Si tratta della composizione algoritmicamente più complessa e allo stesso tempo musicalmente più semplice di quelle che compongono un più ampio progetto dal titolo “Lo spirito del rischio” che presenta opere di Anthony Braxton per sax solo e di Roberto Doati per elettronica ispirate alle musiche di Braxton. Innanzitutto ho suddiviso la composizione RFO – M°-F (32) (1972) di Anthony Braxton (incisa su LP America 30 AM 011-012) in 32 sezioni. Ogni sezione è stata sottoposta a diversi tipi di trattamento del segnale, ma con l’obiettivo finale di sciogliere l’armonia interna dei suoni di Braxton in una sorta di canto, quasi evocando quello degli uccelli. RFO – M°-F (32) è infatti dedicataa Dave Holland, che nello stesso anno esordiva come leader nel disco “Conference of the Birds”. I vari strati che compongono la mia musica sono:
una risintesi, mediante Phase Vocoder, di singole parziali dei suoni di sax controllate nel tempo e nella disposizione stereofonica grazie al generatore di eventi CMask
tre diversi tipi di convoluzione utilizzando alternativamente suoni di sax, suoni del contrabbasso di Dave Holland, canti di uccelli
una modulazione di ampiezza di canti di uccelli su deconvoluzione dei suoni di sax.
(2023) electroacoustic music with alto saxophone ad libitum [7’35”]
The starting material are the recordings of the alto saxophone played by Gianpaolo Antongirolami to whom I asked to exemplify the 12 Language Types codified by Anthony Braxton for his own music: 1. Long Sound 2. Accented Long Sound 3. Trills 4. Staccato Line Formings 5. Intervallic Formings 6. Multiphonics 7. Short Attacks 8. Angular Attacks 9. Legato Formings 10. Diatonic Formings 11. Gradient Formings 12. Sub-Identity Formings. The recording was made in a large space using 8 different microphones: ORTF and binaural stereo placed in different points but far from the sound source, a clip-on over the bell, a lavalier on the player’s cheek, a dynamic microphone placed at 50 cm from the instrument, a contact microphone on the bell.
The formal analysis of KSZMK PQ EGN (1979) by Anthony Braxton determined the algorithmic structure of the Csound instruments I used. For each of the 19 sections I arranged four layers:
Layer 1: given a section duration and a number of repetitions the first Csound instrument reads some of the recordings of Antongirolami (language type 7, 8 and 11 in all of the 8 tracks but mostly the one recorded with contact microphone which enhances key noises)
Layer 2: shuffling loops of small fragments of Layer 1
Layer 3: modal filtering (seven partials). Layer 1 as excitation signal is fed into a parallel bank of resonators
Layer 4: modal filtering (seven partials) on Layer 2.
JRYLJ OP DFM can be performed with a saxophone playing KSZMK PQ EGN as recorde by Anthony Braxton in “Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979”, Arista – A2L 8602.
JRYLJ OP DFM is one of the compositions which make a larger project titled “Lo spirito del rischio”, with solo pieces by Anthony Braxton and Roberto Doati’s electronic pieces related to Braxton’s music.
The starting material are the recordings of the alto saxophone played by Gianpaolo Antongirolami to whom I asked to exemplify the 12 Language Types codified by Anthony Braxton for his own music: 1. Long Sound 2. Accented Long Sound 3. Trills 4. Staccato Line Formings 5. Intervallic Formings 6. Multiphonics 7. Short Attacks 8. Angular Attacks 9. Legato Formings 10. Diatonic Formings 11. Gradient Formings 12. Sub-Identity Formings. The recording was made in a large space using 8 different microphones: ORTF and binaural stereo placed in different points but far from the sound source, a clip-on over the bell, a lavalier on the player’s cheek, a dynamic microphone placed at 50 cm from the instrument, a contact microphone on the bell.
The formal analysis of 104-Kelvin M-18 (1979) by Anthony Braxton determined the algorithmic structure of the Csound instrument I used. Given a section duration and a number of repetitions, it reads the recordings of Antongirolami on my database schema: 12 language types by 8 tracks (microphones). For each sax’s fragment the tracks, chosen in a random or deterministic way, are always two and are put one on the right channel and one on the left channel. Therefore sudden spatial perspective jumps create unusual perceptive changes. The only treatment applied is convolution with sample from music that have had an important influence on Braxton: African tradition, Blues (Muddy Waters), Jazz (Coltrane, Coleman).
