#1 String instruments - selections for the discovery and dissemination of contemporary music

for recordings of satellites, string quartet and electronics

Paris, Centre Pompidou April 18th 2021
Quatuor Diotima

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Achille Judica-Cordiglia and his brother Giovanni Battista are well-known amateur radio operators who claimed in the late fifties and early sixties to have heard radio communications taken from secret Soviet Union space missions, including SOS signals, telemetry, and the dying sounds (heartbeats and breathing) of a suffocating "lost cosmonaut.” Even though their claims have been thoroughly debunked, the stories of these sensational intercepts are part of the mythology of the Space Age and stand at the origin of a durable conspiracy theory.
In the 1960s, the idea of a “lost cosmonaut” spoke to acute fears. Despite the optimism of space exploration tales, the reality of space travel—from sending a dog into orbit to putting a man on the moon—had a striking effect on the public and raised more life-altering questions than it provided answers. A cosmonaut lost in space served as a poignant metaphor for individuals’ anxieties about the future in an era of nuclear tension and uncertainty. This helps to explain the diffusion and the longevity of a hoax that identified the stain of some kind of original sin on the shiny surface of the triumphs of the early space age. Now that the cosmos has switched in our imaginations from being the route toward a radiant future for humanity to a place of accumulation for space capitalism or a post-doomsday shelter for the extremely rich, these stories of dead astronauts are more sinister and haunting than ever.

The title "Memories of the Space Age" is borrowed from the collection of stories of the same name by J.G. Ballard (1988), a set of writings thematically linked around rotting launch gantries at Cape Canaveral, the failure of the US space program, dead astronauts eternally orbiting in space, deserted hotels lining the Florida coast, and the lonely, disturbed individuals who linger at the fringes of this lost dream of the Space Age.

The piece uses more than 100 historical radio recordings of human-made objects gravitating in Low Earth Orbit, for example, the beacon beeps of satellites, telemetries, and the voices of cosmonauts, along with the ill-famed Judica-Cordiglia tapes. This material—shifted and transposed to match the harmonic structure of the piece—is the starting point for an imitation game that involves the string quartet and that grows into a complex three-layered polyphony.

In addition to these archival materials, the electronic material features digital processing of the string instruments with the modulation techniques that were, and still are, commonly used for radio and television transmission. The fragile, inharmonic sonorities of the prepared strings are mirrored by electronic phenomena like feedbacks or physically-modeled chaotic circuits that behave in similarly erratic ways, in a laborious attempt to tame the untamable while at the same time pursuing serendipitous glitches.

"Memories of the Space Age" deals with the aesthetics of ground noise, white noise, and lost radio waves, with the misuse and malfunctions of technology, and with the misinterpretation of a chaotic signal as pareidolia. It is also, somehow, a nostalgic homage to obsolete or soon-to-be-obsolete technologies and to the visions of the future these technologies carried. That future now seems irretrievably lost, but its ghost, like Ballard’s dead astronauts, still haunts us.

Mauro Lanza - "Memories of the Space Age" (2020)

catherine lamb -- descensus trio (2020). i recorded each part by myself over the course of the pandemic.

catherine lamb -- decensus trio

This piece is the first of my own take of Pauline Oliveros "13 changes"
Stay tuned for the 12 others

Standing Naked In the Moonlight - Music Washing The Body / O vis Eternitatis

premiered by Quartetto Maurice on October 10, 2021 at the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik

hollower | for string quartet and phone speakers (2021)

part 2/13 on my project gathering Hildegarde Von Bingen & Pauline Oliveros

Atomic Imagery - Rotating Molecules - Particles Dancing - Instantly Vanishing / O Rubor Sanguinis

World premieres of Quatuor Bozzini's Composer's Kitchen 2021 residents in partnership with Gaudeamus Muziekweek Festival.

Quatuor Bozzini (Alissa Cheung, Clemens Merkel, violins; Stéphanie Bozzini, viola; Isabelle Bozzini, cello)

Sound recording: Tivoli Vredenburg
Mastering: Gabrielle Couillard

Sarah Davachi - Long Gradus Part IV

Malcolm Goldstein, violin
Marc Sabat, viola

In the piece “3 Chorales for Harry Partch”, my music explores Partch’s concept of “utonality”, which constructs the minor triad as an inverted mirror-image of the major triad. Since the major triad is derived from the harmonic series, i.e. 4-5-6, and may be extended upward by taking additional overtones, i.e. 4-5-6-7-9-11, Partch suggests a parallel notion for the construction of the minor triad, by taking intervals from a subharmonic series. There is an inherent paradox in this construction, since the overtone chords “fit” into a fundamental (1) and form a consonant blend, whereas the undertone chords tend to produce much more complex-sounding (dissonant) structures. In my composition, a single “utonal” chord is gradually constructed, pitch-by-pitch, over three phrases. The undertones appear in the following sequence:    

