, “poieticity”, active “musicality”. Rhythm, the “articulation experienced between two primordial opposites, Dionysus and Apollo”, whose musicality pervades all works of art, is the very sense of our time and of the creativity which shapes it into the objectivity of art (Le Musical, Paris, Klincksieck, 1976). Primal (Hypnagogical Extended Space) was commissioned by the Biennale di Venezia 2012». harp and its basic functioning: its diatonicism and resonance. To get round the problem without untuning the harp, I tried to create the illusion of it playing quartertones through the microtonal environment of the other two instruments that can play them without difficulty. Moreover, the harp often plays in a dry fashion, staccato, as if a huge string instrument were playing pizzicato. Impossible not to evoke Debussy, who is a formidable monster: the instrumentation of his Sonata is so referenced, ingrained in the musical unconscious that it was necessary to avoid at all costs anything that might have recalled that work, all the Debussyian topoi. I therefore banned any glissandos and ethereal atmospheres, the gracious harp. But it would have been just another cliché to use the harp in an aggressive or percussive manner; so I had to find the right compromise, and try to open up a path that would make the piece my own and distance it from its famous model». Christophe Bertrand’s Virya for flute, clarinet, piano and percussion can be heard on October 25 at the Teatro Vittoria in Turin, during the series “In Scena!”, Rassegna di Musica Contemporanea of the Associazione Fiarì Ensemble, when the group will be directed by Marilena Solavagione.
Giovanni Verrando Rethinking Grammar T he Associazione Gli Amici di Musica/Realtà, on the occasion of the concert celebrating the 80th birthday of Giacomo Manzoni, commissioned Giovanni Verrando to write Grammatica dell’inarmonico for amplified ensemble and electronics, which will be given its first performance on October 11 at the Conservatorio “G. Verdi” in Milan, and repeated on October 12 at the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale in Venice, during the 56th Festival Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea of the Biennale, with the Ensemble Risognanze conducted by Tito Ceccherini. The composer explains: «The elements that generated the structure of Grammatica dell’inarmonico, that make up its genetic code, are multiple and various: the use of psychoacoustics as a discipline that offers grammatical elements ready for composition; a rethinking of the concept of music grammar, also on the basis of the studies on syntactic structures carried out by Noam Chomsky. Grammar thus becomes a discipline that is more dynamic and creative, less assertive and static, also due to the complex proprieties of inharmonics; inharmonics is in fact the reign of multiplicity of data and of points of view. As such, it doesn’t give rise to a single, or any case a main grammatical solution, a single corpus of adequate elements, but opens up the assessment of the grammaticality of the components by moving it in relation to the purpose, the technical side or sides being taken into consideration each time. In Grammatica dell’inarmonico the grammatical element is judged as adequate when it presents itself as such only in relation to a finite and particular purpose. “Grammatical” is therefore what corresponds to the technical data I am pursuing and is coherent with the compositional purposes declared for a specific section of the piece (for example, a threshold of brilliance of sound, or a threshold of inharmonicity), all the rest is “agrammatical”. Fundamental too is the distinction into four families of sound: 1) homogeneous inharmonics, those noises that Marco Momi Revelation Completed O n January 13, in the Espace de Projection of Ircam, the cycle Iconica will be given its first complete performance by the Solistes XXI and the Ensemble L’Itinéraire directed by Rachid Safir. In its definitive form, the cycle is made up of Iconica for soprano and ensemble, Iconica II for ensemble, Iconica III for six voices on a text by Filippo Farinelli and Iconica IV for string trio, flute, clarinet, prepared piano and live electronics. The musical informatics at Ircam will be realized by the composer, who speaks about his project: «I think the most suitable term to define the series of pieces entitled Iconica is “involuntary cycle”. It consists of pieces for instrumental ensemble and/or voices, with and without electronics (present only in the last piece). Each piece is a collection of miniatures, and all of them (except for Iconica III which is for six unaccompanied voices) end with a cadenza for piano (an instrument central to all of my output). The unity, then, is not to be found in any programmed plan, but in the sharing of formal elements and of sections that actually return in different shapes throughout the cycle. I started writing the cycle in 2006, at the end of my studies at the Conservatories and finished it in 2010 during my last period of training at Ircam. To complete the first part (Iconica) it took me a whole year, a period particularly full of