Name: Sinfonia, beginning of the 3rd movement by HYOID contemporary voices
Duration: 2 min 44 s
Description: Live excerpt of Berio's Sinfonia, 3rd mvt, by HYOID voices with the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra directed by Martyn Brabbins, May 2022.

The podcast is produced and presented entirely by students. The second episode is hosted by Julian, Sinead, Marat and Milan and includes insights on working with Anthony Braxton from singers Fabienne Seveillac and Andreas Halling.

Episode 02

"Disiecta Membra" (2014)
for six voices

Live Recording 
February 5th 2015 
Festival ECLAT Theaterhaus Stuttgart
Neue Vocalsolisten

Disiecta Membra, latin for “scattered fragments” is an expression used to refer to surviving fragments of ancient poetry, manuscripts and other literary or cultural objects, but can also literally means "scattered limbs" or "scattered members". 
The membra this piece is dealing with are the different cuts of Grunnius Cocotta, the imaginary pig whose last wills are summoned in the Testamentum Porcelli, a parodic middle-age text. The short excerpt of this text that I decided to use is an inventory of twelve body parts that the pig, right before being slaughtered, bequeaths to twelve categories of will beneficiaries.

Et de meis visceribus dabo donabo sutoribus saetas, 
rixoribus capitinas, 
surdis auriculas, 
causidicis et verbosis linguam, 
bubulariis intestina, 
isiciariis femora, 
mulieribus lumbulos, 
pueris vesicam, 
puellis caudam, 
cinaedis musculos, 
cursoribus et venatoribus talos, 
latronibus ungulas

[And from my body I shall give and contribute to the cobblers my bristles, to quarrelers my head-parts, to the deaf my ears, to lawyers and the wordy my tongue, to sausage-makers my intestines, to makers of meat products my thighs, to women my little loins, to boys my bladder, to girls my tail, to poofters my muscles, to runners and hunters my ankles, to brigands my hooves]
	
One can easily draw a comparison between this parodic list and the amass of dismembered bodies of saints that (still) populate catholic churches all around Europe. 
Mikhail Bakhtin in his “Rabelais and his time” elaborated the concept of grotesque body and wrote extensively about these holy remains: 

"At the time of Rabelais ridicule relics were quite common, especially, of course, in the Protestant satire […]
Dismembered body of the saint in medieval literature has repeatedly given rise to grotesque images, and transfers. In one of the best medieval parody travesties - in "Treatise Garcia" (1099), the hero, a wealthy Simonist archbishop of Toledo, brings to Rome as a gift the miraculous relics of holy martyrs Rufus and Albina […] "… from the kidneys Albina, from the innards Rufina, from the stomach, from the back, from the backside, from the edges of chest from the legs, the hands, from the neck. What else? - From all the members of both bodies of the martyrs. " We see that already in the XI century relics gave rise to a purely grotesque anatomy of the dismembered body"

While the catalog of pig cuts of the Testamentum has a direct influence on the form of the piece - which is indeed a catalog of short pieces, each related to a different body part -, this reference to relics is suggested by the use of several musical quotations issued from Membra Jesu Nostri, the famous set of seven cantatas by Dietrich Buxtehude, which is also a catalog of limbs: feet, knees, hands, side, breast, heart, and head. Curiously enough, what is considered to be the first Lutheran oratorio has the form of a massive immaterial reliquary for a body that left no material remains. 

The contrast between this longing for the absent flesh and the carnavalesque exuberance of the Testamentum was the basic source of inspiration for the composition of Disiecta Membra. 


Mauro Lanza - "Disiecta Membra" (2014)

Live excerpt of Berio's Sinfonia, 3rd mvt, by HYOID voices with the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra directed by Martyn Brabbins, May 2022.

Sinfonia, beginning of the 3rd movement

for string quartet and electronics

Paris, Centre Pompidou June 7th 2017
Quatuor Diotima

**********************

As a kid we had a television set with an antenna that rotated (you could rotate it from inside of your house). When the major channels would go off-air you could rotate it and pick up strange other channels from smaller cities around - from across the border, Buffalo and so on - and you would see strange things, that were kind of hard to see (there was a lot of static) and it was very intriguing to watch that kind of things. That was really the core, the crystal at the centre of this movie: my experience with that thinking “what if the images that you pulled up were really quite extreme, disturbing, possibly illegal, and what would you think then, would you keep seeking out those channels or would you call the police or what would you do, how would you respond to them?”

David Cronenberg on his movie Videodrome (commentary track of the Criterion Collection BlueRay)

The Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion was a television signal hijacking (probably the most famous and certainly the longest signal hijacking ever) that occurred in Chicago, Illinois, United States on the evening of November 22, 1987. The signal pirates, whose identities were never found, succeeded in getting their broadcast intruded onto WTTW (a local Public Broadcasting Service television station).
The pirate broadcast, which lasted 90 endless seconds, featured an individual disguised as Max Headroom (a sci-fi computer-generated television character quite popular in the 80s, coming from dystopian near-future dominated by television and large corporations).
Around 11:15 p.m. an episode of the British TV-Series Doctor Who was suddenly interrupted by television static, after which an unidentified man wearing a Max Headroom mask and sunglasses appeared. The man started to moan, scream and laugh, uttering various random phrases (the audio was distorted and crackling), including New Coke's advertising slogan "Catch the Wave" while holding a Pepsi can (Max Headroom was a Coca-Cola spokesperson at the time). He then tossed the can out of sight, presented his middle finger wearing a rubber extension, sang an excerpt of “I’m losing you” (a 1966 Motown hit recorded by the Temptations), hummed the theme song of Clutch Cargo (a clumsily-animated television series of the 60s), moaned painfully complaining about his piles, farted, put on and off a giant glove (similar to the one worn by Michael Jackson at the time). He then partially exposed his buttocks, howling: "They're coming to get me!”, while an unidentified female accomplice wearing a French maid outfit started to spank him with a flyswatter. The transmission then blacked out for a few seconds before resuming the Doctor Who episode in progress.

“The 1987 Max Headroom Broadcast Incident” features a string quartet “enhanced” with transducers and preparations. 
The digital processing of the instruments is largely inspired by the same modulation techniques that were - and still are - commonly used for radio and television transmission. 
The piece, an hommage to obsolete or soon-to-be deprecated technologies and to the media-dominated, dark future that the “cyberpunk” sci-fi of 80s foretold, is dedicated to the memory of Fausto Romitelli.

Mauro Lanza - "The 1987 Max Headroom broadcast incident" (2017)

Teaser track for large-scale composition, Virtutes Occultae. 

https://taylorbrook.bandcamp.com/releases

Virtutues Occultae is an album in eighteen sections for six physically modeled virtual pianos, each with a unique tuning in an extended 11-limit just intonation.

In writing this music I used a mixture of traditional composition methods of structuring the music with various harmonies and progressions along with more free writing, collage techniques, and algorithmic composition.

The tuning of the virtual pianos extends Harry Partch’s conception of the over-tonality.

www.taylorbrookmusic.com

Sinfonia, beginning of the 3rd movement

HYOID contemporary voices

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