Music

Pasacalle para Funes -:- for wind orchestra

Mon, 4 Apr 2011 17:19:57 +0200

  Alessandro Perini "Pasacalle para Funes" for wind orchestra (2011)  Stockholms Läns Blåsersymfoniker Michael Bartosch, conductor  Stockholm, Nybrokajen 11 March 25th, 2011 

 The figure of Funes, the protagonist of Jorge Luis Borges' short story Funes el memorioso, is considered by the author himself a sort of paradigm of analytical thinking. Due to his extraordinary memory, Funes can remember everything he sees, in any light condition, time, or from any point of view. But his memory is so strong that he stores in his mind the many visions he has of the same objects as referred to different objects, and not to different occurrences of the same object. This faculty actually represents a big problem for him, since he cannot make use of the platonic concept of "idea". Due to this lack of abstraction, he can't make use of any ability to produce syllogisms; he rather holds in his mind an enormous amount of data. In Pasacalle para Funes a mass of vertically (synchronically) superimposed materials, perpetually rotating in their construction, creates a sort of cubist world, a catalogue of points of view on the same object, where the perpetual rallentando is a kind of zoom that lets the listener analyse the details. An erosive process then gradually digs into this mass, transforming it into a diachronic material, a metaphor of synthetic thinking, while windows on the original material are opened here and there. This way, the cubist, analytical approach is compared at the same time with a teleological, arrow-shaped one, but both are applied to the same material.

http://www.swedishwind.se

La escritura del dios -:- for electric/MIDI guitar, live electronics and video

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 13:14:11 +0100

Alessandro Perini "La escritura del dios" for electric/MIDI guitar, live electronics and interactive video Stefan Östersjö, guitar December 4th, 2010 Inter Arts Center, Malmö (Sweden)  Video made with vvvv.org

The reference is to one of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories, included in El Aleph. In Borges’ text, an Aztec priest is imprisoned by a spanish conquistador. The priest/magician tries to decipher the spots on the fur of a jaguar in order to find a magic formula that would set him free.
In this piece, the magic formula is constituted by two scales (derived from the tuning of an Aztec flute) used to build the entire musical plot. This formula is then hidden and filtered in different ways, following the processes occurring on the visual level. The interactive video system, reacting to the guitar’s audio and MIDI signal, plays with a granular background of sand (dreamt by the priest in the short story), a fragmented image of the jaguar and a set of symbols taken from the codex Fejérváry-Mayer, an Aztec mauscript containing a sacred calendar.

Exploración de la biblioteca de Babel -:- for 12 strings

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 20:07:27 +0100

-:- Please use headphones and watch in HD, fullscreen -:-

"Exploración de la biblioteca de Babel"
for 12 strings

commissoned by Biennale di Venezia and written for Ensemble Resonanz

Ensemble Resonanz
Beat Furrer, conductor

54° Venice Biennale
September 28th, 2010
Teatro alle Tese - Arsenale, Venice

[ITA]

Dal sito web della Biennale di Venezia:

Il giovane Alessandro Perini con Exploración de la biblioteca de Babel, commissionato dalla Biennale, si confronta con il mondo fantastico di Luis Borges, alla cui opera, insieme a quella di Calvino, si è ispirato per i suoi ultimi lavori. Così, in Exploración de la biblioteca de Babel, “lo spazio tridimensionale della biblioteca di Babele descritta da Borges in una tra le più conosciute delle sue Ficciones viene trasposto in un astratto spazio sonoro le cui dimensioni sono quelle del timbro, della risonanza e della frequenza. I sentieri spiraliformi attraverso i quali il materiale musicale si snoda ne provocano una continua evoluzione, così come l'eterna e tortuosa indagine dell'uomo nei confronti della natura (cioè di quell'universo di cui la biblioteca di Babele è una metafora), generando il miracolo della conoscenza, cambia l'essenza dell'uomo delineandone una storia costellata da dinamiche sociali di coesione o di repulsione. Sarà solo la storia stessa a rivelare se tale ricerca della conoscenza sia effettivamente una freccia puntata verso un fine ultimo o se sia tanto infruttuosa quanto la ricerca di un possibile catalogo della biblioteca di Babele”.

[ENG]

From the Venice Biennale Website

The young Alessandro Perini with Exploración de la biblioteca de Babel, commissioned by the Biennale, addresses the fantastic world of Luis Borges, whose work, along with Calvino’s, was the inspiration for his latest pieces. Thus, in Exploración de la biblioteca de Babel, “the three-dimensional space of the Library of Babel described by Borges in one of his most famous Ficciones is transposed in an abstract sonic space whose dimensions are those of timbre, resonance and frequency. The spiral-shaped trails through which the musical material unfurls provoke a continuous evolution, just as the eternal and tortuous investigation that man conducts of nature (i.e. of the universe of which the Library of Babel is just a metaphor), generating the miracle of knowledge, changes the essence of man delineating a history constellated with social dynamics of cohesion or repulsion. Only history itself will reveal whether this search for knowledge is in fact an arrow pointed towards an ultimate objective or if it is as infertile as the search for a possible catalogue of the Library of Babel”.

