Extended note

In the confines of the 19th century the decadentists aestheticize life as a form of consciousness of futility and impotence in contrast to the positivism of the time.

At the beginning of the 21st century, numerical thinking applied to art reverses the relationship: while many of the works show utility and aesthetic function, their structures resemble organic forms.

Sometimes I use systems from nature as a metaphor to construct aesthetic systems. In this work I was inspired by vilanos, the endings of certain fruits that serve for dissemination and procreation.

In the opposition between the synthetic and the organic, one imposes itself on the environment while the second creates it. Living things are not composed or carved, but simply grow. The property of growth is given by the following principle: all information required to function and replicate is supported in a cell or minimal life form. The formal principle of the work is based on this unfolding, from the non-pulmonary sounds (or "clicks") to the transfer of a feedback from inside the instrument to one with the whole. By amplifying the flute within its body each of the holes is in turn transformed into a closed tube with its own fundamental. It is in the instability of this acoustic complex from which the work is projected in an arboreal form. The arboreal systems always display the same forms regardless of the materials they are made of. They are less uniform, and present more variations in their details than the spirals or the explosions, they occupy all the space they can, like the veins, the subterranean and the rhythmic complexes approached here, built by minimal variation, fed back and mirrored. Like a strict canon that fractalizes towards infinity and returns to the surface in a toroidal space.

The amount of interfering variables is opposed to the amount of control variables, the precise notation of the embouchure, and of the configuration of the flute as a spatial translator. The repetition is not in the musical material but in the phenomenon of re-feeding. All geometry can be understood as a form of spatial constraint, between the relationship between the number of lines and points. In non-repetitive forms there are always fewer lines than points, since points are exchange connectors. In Vilanos, I tried to compose only the points of the geometry, and to make the lines and shapes emergent. This happens especially in the third section, where the interaction in hoquetus between the events of the keys, superimposed on the actions of the embouchure, generate a texture of four layers whose resultant is always changing, because of the speed of interaction of the feedback.

In a multicultural and multitemporal environment, composing with systems and their unquantifiable emergences can remind us how ridiculous any pretension of control or subjective selectivity can be. It is an anti-elitist definition of sophistication as the selective growth of any natural organism. Beyond our subjectivity. It is (to paraphrase Adorno) an unresolved antagonism of reality, which returns as an immanent problem of form.

Research

in preparation, explained concert IUNA ensemble, Cúpula CCK. 2015

Daniel Halaban, Inervation and second technique in Luciano Azzigotti’s Vilanos

In this paper we aim to analyse Vilanos for two amplified flutes in C, by Argentinian composer Luciano Azzigotti, through Walter Benjamin’s concepts of “innervation” and “second technology”. We attempt to rethink these categories, which have been extensively applied to cinema, and transpose them into the reflection on music, in order to approach, from an scarcely explored perspective, a central problem of New Music: the use of electronic media. We posit that in Azzigotti’s work the particular way the instruments are amplified -i.e.: through a condenser microphone inserted inside each flute- has a decisive role in the construction of the piece and in it’s reception. We can hear with utmost detail all key clicks, subtle changes in embochure and even feedback sounds produced due to the flute preparation. Thus the singularities of the piece direct our attention to a specific modus of interaction between the performer’s body and the musical instrument, demanding us to reconsider Marx’s ideas about the relationship between humans and technology. Hence what we intend is, not only to say something about Vilanos, but to contribute in providing tools to reflect on political and aesthetical implications of technology in New Music today.

Iedro locates the pianist in a performance position between standing and sitting. Its title is Polyhedron’s Apheresis (from Greek poly / many and edros / faces or bases). These sonic faces form a common lyrical continuum, placing the work in an interstitial space between the extension of sound without a teleological feature set and points of intersection where sound can settle into expressive arches, constantly changing depending on the particular resonance of each instrument and the performer’s bodily position. It was composed in late 2009 in Buenos Aires.

