Category: Live electronics solo

(2014) live electronics solo (8 tracks) [indefinite duration]

Premiered at Festival « Nuova Consonanza », Roma, December 3rd 2014

The work stems from an invitation from James Dashow to participate in the celebrations for his 70 years that Nuova Consonanza organized in Rome in 2014.

Instead of proposing an already made composition, it seemed to me most respectful of Dashow’s  contributions to electronic music and of the high consideration I have for the most valuable advices James has lavished generously at the beginning of my career as a composer in Padova, to create a new composition.

Most of the music material is made up with 5 fragments (all synthetic sounds) from his In winter shine (1983). The spectral components that I get from the analysis are used to synthesize in real-time pitches and timbres through processes similar to those used by James in his Dyad System, but not with the same accuracy. I used somewhat a heuristic principle defined as  “rule of thumb”. This is because many years ago I suggested to James to apply a “rule of thumb” for a composition on the sound quality of a pan struck with the thumb whose timbre fascinated him so much. Today I recorded these kind of sounds and their convolution with the synthetic sounds from James’ composition, will end this music of mine wishing to express all my affectionate gratitude to JD.

(2013) live electronics in the kitchen. Chef: Luigi Zanco [indefinite duration]

This composition originates from sound material used in the last three minutes of “Seppie senz’osso” (“Cuttlefish without bone”), 5th episode of the audiovisual cooking project Titolo segreto per quadrati, tromba fitta, frutti cavi (Secret title for squares, dense trumpet, hollow fruits),  born from the collaboration with the chef Gigi Zanco and the video composer Paolo Pachini. Why cooking? Because Culinary Art and Music have much in common: there is a tradition of recipes (for music: harmony, counterpoint, classical forms) and both start from common basic materials (sounds) to make them, through countless techniques transformation, complex materials (sound structures) that shaped in a form will create the final dish (music).

The final part of Seppie senz’osso is, in fact, the presentation of the dish. Contained in the visual space that Paolo Pachini had destined for it in the architecture of the entire video, it had stimulated in me the generation of a greater quantity of materials than was necessary. So I thought of processing in real time this material according an improvisation for an autonomous form, independent of visual and gastronomic suggestions.

(2007) live electronics solo [indefinite duration]

Premiered at Festival “L’Espace du Son”, Bruxelles, October 20th 2007

Commissioned by Musiques et Recherches, Bruxelles

The piece rises out from an invitation I received from Musiques & Recherches to contribute to Bernard Parmegiani 80^th birthday celebration within the festival “L’Espace du Son” in Bruxelles. It is part of a larger suite of pieces written by several composers on the same occasion.

Rather than proposing an already done piece, I preferred to write a new one, as a true and direct homage to the great French composer.

Not so respectful is probably the choice I have done to use a piece from his De Natura Sonorum (1975) as raw material. The idea was to consider Parmegiani’s music as a natural state, concréte, to be treated in order to make things.

I decided to work on Accidents/Harmoniques not only for its spectral richness, but for a free association – a word game – on its title that came in my mind:

“blast (Accidenti, in Italian) Rameau, who established his tonal system over natural Harmonics so curbing all the XX Century musical experiences that moved away from it!”

Accidenti agli armonici! is a real time recording of a performance I made with a CSound patch that allows a 100 oscillators resynthesis of a Phase Vocoder analysis of Accidents/Harmoniques. The performance parameters are: time stretching, spectral envelope, spectral stretching and shifting, single amplitude envelopes. So it can be considered one of the several possible musical explorations of the Parmegiani’s work spectral space over which by accident natural harmonics come out, dammit!I foresee an interactive version with a mime controlling the parameters.