questions, of a sense of detachment and challenge in redefining certain categories of my compositional thought which until then I had simply shared, comforted by the fact that I had learned them. The cycle exhausted itself when I became aware that I was formalizing something that until a short time before was unknown to me. To define without formalizing and therefore, if necessary, repeating rather than replicating structures. To sculpt an audacious perceptual dimension, dry and powerful through present wide bands of frequencies homogeneously occupied and which are given particular names (white noise, pink noise, brownian noise, blue noise and so on); 2) heterogeneous inharmonics, those sounds that present spectral components not proportional to one another (Hz), distributed with different spectral densities, so as to produce neither perceivable fundamental frequencies (notes), nor wide homogeneous bands that prevail over the other components; 3) distorted harmonics, those sounds in which harmonic and inharmonic frequencies are perceptible to the same extent; 4) harmonic sounds. Finally, the work on new string instruments is essential. To obtain all this (that is, to be able to work on the inharmonic spectral details) the instruments in the ensemble are amplified and their performing technique is somewhat upset. The string players play with different kinds of bows, prepared with strips of card or polyethylene, which are rubbed directly onto the strings in place of the horsehair. This is to increase the quota of inharmonic elements within the sounds produced by the strings. The electronics are entrusted with the fate of the generally inharmonic sound of the whole piece». In September ESZ officially published the book La nuova liuteria: orchestrazione, grammatica, estetica, an important publication prepared by Giovanni Verrando in collaboration with the students of the classes of orchestration and theory of composition at the Conservatory in Lugano, directed and supervised by the composer himself, with a preface by Pierre Albert Castanet. Born of a collaboration with the Divisione Ricerca e Sviluppo of the Scuola Universitaria di Musica - SUPSI of the Conservatory of Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, the book, presented in the last issue of ESZ News, represents the final outcome of a research project lasting two years carried out by Verrando. An English edition of the work is currently being prepared. chiselling, the nuance that reveals the detail and the same that becomes the mainstay of the listening. The balance between the perception of the form through macro-figures and the creation of a time that becomes salient in every instant is achieved by renouncing the process. The attempt is to create a mechanism of continuous revelation, not to give in to the consolatory reconstruction of the listening. The sensation of a tactile discovery. The material that I hold in my hands is in itself neutral and fixed: each miniature that makes up the pieces presents itself as unequivocal and somewhat anonymous in its DNA: scales, multiphonics, distorted sounds, objects deprived of their common use (megaphones), glissandos... each sound is nonetheless “exposed”: the performer is expected to act without a safety net, is obliged to interpret, to consider each action as determinant, in respect of the most ruthless fundamentals of chamber music». The premiere of the complete project, to be performed during a concert that will take place as a co-production between Ircam-Centre Pompidou, L’Itinéraire and Les Solistes XXI, will be broadcast live by France Musique and will be coupled with music by Gesualdo. In October it is possible to hear the music of Marco Momi at the Fondazione Prometeo in Parma, during the Festival Traiettorie: on October 9 Mario Caroli will play Reloading vanishing for flute; Iconica IV will be given its first Italian performance on October 10 at the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale in Venice during the 56 th Festival Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea of the Biennale, by the Ex Novo Ensemble. Finally, on October 18 Cinque nudi for saxophone and Midi controller will be recorded by David Brutti at Radio France, who commissioned the work for the series of transmissions “Alla breve”, The concept of “inharmonic” at the centre of a new work to be presented in Milan and at the Biennale in Venice La lirica di Mario Luzi accompagna e ispira la ricerca di confine cara al compositore Ircam presents the complete cycle that accompanied the composer’s final years of study 9
Page 1 and 2: Nicola Sani ESZnews Edizioni Suvini
Page 3 and 4: from page 1 (Cattaneo: Sound Labyri
Page 5 and 6: Stefano Gervasoni Invitation au voy
Page 7: Aldo Clementi Canonic Mosaic O n Oc
Page 11 and 12: Giorgio Colombo Taccani Solitary Vo
Page 13 and 14: Malika Kishino Sonic Garden A first
Page 15 and 16: Andrea Mannucci Melologues of Solit
Page 17 and 18: Giorgio Gaslini Leaps and Dances O
Page 19 and 20: First First World Perform Per First

Timbral Spaces Sound Labyrinths - Edizioni Suvini Zerboni

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