The Freesounders Laptop Band -:- Internet music performance

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:09:06 +0200

The Freesound Project (www.freesound.org) is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sound samples uploaded by users. By using the two main features of the Freesound Project search results page (preview and loop), The Freesounders Laptop Band is able to play the Freesound site, creating soundscapes and gestures from the sound samples provided by the community. This different way to exploit the website leads to a musical itinerary which depicts the different semantic areas that develop around the keywords used for the sample search feature. It can be thought of as a collaborative work in which the performer decides the structure and the Freesound community provides the content.
The performance yields some copyright issues, since it is an improvisation on material provided by others. Being the sound samples free to download and available under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License, the performer must state every author of every file used in the performance: this is accomplished as long as the computer screen is videoprojected at the back of the performer and every sound preview already includes the name of the author.

“The Freesounders Laptop Band” was premiered at Casa da Música in Porto (Portugal) on July 25, 2009, for the SMC2009 conference (Sound and Music Computing).
In April 2010 it was performed in two sessions at the first Breizh Entropy Congress, Rennes (France), University of Rennes, together with an artist’s lecture by the author.

Explanation video:

Lecture about “The Freesounders Laptop Band” at Breizh Entropy Congress,
Rennes (France) 2010.

Divinità di una città invisibile -:- for clarinet and six instruments

Sun, 31 May 2009 09:48:36 +0200

Divinità di una città invisibile
(Gods of an invisible city)
Concertino for clarinet and six players
duration: about 9‘30’’
year: 2008-09

The piece is based on Italo Calvino’s “Invisible cities”. In particular, the city of Isaura led to the five sections of this work.
Five different places pervaded by the gods of this acquatic city have been chosen to be put into music.

Isaura, city of the thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep, subterranean lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig long vertical holes in the ground, they succeed in drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no father. Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock's calcareous sky. Consequently, two forms of religion exist in Isaura. The city's gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the black lake that feeds the underground streams. According to others, the gods live in the buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the wells, in the revolving pulleys, in the windlasses of the norias, in the pump handles, in the blades of the windmills that draw the water up from the drillings, in the trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs perched on stilts over the roofs, in the slender arches of the aqueducts, in all the columns of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, the drains, all the way up to the weathercocks that surmount the airy scaffoldings of Isaura, a city that moves entirely upward.
Italo Calvino, Invisible cities

Every place chosen is described by the music by means of the different movements it suggests.
The first section “in the blades of the windmills” uses a circular series of notes enunciated by the solo clarinet, which puts also in motion a mechanism that lets the subterranean waters (played by the other instruments) rise up.
The second part, “in the buckets that rise suspended from a cable”, is a sort of rapsody based on the vertical movement of the bucket along the walls of the well: it uses the register key of the clarinet as the cause of the upward movement, while the fall is always a transposition an octave lower.
The third section is named “in the pump handles” and uses some comfortable open-hand positions of the clarinet to achieve fast tremolos in which one of the note is ever-changing (the open-hand position is thus used as an open string on the violin, and rapidly alternated with different fingered notes). The resulting gesture is therefore similar to a pump-lever movement.
The fourth part “in the vertical pipes” simulates the use of water taps (played by the clarinet) which modifies the flowing of water in the pipes underground (played by the other instruments). This part is quasi-improvisative, summoning back the rapsodic moods of the second section.
The last part is intitled “in the slender arches of the aqueducts”. It concludes the specular form of the piece by recalling the structure of the first section: a rotation of pitches in the clarinet leads to arch-like phrases, while the other instruments let the water gently flow down along the aqueduct.

The piece won the 3rd prize at the “Oliviero Fusi” International Composition Competition in Bulciago (Italy, 2009).

Tre città invisibili -:- for solo cello

Sat, 9 May 2009 08:35:38 +0200

This piece is a version for solo cello of “Four Invisible Cities”.
It was premiered on May 9, 2009 by Guido Boselli
at the Conservatorio di Musica di Como.

The piece uses movements I, III and IV from “Four Invisible CIties”.

Playback should begin shortly...press the HQ button to watch in better quality!

Four Invisible Cities -:- for cello, live electronics and live video

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 18:52:37 +0200

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s “Invisible cities”, this suite of four pieces depicts four different cities described by the Italian writer. The video images are in a large part interactive – that is to say, the cello itself controls some of the video events.

Playback should begin shortly...press the HQ button to watch in better quality!

The city of Olinda grows starting from the center, in concentric circles, but the center is not static: the old material expands and the new rises in its center. The same happens to the music, in both the frequency domain (cluster expanding from a single pitch) and the time domain (series of notes that expands from the center one occurrence after another).
The second city, Tamara, leads to an interactive video in which a urban landscape is shown. The music itself want to recreate a metropolitan landscape. The images are entirely built with letters (graphemes), and this comes from the semiotic speculation that pervades Tamara, city made of “signs”.
The third city (Eutropia) uses live electronics (filters and amplification) to convey the duality of fullness against emptiness; the visuals do the same thanks to the use of digital images processed in order to show only their contours.
The last city (Valdrada) is based on simmetry: the piece is constructed as retrograde of the inversion of itself. The amount of the transposition of two symmetrical pitch-shifters is determined by the amplitude of the cello, thanks to an envelope follower. The images shown by the video projection create an infinite zooming made with crossfaded and symmetrically repeated architectonic elements.