-169,15 Celsius is one of the compositions which make a larger project titled “Lo spirito del rischio”, with solo pieces by Anthony Braxton and Roberto Doati’s electronic pieces related to Braxton’s music.
I always pay great attention to what is generally called the pre-compositional phase. It is an attitude I developed from my acquaintances with conceptual artists in the 70s and John Cage’s music. The ‘cambiamento’ (change) of the title refers to Music of Changes (1951) for piano, the first work where the American composer used extensively his chart system based on I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of oracles organized in 64 hexagrams. From Music of Changes I took the formal division into four Books and their durations, but above all the inspiration for the non -intentional generative process of the sound events in my composition.
The technique adopted is that of convolution. It starts with the deconvolution of short fragments (about 1 ‘) from instrumental music of the II post -war period with ‘burst’ of instrumental sounds. So I get impulse responses (IR) that I will use for the convolution with 8 different types of materials (Ecc), each with 8 different sounds:
instrumental short sounds
concrète impulsive sounds
electronic impulsive sounds
instrumental + concrète impulsive sounds
instrumental + electronic impulsive sounds
instrumental continuous sounds
concrète continuous sounds
electronic continuous sounds
The IRs are organized in 4 ‘mobile’ charts (one for each Book) of 8 x 8, while the Eccs in a single 8 x 8 ‘immobile’ matrix that is used for all 4 Books. The product of these two matrices therefore gives me 4096 possible structures for each Book. End of Theory.
The Practice: the Eccs and IRs randomly extracted, with variable density between 1 and 8, will generate through convolution the sound events to be placed in time according another random choice. While the percussive nature of the piano is just evoked in the first two Books – each sound event is like a trail, a refraction of the piano gestures on a ‘sound prism’ (“Duration, color, speed focus” writes Cage in his notebook) – in Books III and IV we focus more and more on David Tudor’s piano.
In 2024 the John Cage Trust and Edition Peters/Wise Music gave the permission to perform simultaneously Music of Changes and Teoria e pratica del cambiamento.
Studi I-IV (2020-2021) electroacoustic music [6′ 57″]
Premiered at Teatro Akropolis for GOG, Genova, May 11th 2023
Studio V (2020-2021) electroacoustic music [6’ 21”]
Premiered at Teatro Akropolis for GOG, Genova, May 11th 2023
Studio VI (2021) electroacoustic music [25’ 49”]
Premiered at XXIII Colloquio di Informatica Musicale, Auditorium della Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona, October 26th 2022
Studio VII (2020-2021) electroacoustic music [7’ 02″]
Premiered at REF Resilience Festival, Foggia, Teatro della Piccola Compagnia Impertinente, September 26th 2021
Studio VIII (2020-2021) electroacoustic music [1’ 45”]
Premiered at Teatro Akropolis for GOG, Genova, May 11th 2023
Force without law has no shape,
only tendency and duration.
David Foster Wallace
My Studi I-VIII originated from a personal reading of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke I-VIII. These piano works revolve around the electronic experience of Elektronische Studie I and II. If the Klavierstücke I-IV (1952-53) represent a sort of sketches of the electronic pieces to come, the Klavierstücke V-VIII (1954-55) reveal a new attention to time which at the same time ‘stretch’ the form according to “statistical form criteria” and allows the author to build different timbres (almost in competition with the electronic ones he had worked on for 18 months) that emerge from the constant use of resonances produced by the silent pressure of the keys.
In my studies, all realized with CSound, I wanted to recreate the electronic sound of those years: : in its main morphology so close to that of piano sounds (due to sharp cuts in the magnetic tape) and in its ‘color’ – mainly obtained thanks to the convolution with the impulse response of the EMT 140 plate reverb, the one used by Stockhausen for Kontakte (thanks to Martino Marini for its IR recordings).
