Author: Roberto Doati

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.

(2018) electroacoustic music [13’ 43”]

Commissione: Flaubert Revue critique et génétique

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.

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[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.

(2015) electroacoustic music [10’ 09”]

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 N^o5 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 N^o5 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:

(2012) electroacoustic music on 24 tracks [12’ 44”]

Premiered at Suoni Inauditi,  Auditorium “Pietro Mascagni” di Livorno, April 24th 2013

Commissioned by ISSM “Pietro Mascagni”

1 commission by Istituto Mascagni in Livorno

1 French Horn

1 Jewish-feeling melody played by Francesco Marotti on the French Horn over three different octaves

24 loudspeakers arranged in three 8 loudspeakers groups at three different heights

24 impulse responses captured in the Istituto Mascagni Auditorium with source location at the center and mic locations at the 24 loudspeakers

5 comb filters to “pitch” the impulse responses

192 pitches used for convolution between the French Horn and the filtered impulse responses

4 delays series controlled with four different metronomes and eight loop times

24 mono tracks

1 virtual spatializer by Timothy Place and Roberto Doati

One ricercare over 24 vanishing points 1 spatialisation system over 24 independent channels

(2010) electroacoustic music based on a poem by Edoardo Firpo with an appendix by Edoardo De Giovanni [3’]

Premiered at Miso Music Portugal, Auditório Philippe Friedman, Lisboa, April 15th 2010

Commissioned by Miso Music Portugal

This work was commissioned by Miso Music Portugal Festival for its 25^th birthday. It belongs to a Cadavre Exquis made up by 50 different composers.

There are some similarities between Genova and Portugal, among these the sound of the language.

Therefore my present  is Edoardo De Giovanni (half Venetian, half Genoese) voice reading a poem in Genoese dialect written by Edoardo Firpo. Each declaimed verse is like a blow to the West, jumbling up 25 different frequency components I am filtering from a sound recording of Duarte Lobo Audivi vocem de caelo. This is a masterpiece of Portuguese Polyphony from the XVI Century and it is a six-voice setting of a verse and response for Lauds from the Office of the Dead.

Although Edoardo did not know it, he added to Firpo’s poem a “coda” which hints at the world that is still beyond “the Pillars of Hercules”: I am grateful to him.

Idillio

Quande in te lunghe séje là da stâe
veddo a farfalla gianca ch’a se posa
in sce-o fiore da-o gambo lungo e fin,
e l’aa ch’a ghe fa veja un pô a s’imbosa
comme a barchetta sott’a-o ponentin,
e se barcollan poi tutti doï
mentre da l’erba vegne un son sottï,
a muxica che sento a l’è tanto ata
che no çerco ciù ninte intorno a mi.

                                             Edoardo Firpo

When, in the long summer evenings,
I see the white butterfly alighting
on the long and fine stemmed flower,
and her wing swells like a sail
on a small boat under the westerly breeze,
and both of them then slightly sway
while a thin sound comes out from the grass,
the music I hear is so loud
that I do not search anything around me anymore.

Veneziana n. 1 per Luigi Nono (2007) electroacoustic music [8’40”]

Premiered at EMUFest, Sala Accademica del Conservatorio “S. Cecilia”, Roma, November 14th 2010

Veneziana n. 2 per Mario Messinis (2007) electroacoustic music [17’ 10”]

Premiered at Sala Tartini del Conservatorio “Giuseppe Tartini”, Trieste, November 24th 2010

Veneziana n. 3 per Alvise Vidolin (2007) 6 tracks electroacoustic music [8’ 40”]  

Premiered at Conservatorio di musica “F.A.Bonporti”, Riva del Garda, May 3rd 2008

The “Veneziana” series rises from my unconscious as a symbolic farewell to Venezia and to three persons who played an important role in my professional development.

March 2007: I am preparing the “choirs” for the revised version of Un avatar del diavolo, a musical theatre work based on Antonin Artaud text and commissioned to me by the Biennale di Venezia in 2005. The idea is to add vocal tonal harmonies to three scenes in order to evoke the image of the bourgeoisie, who judges and finds Artaud guilty. These “choirs” are randomly broken into atonal gestures by the passion of the male actor voice on the scene. It is natural for me to take inspiration from Jean-Philippe Rameau who set the rules of tonal harmony. On the other hand he is already present in the 4^th interlude (called “xilophonie”) to mention Artaud love for XVIII Century French dances.

The starting point for these choirs is the recording of Marianne Pousseur singing – extremely slow as I asked her – the melodic line of Vénitienne, an harpsichord piece by Rameau. “Veneziana” (Vénitienne) was the name for a composition form of satirical and burlesque content, a form practised also by Andrea Gabrieli.

As I am working on this sound material using some of the techniques experienced by Nono for his last compositions with live electronics – delays, resonant filtering, riverberation – I feel more and more the results as a nostalgic farewell to Venezia. As a matter of fact after 30 years I am leaving this incomparable town to come back to my birthplace, Genova. So I decide to select three different structures from the obtained materials to be arranged ad libitum according the desired “harmonic” stream.

