Halt And Catch Fire
Halt And Catch Fire
electroacoustic improvisation concert for violin double bass and electronics
2023 -
Duration: 40'00''
Sound diffusion: stereophonic | quadriphonic | acousmonium
HALT AND CATCH FIRE is an improvisational concert for acoustic instruments and electronics. It is the musical translation of an operational instruction that tends to build ambitious architectures, poised between electronic rhythm and timbre permutation, where the elements try to succeed and overwhelm each other in a growing and very rapid cycle that tends to the limit, until arriving at an inevitable collapse point. Halt and catch fire (HCF) is in fact a dummy assembly language instruction used to define instructions that bring the CPU into a state from which it can only be brought out with a reset.
Nicola Cappelletti: violin and electronics
Performances
10.04.2023 - Indigo Art Gallery, Perugia (IT) HACF #02
15.03.2023 - Murate Caffè Letterario, Firenze (IT) - HACF #01
Dissipatio HG
Dissipatio HG
for bass clarinet and electronics
2020
Duration: 9'40''
Sound diffusion: 3 frontal loudspeakers with subwoofer and 2 exciters on two steel cans.
Dissipatio HG is an homage to the same title post-apocalyptic novel by Guido Morselli, published posthumously in 1977 and written shortly before his death by suicide, which is also the theme of the novel: the dissipation of the entire human race is the sudden and unexpected context in which the suicide loses meaning. Only audiovisual residuals and mechanical devices remain to testify the past existence of mankind, in a mediated new relation with the world where the concepts of time, space and language are newly defined paradigms.
The piece reveals a sound dramaturgy, a search for a relationship and for a new language in which the voice of the bass clarinet tries to reconstruct his selfawareness in a context of illegible signals and disregarded responses, where the electronics shape the perception of time, and the accidental synchronicities are nothing more than a lack of mimesis of residual and no longer present sounds. The dissipation of the sound matches the loss of direction, emphasized by the sound degradation processes and the diffusion through transducers applied to steel cans, which flank the more canonical diffusion of electronics.
Bass clarinet: Raffaella Palumbo
Awards
XV Premio Nazionale delle Arti 2019-2020, Electroacoustic composition
Performances
27.10.2022 - XXIII CIM, Auditorium Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona (IT)
13.10.2021 - ElettroAQustica Festival, Paper concert hall - Auditorium Shigeru Ban, L'Aquila (IT) *premiere
Passage Etroit
Passage Etroit
for violin and live electronics
2017
Duration: 6'00''
Sound diffusion: stereophonic
The harmonic construction of a minor seventh chord is a prelude to the disintegration and decomposition of the sound of the violin, up to the total loss of timbral or harmonic recognition of the initial material. The function, according to traditional harmony, of the minor seventh chord as a chord that opens up the possibility of passing to a different key, is used metaphorically as a pretext for passing from the harmonic sound to the inharmonic sound, through a hostile "narrow passage", poised between sound and noise.
Performances
15.06.2019 - Encode, Filatoio di Cariglio, Cuneo (IT)
05.12.2017 - Fucine Contempo, Palazzo della Penna, Perugia (IT)
Macello
Macello
for fixed media
2017
Duration: 5'19''
Sound diffusion: stereo, octophonic
Macello starts from some excerpts taken from the collection of poems by Ivano Ferrari (Mantova, 1948), published with the same title by Einaudi in 2004.
Voice: Fabrizio Cruciani
The composition develops entirely from the reciting voice samples, as all the sounds are the result of it's elaboration. The search for an internal dramaturgy makes the three "stanzas" of the text correspond to three acoustic environments, linked by a narrative thread with the sound elements build, deny, alternate, add up, collide. The initial search for a defined vocality, a metaphorical search for the sense of the human, leads instead to the dissolution of the voice, a parallel to the dissolution of the element of humanity. The process of construction and destruction of the voice in its intelligibility has as its counterpart the emergence, at first avoided and then inevitable, of a resulting rhythm, even if inconstant and not coherent. In this dialogical relationship of tension, the resonances and formants of the voice are then used to set up an inharmonic background context, devoid of any hypothesis of tonal resolution, to arrive at a final scenario in which the "life that begins again" is totally transfigured and left adrift of uncontrolled and dehumanized developments.
Performances
05.11.2021 - eviMus, Saarbrücker (DE)
23.06.2018 - Verso la Meta Musica, Conservatorio G. Martucci, Salerno (IT).
09.10.2017 - Ver-v #3 Vox Electri, Auditorium del Conservatorio B. Marcello, Venezia (IT) *premiere
Le Jour et la Nuit
Le Jour et la Nuit
for flute and electronics
2020 - on going
Duration: 0'40'' - 4h20'00''
Sound diffusion: stereophonic
Le Jour et la Nuit is a sequence of 176 short pieces for flute, fixed media and live electronics, composed using algorithmic composition procedures to relate music to 176 aphorisms written by the French cubist painter Georges Braque, collected in the book Le jour et la nuit. Cahiers: 1917-1952 (Gallimard, Paris 1952).
Eight different forms of notation have been formalized, associated with each piece in relation to a linguistic density parameter. All the musical parameters of the composition, as well as the electronics ones, are likewise related to linguistic, formal and / or structural aspects of the corresponding aphorism. The different notations also represent different degrees of opening of the pieces.
Performance. A Le Jour et la Nuit performance should consist of a free choice of the number and order of the pieces to be performed. As well as a book of aphorisms, this work is meant to be a collection from wich to extract the desired pieces: the criteria of this choice are left to the performers, and under no circumstances a progressive order performance should be encouraged. A performance of only “A” notation pieces is not allowed; at least one piece with “D” notation must be performed.
Le Jour et la Nuit A/V may also be presented either as an audiovisual stand alone work or an audiovisual electroacoustic performance, in wich "D" notation pieces are accompanied by a found-footage video fixed media.
Flute: Claudia Giottoli, Andrea Biagini, Giovanni Petrini, Sara Valle, Denise Tamburi.
Awards
Performances
2nd Prize, CONFINI International Call for Electroacústic Chamber Music - Venice (IT) 2021.
10.02.2023 - Lund Contemporary, Odeum musikcentrum, Lund (SE). A/V performance. Flute: Agata Tuchołka. *A/V premiere
18.12.2021 - Confini, electroacoustic chamber music concert. Conservatory Concert Hall, Venezia (IT). Flute: Sara Valle. *premiere
11235855
11235813
for flughelhorn and live electronics
2018
5'25''
A numerical interpretation of the Fibonacci serie becomes the structural pretext for this piece, consisting of a constant dialogue between flugelhorn and electronics. Those two instruments stage a narration that starts from the extended techniques of the flugelhorn and ends in a landscape designed by the electro-acoustic elaboration of the reachable extremes of the same. At the center, a dizzying acceleration, a chase in which the instrument draws paths that the electronic processing follows, metabolizes and returns in a continuously changing form.
Flugelhorn: Riccardo Catria
Performances
25.01.2018 - Auditorium del Conservatorio F. Morlacchi, Concerto Inaugurazione Anno Accademico, Perugia.
24.05.2018 - Luigi Nono FotoAlbum con Musica – Incontro con Nuria Schömberg Nono – Auditorium del Conservatorio F. Morlacchi, Perugia.