17/10/2016

h.21 Auditorium San Fedele

Francesco Fabris
Kigen (2016, world premiere) 25’
Audiovisual work commissioned by San Fedele Musica to the winner of the San Fedele Young Composer Prix 2016 

Bernard Parmégiani 
Acousmatic triptych with interactive video mapping composed by Andrew Quinn
Immer/sounds (1999) 11’
Espèces d’espace (2002) 22’
Rêveries (2007) 14’

Sound engineer: Filippo Berbenni

In collaboration with Institut Français de Culture de Milan and in coproduction with Festival Milano Musica. With the support of Fondazione Cariplo

Kigen (2016)
Freely inspired by the story of Genesis from the Old Testament, Kigen (in Japanese origin) is divided into seven sections, each corresponding to a day of Creation. The durations and dynamics of the sections are determined following time matrices derived from the Fibonacci sequence. The piece is made for four spatialized channels starting from the characteristics of the acusmonium Sator. The live electronics is composed of an acousmatic part accompanied by real-time processing of concrete sounds generated by objects representing the characteristic elements of each day of Creation.

Bernard Parmégiani – Electronic triptych with interactive videomapping

Three works brought together in a triptych of the latest artistic production by Bernard Parmégiani, presented for the first time with the visual interaction in videomapping by the Australian artist Andrew Quinn. Parmégiani was the best known representative of acousmatic music, a musical genre born in France from Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète. This music is produced in the studio by reworking and transforming the recorded sequences and is presented on a medium (magnetic tape, audio CD, etc.) which is played with a spatialized audio system. The term acousmatic recalls the name given by Pythagoras to the way of teaching philosophy to his disciples, behind a veil and in the dark, to make them more attentive to his speech. The loudspeaker is the metaphor of the veil of Pythagoras. Acousmatic music aims to develop the sense of listening, imagination and mental perception of sounds. A fundamental role in this musical genre is that of the interpreter, who from the console takes care of the diffusion of the works fixed on the support, intervening on the volume, the timbre, the density of the sounds and their location in space; taking into account the characteristics of the hall and the response of the public. 

Immer / sounds (1999) 

First performed in 1999, during the Melbourne Immersion Festival. Parmégiani wrote that he conceived his work of him as “an immersion in sound, like the experience of diving, when fish flow under the eyes, signs of a visual random score, devoid of sounds but at the same time same bright. Just as the fish are not the sea, so the sounds are not the music, but are its constituent elements, following an order, for some random, for others well structured. ” Parmégiani has created a sound space starting from some reference sounds: pops, rotating objects, micro-sounds, rhythmic cells. Some of them have their own trajectory, which becomes perceptible as the sound moves through the different speakers. The composer invites you to “immerse yourself in sound”, that is, move from hearing to listening. 

Espèces d’espace (2002) 

This is how the composer himself describes it: “This title, inspired by Geroges Perec, led me to be interested in the possible evolution of some sounds according to the space where they appear. A sound, for example a signal, can push the imagination to prolong it in a musical way. In fact, dreamy listening to acousmatic pieces sometimes leads me, for fun, to mentally change my listening point. When the work invites me, I abandon myself to a coming and going between a more intimate listening to the sounds or a more distant one: an inside-outside exploration of the space in which they are located. I have often reduced this notion of space to a singular point which then becomes a place where sounds live and die. The use of a voluntarily heterogeneous material is destined to provoke contrasts that create diversified plans. Vast or intimate, public or private, closed or open, enigmatic or identifiable, these spaces generate a specific sound climate. I chose to “reveal them” (in the photographic sense of the term) slowly. Thus spaces appear whose meaning is clouded by the appearance of heterogeneous sounds of various origins to underline the strangeness of the place in which they are produced. Instead, other spaces where the sound signs are perfectly identifiable, stimulate the imagination and propose an escape to an “elsewhere”. 1. A closed space, theoretically impenetrable; that of a submarine where one is stimulated by particular sounds and noises, a universe that can evoke Jules Verne. 2. An identifiable air space, in whose air the jingle I made for Paris Roissy airport resounds. 3. A natural space in which the animal communicates through a language unknown to humans. 4. A paradoxical space that is both closed and open at the same time: the theater in which the word is the king of the show. “

Rêveries (2007)

Parmégiani’s last work, recommended by the composer himself to the listener who was interested in his music for the first time. Conceived as a crossroads of soundscapes, it is also a dreamlike summary of the composer’s entire work. In it we recognize the whole of his expressive modalities and sonority. In fact, in the arc of the piece we recognize the birds, the crackling fire and the humming crowds of the opera Dedans-Dehors; the sound-impact of Point contre champs; and above all the terrible and hallucinatory train of L’ŒIL écoute: it is he who leads this sound flow in a single piece, proceeding through successive metaphors, before ending up in the three theatrical strokes that awaken and lead back to reality.