The piece was premiered at the FestiVAL Olona on Sept. 13, 2008.
Guido Boselli, cello
Alessandro Perini, live electronics
Giorgio Tedde, sound director

I. “…Olinda non è certo la sola città a crescere in cerchi concentrici, come i tronchi degli alberi che ogni anno aumentano d’un giro…ma alle altre città resta nel mezzo la vecchia cerchia delle mura stretta stretta…a Olinda no: le vecchie mura si dilatano portandosi con sé i quartieri antichi…”

II. “…l’occhio non vede cose ma figure di cose che significano altre cose…come veramente sia la città sotto questo fitto involucro di segni, cosa contenga o nasconda, l’uomo esce da Tamara senza averlo saputo…”

III. “…Eutropia non è una ma tutte queste città insieme; una sola è abitata, le altre vuote; e questo si fa a turno…così la città ripete la sua vita uguale spostandosi in su e in giù sulla sua scacchiera vuota…”

IV. “…così il viaggiatore vede arrivando due città: una diritta sopra il lago e una riflessa capovolta. Non esiste o avviene cosa nell’una Valdrada che l’altra Valdrada non ripeta, perché la città fu costruita in modo che ogni suo punto fosse riflesso dal suo specchio…”

Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili

Click for details -:- four-channel electronic music

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 11:35:39 +0200

Please use headphones and view in fullscreen.
This is a pseudo-binaural version.
Not suitable for people suffering from epilepsy.

Music entirely produced in CSound csounds.com
The whole piece is built starting from the mpulse opcode. Clicks are processed through reverberation and filtering, sometimes pushing the parameters beyond the sample rate.

Video made with VVVV vvvv.org and Max/MSP cycling74.com connected via OSC protocol.

Check out the sound and light installation here.

Duration: 08’ 31’’
Year: 2006

[English]

In this era of media redundancy and of superficiality, Click for details could be like a takeover bid on the essential. The piece is, in fact, constructed in limiting to a minimum the available material: the unique source used is the click, i.e. the pulse. This element, which represents all the potential energy concentrated in a sole instant, reclaims, from the listener, a recognition of the narrowest semiotic spaces, where the slightest distinctive feature is pertinent.
The musical development extracts, from time to time, from the overall mass, the specific characteristics of each single individual, claming its right to identity. The material finally unbinds itself and explodes in an unpredictable manner, creating a new universe of relationships never seen before.

[Italiano]

Nell’epoca della ridondanza mediatica e della superficialità, Click for details si pone come un tentativo di recuperare l’essenzialità. Il brano è infatti costruito limitando al massimo il materiale disponibile: l’unica sorgente (peraltro artificiale) utilizzata è il click, ovvero l’impulso.
Questo elemento, che rappresenta tutta l’energia in potenza concentrata in un solo istante, richiama l’ascoltatore a una ricognizione degli spazi semiotici più stretti, dove ogni minimo tratto distintivo è pertinente.
La drammaturgia musicale estrae di volta in volta, dalla massa globalizzata, le caratteristiche peculiari di ogni singolo individuo rivendicandone il diritto di idenìtità. Il materiale infine si scioglie ed esplode in maniera imprevedibile, creando un nuovo universo di inusitate relazioni.

Lùmina -:- for five instruments

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 22:23:17 +0100

"Lùmina" was finalist at the "...a Camillo Togni" composition contest and was premiered at Teatro Grande, Brescia (Italy) on November 26, 2006, by Dèdalo Ensemble.

Daniela Cima, flute Raffaello Negri, violin
Rocco Carbonara, clarinet Guido Boselli, cello
Elena Pasotti, piano Vittorio Parisi, conductor

Playback should begin shortly...

Lùmina
for flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, cello and piano
duration: 7’30’’
Year: 2005

Lùmina is a piece of electronic music made with acoustic instruments. In fact, it consist of two different concepts, each one recalling a particular approach to electronic music.
Sections 1, 3 and 5 draw inspiration from musique concrète, where the tape was cut into slices and recombined. Such sections examine the juxtaposition and superimposition of tape slices cut in different manners and filled with various materials, as well as fade in and out techniques.
Sections 2, 4 and 6 refer to sound synthesis (and analysis). They gradually cover the whole acoustic spectrum by means of partials calculated as harmonics shared by respectively two, three or four fundamentals, with an approximation of an eighth of a tone.
“Lùmina” is a Latin word which means “light”, but also “aperture”. In this metaphorical view of electronic music, aperture is the abrupt or smooth switching from one tape slice to another, or the slow opening of a lowpass filter which lets out more and more higher frequencies, thus letting the “light” (white noise) pass at last.