A deep sense of gratitude to Luigi Nono goes with Veneziana n. 1, to Mario Messinis with Veneziana n. 2, to Alvise Vidolin with Veneziana n. 3.

(2005-2007) 4 tracks electroacoustic music (voice: Giorgio Bertan) from Un avatar del diavolo [24’ 15”]

This work is not simply a reduction of the theatre piece Un avatar del diavolo I wrote in 2005 for La Biennale di Venezia Music Festival. The theatre work was based on the last Antonin Artaud text “Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu”. The word “avatar” stood for the idea of the “double”: God as Lucifer’s double, excrements as double of spirit, the electronic avatar as digital alter-ego, etc. The music was using digital technologies to transform the two (Giorgio Bertan and Marta Paola Richeldi) actors’ voices in real-time, always suspended between logos and melos, the word and its musical double.

So, which is here the missing double (In the absence of the double)? The voice as a word. What does it remain? The voices’ resonances in extraneous bodies: animals, percussions, brass and string instruments, sighs and screams. It remains the music was arising on the stage from the resonances the voice excitation produced on vocoders and convolution algorithms.

The overall form, if halved in its duration, is the same of the theatre piece. Consistent with Artaud original text, it is made up by 5 scenes with 4 interposed xilophonie – as Artaud called his  short percussive interludes – plus a coda of handwriting sounds I added to stress the current  importance of Artaud writings.

(2002) three electroacoustic pieces from “Sopra i monti degli aromi” [6’ 32”]

“Sopra i monti degli aromi” is a journey into the Song of Songs through Gregorian Chants, Medieval polyphonies and electroacoustic compositions. It has been realized with the Ensemble Oktoechos conducted by Lanfranco Menga on a project by Emanuele Pappalardo, Paolo Pachini, Lanfranco Menga and Roberto Doati.

The guide lines for the compositions of my five pieces are suggested by unity and dualism concepts: the ille and the illa of the Song text, eroticism and sacred love, the human and the sacred. The vocal score is built on a few pitches, very often repeated to point out a sense of belonging to the earth. Nevertheless this kind of hochetus is sometimes broken by highest notes to mean the spiritual, the aim – not always achieved – to conquer the heaven, or it is broken by short speeches and non-singing vocal articulations. These articulations and recordings from everyday life of the two singers (Alessandra Vavasori and Antonio Bortolami) complement each other, so that each performer unfold oneself by means of the singing (the spiritual) and the speech (the corporeity). It is within the electronic part that I ideally accomplish the unity concept by using signal convolution technique. The frequency components of a male voice (or choir) are spectrally shaped by a female choir (or single voice), underlining both the physicality of the closely recorded voice and its fading into the reverberant space of a church. All the sound materials are coming from Ensemble Oktoechos performances of ancient music based on Song of Songs. From the five original pieces (d’yn, n’yn, b’yt, spyrty I and spyrty II, d’yl) I present here:

d’yn e n’yn are convolutions between men and women performances of  “Jam hiems” and “Veni electa mea” antiphonies;

spyrty I is built upon “Tota pulchra es, anima mea” by Heinrich Isaac and is scored for electroacoustic tape with long static vocal resonances alternating lively sequences of voice grains.

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.

(1999) electroacoustic version [11’ 54”]

Premiered at Auditorium Cordoba University (AR), April 29th 2006

Realized with a Fellowship from Bogliasco Foundation, Centro Ligure per le Arti e le Lettere

The work has been realised during a residence at the Fondazione Bogliasco thanks to a Fellowship from the Liguria Study Centre for the Arts and Humanities. The idea of the work (in his original version  for violin, rainsticks, electronics and interactive system ad libitum) arises from the admiration of certain monochromatic paintings where, according to different matters and techniques, successive paint’s layers give rise to a surface that make “disappear” the raw material. They can be perceived as sculptures or as comprising different changing shades, depending on the light incidence on the colour.

I am struck by the little perceptual bursts due to a strong abstraction.

As in other works of mine, I started here with sound materials that include both concrète [earthly] and abstract [heavenly] elements. I have tried to realise the idea of a monochromatic surface electronically transforming the impulsive sounds of two palo de lluvia (rainsticks), a popular instrument of the South American Indian cultures. It is this granular monochrome that constitutes this electroacoustic version. The violin – as played by Marco Rogliano and submitted to certain transformations – is heard just at 4’38” for a minute, isolated from other sounds.

Thanks to Xavier Serra for his SMS program and Davide Rocchesso for his BaBo program: together with Csound I used them for the transformations of rainsticks. From the formal point of view the work follows 12 within 63 computer-generated drawings I received as a present from my very friend Gianni Revello. Some of these drawings have been submitted to the GraphSco program by Riccardo Bianchini for the extraction of musical parameters both for violin and electronic part.

I am finally indebted to Franco Avicolli, poet of abstract lands to whom I owe the discovery of pouring sounds and lasting friendships in Argentina. I wish to dedicate to him bastone armonico.