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ACOUSMATIC

L’apparizione di tre rughe

electroacoustic version (2001) [11’ 42”] [CD Stradivarius STR 33634]

Premiered at Festival “Il Giardino della Musica”, Palazzina Liberty, Milano, June 13th 2001

Realized with a Fellowship from Rockefeller Foundation

The five fragments that form the whole work come into the world thanks to my admiration and friendship with Elena Casoli. They have been realized for the purpose to serve as interludes, in the theatrical sense,  for her guitar concerts. My aim was to create something that could be at the same time a continuous allusion to different – as concern time and language –  styles and kinds of guitar, and as much as possible abstract to be suited to whatever piece from other composers she is playing during the concert without affecting its listening.

I worked with the idea of cross-breeding in mind. Cross-breeding of instruments and styles, of  acoustic excitation signals and resonances. So the first step was to record guitar pieces taken from different repertoires – classical, blues, flamenco, jazz, baroque, south-American, rock – all played by Elena Casoli, both with original instruments and “unfamiliar” instruments and manners. Therefore Eric Clapton performance of Crossroads was played on an archlute, a Paganini Minuetto with a distorted electrical guitar and pitch bending technique, a flamenco siguiriya with “tambora” technique on a metal strings American instrument, a Sor Studio with wah-wah effect, and so on.

Then I started to digitally transform these recordings with Marcohack program that allow to separate excitation signals and resonances characteristics from a soundfile. So, for example, the excitation signal from an electrical guitar playing Django Reinhardt Nuages, is cross-breeded with the archlute resonance of a Barrios Choro. Next I worked through filtering and analysis-synthesis algorithms in Soundhack and Csound environments to supply different degrees of abstraction to the original materials, changing and sometimes contorting their noticeable characters.

From the formal point of view I used the following drawing, where it can be seen the increasing duration of each fragment (30”, 1’, 2’, 3’, 5’) as well as the increasing voices number (7, 6, 9, 18, 28), where each voice is a singular style/instrument.

L’apparizione di tre rughe has been realized during a residence at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio with the facilities of its electronic music studio and SoundHack, MarcoHack, Csound programs.