Mycelium is a vegetative growing phase of a fungus. Mycelia do not have flowers or seeds, but are compoed of self-replicating strands. Whith these metaphors I organized a system of gestural growth throughout vertical and horizontal harp axes, replicating and proliferating different sound artifacts, from a fishing line tangled between the strings, to cat brushes, needels and fan motoros. The piece was worked in a close collaboration with Gabriela and premiered at Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno on November 2017.

Géraldine Thébault

Elena D'Alò

A meeting of realities distant in time and space, in which music transforms the immaterial into language, and the concrete into image.

I dreamt, the other day, of my memory as a perfect sphere. A place where time curves space, drawing vaporous colours that cannot be touched. The tragedy of form is the language that transforms memory into gesture. Like my lips, which, while they want to say 'colour', can simply whisper 'shadows'.

The metaphor of floema (phloem) works like a living tissue that is organises a system of exchange. Living things are not composed, but they react and exchange energy with the environment. This mechanism is reflected in this work through it's non-additive logic, where the properties of the materials vary continuously and delicately. In a tree there’s no difference between the root, the stem, the branches and the flowers. The entire tree is the fruit.

In the micro percussive scale, information is processed as a magnetic field, the chirp in a tone burst and the decision of every attack as an accident occurring inside the rattle.

In the micro percussive scale, information is processed as a magnetic field, the chirp in a tone burst and the decision of every attack as an accident occurring inside the rattle.

darmstadt

moë

weSpoke at Darmstadt

There is an experimental version of [[microbeatlogic@darmstadt wespoke|mbl4]] for percussion quartet, developed in collaboration with the quartet weSpoke and presented in Darmstadt in 2016.

2020 reConvert

Iedro locates the pianist in a performance position between standing and sitting. Its title is Polyhedron’s Apheresis (from Greek poly / many and edros / faces or bases). These sonic faces form a common lyrical continuum, placing the work in an interstitial space between the extension of sound without a teleological feature set and points of intersection where sound can settle into expressive arches, constantly changing depending on the particular resonance of each instrument and the performer’s bodily position. It was composed in late 2009 in Buenos Aires.

Iedro locates the pianist in a performance position between standing and sitting. Its title is Polyhedron’s Apheresis (from Greek poly / many and edros / faces or bases). These sonic faces form a common lyrical continuum, placing the work in an interstitial space between the extension of sound without a teleological feature set and points of intersection where sound can settle into expressive arches, constantly changing depending on the particular resonance of each instrument and the performer’s bodily position. It was composed in late 2009 in Buenos Aires.

Espinor is an extended classic guitar piece. The system consists of a contact microphone amplifying the sound of the guitar body from the bone, a webcam located behind the bridge looking towards the headstock and a PD patch processing the audio and video in real time. The software is in charge of recording fragments of the piece indicated in the electronics staff (top line). These fragments are then played back in the video by varying their speed, direction and start time (annotated on the lower line). Each color correspond to a different buffer. The video is organized in two symmetrical overlapping layers, one of them is the direct camera shot that visualises the guitarist's movements and the second one , a superimposed layer that reproduces the audio/video samples.The second layer is mirrored, being a structural detail of the piece. So the result will be a symmetrical visualisation of the real and delayed time events.

A complex web of three modes that rotate in a row, the sound, the gesture and the time. The recording of immediate actions and their contrapuntal execution generates and scalar constructions in time of great precision. The organizational unit extend to a complementary resonant object made of gesture, sound and documentary actions in real and past time. The use of a numerical memory as a notation parameter equals the condition of the recording at the level of live events, except that they are mirrored symmetrically like the spinorial model, a vector model of rotation of elementary particles. The guitar is not only a sound generator but also a geographical and spatial, quasi-scene generator where the guitarist appears inside it as well as outside. It was commissioned by the music area of the National Ministry of Culture for the Guitarras del Mundo festival.