(1) 12 (D) - 8 (A) - 9 (G)      
(2) 12 - 10 - 8 - 11    
(3) 8 - 11 - 12 - 14 - 10 - 9

3 Chorales for Harry Partch (1993)

section X from Divisio Spiralis (2019)

JACK Quartet

February 25th-26th, 2021, Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, New York
Mastering engineer: Ryan Streber
Editing/Mixing: Christopher Botta and Christopher Otto

Catherine Lamb

Divisio Spiralis X (2019)

Malcolm Goldstein, solo violin / Hemispheres Toronto
chamber concerto for violin and mixed ensemble in 
72-tone equal temperament (May 1996)

Quiet Winter (1996)

THIS IS WHY PEOPLE O.D. ON PILLS (2004)

Live recording of the JACK Quartet (Ari Streisfeld, John Pickford Richards, Kevin McFarland, Christopher Otto) at Harvard University, 6 February 2016.

http://chrisswithinbank.net/2016/01/union-seam/

union–seam (JACK Quartet)

Touch Five

Two Lips (Dither Guitar Quartet)

Classical acoustic guitar & objects.
Recorded the 6 February 2017 in Marseille, France.
A piece by Clara de Asís.

Fais rien

Geometrie nelle mani (2013-16)
Three studies for amplified guitar

I. Corda-Legno. Metallo
II. Unghie
III. Pelle-Corde-Legno. Contatto

Ruben Mattia Santorsa, amplified guitar

Geometrie nelle mani - I. Corda-Legno. Metallo

Premiered by Mivos Quartet on April 14, 2017, at Center for New Music, San Francisco.

Olivia De Prato, violin
Lauren Cauley, violin
Victor Lowrie, viola
Mariel Roberts, cello 

Special thanks to Jeremy Wagner for recording, and Brent Miller for mastering.

O reche modo (2017) for string quartet

for Solo Cello
Recording performed by Séverine Ballon
Commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with funds from Diaphonique/Franco-British Fund for Contemporary Music, Südwestrundfunk & Fundación BBVA Bilbao
First performed 19 November 2013, St. Pauls Hall, hcmf//, by Séverine Ballon

Solitude (2013)

5 string violin "Milanolo" and string orchestra

I composed Struny: steny, zhluky, sny for Milan Paľa. You can already guess something about the music from its title but it is the music itself which will have to take care of the most important part, including the musicians turning this dreamworld into the realm of sound. I would like to thank them in advance for their effort and needed enthusiasm.

released at Pavlík records:
https://www.pavlikrecords.sk/shop/4-milanolo-concertos-2cd-audio

5 string violin - Milan Pala
conductor - Marian Lejava
strings - Ensemble Opera Diversa

Project 4 MILANOLO CONCERTOS is a unique combination of four individual composers with their well-defined visions of music language and instrument that was built specifically for my artistic needs. After five years this vision has materialized into this CD and the first concerto works in the history for the only instrument of its kind and modern quality are now reality.

4 MILANOLO concertos

Struny: steny, zhluky, sny 2016 (rev. 2018)

Carlo Siega, electric guitar

versione integrale, Milano, 30.112019

La Sola Distanza 2015 (rev. 2019)

"'à l’unisson X' for 2-6 strings is one piece within the series à l’unisson, all realising different kinds of performing in unison. 

Why a French title? I got many ideas listening to music of Hector Berlioz who loved the unison sound. It’s a sound that often opens a great space of amazing colours and overtones.

All performers play the same pitches (nearly) together, and the resulting sound may be different from and greater than the sum of the individual sounds."

evamariahouben.de

'à l’unisson X' was performed by Jennifer Ames Alexander and Colin Alexander at 840: New Music for Viola and Cello on the 7 July 2018 at St James' Islington.

Eva-Maria Houben – à l’unisson X

So You ... (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice) is a major new work by legendary experimental composer Alvin Lucier. It is an hour long epic that tracks the familiar Orpheus myth from a less familiar perspective: that of Eurydice as imagined by poet H.D.; a Eurydice who rails at Orpheus for his hubris in attempting to rescue her. Two key, and formerly distinct, aspects of Lucier's practice come together in this piece: the exploration of interference patterns in closely tuned intervals, and the exploration of resonant chambers. From speakers mounted inside amphorae a constantly turning braid of beating sine waves trace the descent into the depths of hell, and then the doomed attempt to climb back into life.

Singer Jessika Kenney and long-time Lucier collaborators Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis embody the three title characters in deeply focused performances that assert themselves against the process of the sweep, or become enfolded in it. The electronics were mixed in real time by programmer and equipment designer Tom Erbe.

BT044 -Alvin Lucier - So You ... (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice)[sample]

Ivan Liuzzo is an italian musician active in various artistic fields based in Basel;

He mainly works as a composer in the contemporary classical field, and as a drummer/percussionist he has collaborated with many artist in the Italian avant-jazz(Manlio Maresca, eg.) and artist such James Chance;

He is also artistically active under the pseudonym of Luiz Vinoza and co-founder of Avidi Lumi.

https://ivanliuzzo.bandcamp.com/follow_me