For each study, or group of studies, I have adopted spectral generations and different behaviors in the ‘bad copying’ of the Klavierstücke, but always conceiving each sound as a momentform whose duration and entry delay are unpredictable, and within which it is sometimes possible to hear the barely hinted echo of an acoustic composition.
Studi I-IV (which must all be performed together): resonant filtering of short distorted samples of ethnic music with various functions, gestures and temporal distribution as similar as possible to those of Klavierstücke I-IV, echoes of ethnic music.
Studio V: physical models applied to audio functions produced by a Julia set (implemented in CSound by Hans Mikelson, 1999), notes generated with Cmask (Andre Bartetzki, 1997) to approximate the density and dynamics of Klavierstück V, echoes of classical music.
Studio VI: each sound is the sum of a three-fold ‘image’ obtained with convolution (long decay piano sounds) of Julia set spectrum, squarewaves, piano attacks. The long decay piano sounds are actually the deconvolution of original piano tones with selected short piano attacks; the result is a kind of RM piano. All the piano sounds are sampled from the David Tudor III version of Klavierstück VI. Following the Stockhausen’s idea of ‘satellites’ and main sounds, I wrote an algorithm to serially generate all the parameters and formal organization. Echoes of vocal music. I wish to thank Pascal Decroupet for giving me access to his working sheets for “First sketches of reality. Fragmente zu Stockhausen (Klavierstück VI)”.
Studio VII: physical models applied to audio functions produced by a Julia set. Its structure arises from an approximate analysis of the events in Klavierstück VII, identifying three morphological types: fast arpeggios (piano), long single sounds, sounds with delayed partials (slow arpeggios). Echoes of music from Stockhausen.
Studio VIII: physical models applied to audio functions produced by a ring-modulated Julia set with random step functions and transposed with Hilbert transform. Its structure comes from an approximate analysis of the events in Klavierstück VIII, identifying three morphological types: fast arpeggios of chords, long single sounds, sounds generated by probabilistic distributions over several ‘voices’. Echoes of free jazz.
Fermentazioni is made by some of the materials I collected during the making of the music video Il suono rosso (The red sound, video by Ivan Penov), an “audiovisual staging” on wine commissioned by ‘La Stoppa di Elena Pantaleoni’.
Between 2018 and 2019 I made many hours of recordings in Ancarano di Rivergaro (PC), distributed over time according to the rhythms and phases of static and extreme dynamism typical of wine production. For Fermentazioni I chose the recordings that account for the chaos of one of the dynamic processes that take place in the steel tanks in which the pressed grapes are put: fermentation.
Without distorting its acoustic nature, a phenomenon usually hidden from our ear – and endowed with a strong ambiguity due to the similarity with an electroacoustic technique very common today in music such as granulation – becomes audible.
For the recordings I used a self-built piezoelectric microphone and an AKG 411L dynamic microphone, both applied to the external surface of the tanks in which two different wines produced by La Stoppa ferment: Ageno (in two different tanks, a few days after pressing) and Malvasia (one month after pressing).
Fermentazioni is constructed by simply sequencing, with a cross-fade of 1 ‘, three fragments of 4’ each (Malvasia-Ageno01-Ageno02), modified only with a second-order high-pass filter at 100 Hz for Malvasia, at 300 Hz for Ageno.
A Mario Messinis, in memoriam (2020) electroacoustic music [14’ 05”]
This composition comes from working materials for a larger work, Il suono rosso (The Red Sound), a videomusical project commissioned by La Stoppa (a ‘natural wine’ factory in Ancarano, Italy). The nature of many of the sounds recorded there reminded me of Xenakis GRM pieces, especially of Bohor: pruning, fermentation, farm tractors, racking, decanting, labeling + bottling, harvest, removing a huge cloth covering drying grapes, barrique washing, filtered granulation of barrique washing, distillation, racking and dripping, resonating filters on previous materials, wasps over drying grapes, time stretching of resonating bottles, modal processing of previous material.
So I decided to use them in a different organization, according the Makis Solomos paradigm “Between mathematics and Natural Sciences”.
To formalize the 16 natural/transformed sound sources, I used the stochastic method applied by Xenakis in Achorripsis. Thanks to the formula for Poisson’s law (lambda= 1.667) I get the overall distribution of the events (density degree: I to VI) on a matrix with 16 rows (each for one different sound source) and 28 columns (time unit=30”).
As the result was too dense, loosing many small but musically important timbre differences, I decided to use only four different sound sources for each of the four parts structure.
Enfoncer une porte ouverte represents the beginning (Part I, chapters 1 to 4) of a longer work commissioned by Bruna Donatelli, editor of “Flaubert en musique”, issue 21 of Flaubert Revue critique et génétique.
We know that for Flaubert text and sound (writing and reading) were not two separate entities, as he was reading aloud his drafts, Στέντορι εἰσαμένη μεγαλήτορι χαλκεοφώνῳ, ὃς τόσον αὐδήσασχ᾽ ὅσον ἄλλοι πεντήκοντα[1]. Thanks to this practice, he called gueuloir[2], he evaluated the quality of his sentences according their sonority: “Plus une idée est belle, plus la phrase est sonore; soyez-en sûre. La precisión de la pensée fait (et est elle-même) celle du mot”[3]. So I asked to the voice in my composition – Marie Gaboriaud- not to read the published version of Madame Bovary, but the final manuscript. I animate the text with sound-objects whose source is not necessarily heard, as I often replace the vocal spectrum with that of the sounds mentioned in the book, while the voice amplitude envelope will still determine the rhythm. The idea is to give rise to what I call an Imaginary Soundscape, where the sounds assume the role of characters, as in a stage work.
I am deeply indebted to Bruna Donatelli for guiding me into Flaubert’s world, hoping she will find the ideas aroused from her many advices now developed into a musical, even though unfinished, collana.
[1] “in the likeness of great-hearted Stentor of the brazen voice, whose voice is as the voice of fifty other men”, Homer, Iliad, V, 785.
[2] Michael Fried, Flaubert’s ‘Gueuloir.’ On ‘Madame Bovary’ and ‘Salammbô’, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2012.
[3] Letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie, December 12th 1857.
Premiered at Fifth International Csound Conference, Teatro Municipale di Cagli, September 28th 2019
This composition comes from working materials for a larger work, Il suono bianco (The White Sound), a videomusical project commissioned by Caseificio Di Nucci 1662 (a cheese factory in Agnone, Italy). For a whole week, from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., I have recorded all the sounds in the factory (mainly for the production of caciocavallo): the milk spilling, the all hand-made transformation processes in wooden and steel vats, the conservation and aging stages.
In Cacio No5 the first half is devoted to the “liquid” part of the process, while in the second part we can hear the sounds of rubbing and beating the caciocavallo form in the cellar, as well as tasting of the cheese (recorded with a mouth microphone). The two main techniques I have used are granulation and convolution, mainly with the idea to render acoustically the aptic dimension of the cheese making.
Cacio No5 exists in stereo and 8 tracks version. The 8 tracks version has been created for the International Electroacoustic Composition Competition IANNIS XENAKIS 2016. After mixing the 2 tracks of the stereo version in a mono file, I split the whole spectrum in 24 bands (20 Hz to 24 KHz). I then arranged them in 8 files with 3 bands each (from low, middle and high register). To realize their spatialization I took 11 rotations from the transformations of a cube used by Xenakis for his Nomos Alpha (in Formalized Music, Pendragon Revised Edition, 1990, p. 219-236). The 8 corners of the cube became the 8 loudspeakers and each of the files will move according the Xenakis’rotations, joining and dragging the spectrum of the corresponding loudspeaker. So for the first rotation (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) we will hear at the beginning of the piece band1 (b1) on loudspeaker1 (L1), b2 on L2, etc. Soon b1 will move to L2, dragging b2 to L3, dragging b2 and b3 to L4, until, after a certain time determined by speed of movement, all the 8 bands will join in L8 covering the original whole spectrum. The 11 speeds (from 0.684 m/s to 8 m/s) are generated by a Gaussian distribution.
Performance notes
The loudspeakers set-up for Cacio n. 5 is represented by the Xenakis figure in Formalized Music:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 represent the channel-loudspeaker pairs. The cube side is 8 m. L6 L3 L5 L4 at the audience floor, L1 L8 L2 L7 above the audience.
A one floor arrangement, according the following picture, could fit:
