version for three violins and voice on fixed media
Mia Detwiler, violin
J. Andrew Smith, voice

By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters…
Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. 2, Sec. II, Mem. IV

“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below-one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. […] Each wall of each hexagon is furnished with five bookshelves; each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters. There are also letters on the front cover of each book; those letters neither indicate nor prefigure what the pages inside will say. […] First: The Library has existed ab eternitate. […] Second: There are twenty-five orthographic symbols.”
 (Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1998.)

This piece embodies the concept of self-organized music that is central to my esthetic principles together with the idea that artists and their audience are active co-creators of the artistic event. These two principles have now found an evolutionary path in the conceptualization of networks as entities that bridge Science, Art and Society, a vison that has become the foundation of my artistic and music-theoretic research. In this piece (whose final title will be decided also by the performers), every aspect of the performance is defined by three key elements: a network of nodes with a specific connection topology, the determination of the optimal path that visits every link connecting any node at least once and the individual interpretation that the performers give of every node (each node contains specific instructions on the musical gesture to be performed). The resulting music emerges from the collective actions of the musicians as an experiment in cooperative, complexity-motivated musical creation.

Helefini otea agoninisconi

Additive sound installation and radio broadcast
(instrumental samples and voice recordings on fixed media, FM radio transmitters and transistor radios, yarn, and empty bullets) 
infinite duration, 2022

concert stereo version

Requiem between a Barrel and a Heart is a testament to the countless lives that are lost every day to weapons, in war zones or in random acts of violence, and recognizes them not through their names, but through the counting of their numbers, as it always happens in times of great catastrophe.

Requiem between a barrel  and a heart

Networked soundscape, interactive electroacoustic sound installation
(4-channel audio) by SoniLab
for the exhibition
“I AM NOT A ROBOT” – ON THE BORDERS OF THE SINGULARITY”
Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary
September 16 - November 27, 2022

SoniLab is the University of North Texas College of Music data sonification laboratory led by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli (creative director and composer),
with Garrison Gerard, Chris Poovey, Patrick Reed, Benjamin Shirey and Okan Yaşarlar (composers and sound designers).

for the installation
Fake News Apostles by BarábasiLab
Gabor Klitzinger (video art)  
A.-Laszlo Barabasi (artistic and scientific director)

I am not a robot, am I? - Binaural ReMix

L'Indifferenza dell'Amore Cosmico (The Indifference of Cosmic Love)
for flauto d'amore, clarinet, electronics and cosmic rays (2021)  

Ginevra Petrucci, flauto d'amore; Gleb Kanasevich, clarinet; 
Marco Buongiorno Nardelli, electronics   

Recorded live at "An evening exploration of music complexity" presented by the Santa Fe Institute and SITE Santa Fe. Performance at SITE Santa Fe on May 16, 2022 - world premiere

L'Indifferenza dell'Amore Cosmico

Electroacoustic cantata for 16 female voices on fixed media (10 audio channels) by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli for the exhibition “The Art of Connection” by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi/BarabasiLab at the MEET Digital Culture Center in Milan, Italy, February-April 2023. Soprano and lyrics: Júlia Coelho

La Solitudine delle Moltitudini

miniature opera for voices and fixed media (four channel audio, polystyrene, plexiglas, electronic components and orange beanbags)

Music by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli

soprano: Adria Le Boeuf; spoken voice: Heather Spence; libretto: Ken Eklund, Heather Spence, Adria Le Boeuf, Peter Walter, Marco Buongiorno Nardelli ("The Band of Six")]

Technical design and electronics: Frank Cerasoli

This miniature opera was conceived at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in July 2017 as a collaborative art installation. In it, we are asking participants to express their own ideas about the steps and progress of a creative journey into the unknown. On the array we place nodes that describe different moments of the creative process in Science and/or Art, and the audience undertakes sense-making by connecting (all or just some of) the nodes to represent their own creative process. The libretto for the miniature opera UNKNOWN, a journey is composed by the following words: TRANSFORM, ILLUMINATE, FLOURISH, SYNTHESIZE, EVOLVE, LISTEN, ENVISION, STEW, PITCH, FAIL, PRUNE, and DIG.

Unknown, a journey

Unknown, a journey (concert fixed media version)

Tzolk'in is the name of the version of the 260-day Mesoamerican calendar which was used by the Maya civilization, and it is regarded as being the oldest and most important of the calendar systems attested in the region. The Tzolk'in calendar ("Tzolk'in" means "count of days") combines a cycle of twenty named days with another cycle of thirteen numbers to produce 260 unique days. The numbers 20 and 13 were important numbers for the Maya: twenty was the basis of the Maya counting system, taken from the number of human fingers and toes. Thirteen symbolized the number of levels in the Upperworld where the gods lived.
This composition for three marimbas exploits the interlocking structure of the Tzolk'in calendar, where 20 melodic units are superimposed to 13 different meter regions, creating a cycle where pitch and rhythmic structures follow each other for 260 four-beat units for a total duration of 13 min. Performance by by the Volta Trio (Chris Clarino, Jonny Allen and Erik Lutters, marimbas)

Tzolk'in

Two drones written for the iTunes podcast “StaticMusic | Drones” of the New York Miniaturist Ensemble.

Kaleida

Recorded live by the "New York System" ensemble at Rhode Island College, RI (E. Codd, vl; K. Waters, C. Craig, fl; M. Buongiorno Nardelli, electronics; A. Shockley, conductor)

rain over tallin

Canto Notturno (di un pastore errante dell’Asia)

CONTRAPPUNTO I is part of a collection of compositions, “Inventions from Data”, where I explore the aesthetic potential of big data as artistic objects. Starting from the sonification and remix of complex data streams, this collection of pieces reflects different approaches to data-driven composition and improvisation. Using the computer aided data-driven composition environment materialssoundmusic, the incoming data are manipulated with a broad palette of musical and esthetic choices before being finally engraved in the score. The music is born of a process like that of a sculptor who uses clay (the raw data) to mold any object or create any design, and embodies the continuous flowing of data all around us in a dialogue that ultimately reflects, in an artistic way, the binary nature of information.

Contrappunto I

for flute, player piano, electronics and live data stream. Flute, Ieng Wai Wong (NOVA ensemble), electronics, Marco Buongiorno Nardelli. Premiered at ICMC 2015. See http://www.materialssoundmusic.com/#!music/c19kg for more info on the piece and http://imslp.org/wiki/Ricercare_(Buongiorno_Nardelli,_Marco) for the score.

Ricercare

JXOverdrive is a composition constructed entirely using a computer-aided data-driven composition environment based on the sonification and remix of scientific data streams. The piece is scored for four bassoons, drum machine (or live drummer) and electronic effects. 
In the piece, the process of sonification of the data is used as the raw material in a compositional infrastructure based on MAX/MSP and MAX for Live: I use these data as a sculptor would use clay (the raw data) to mold any object or create any design. Here, all elements of the composition continually transform in a dialogue that ultimately reflects, in an artistic way, the quantum nature of reality and its transformations at microscopic scales. 
For more info visit www.materialssoundmusic.com

JXOverdrive

Soundscape for the "Installation in the Old Barn" by Javiera Tejerina-Risso at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in July 2017. (Photo by Javiera Tejerina-Risso)

Mylar soundscape

six experiments for string quartet and fixed media

​Mia Detwiler, Karim Ayala Pool, violins; Kathleen Crabtree, viola; Kourtney Newton, cello.

See also at https://vimeo.com/265301021/907ad70c00,

2. 非常饿了 (feichang e le), "very hungry" or the emergence of the machine

1. Even snails can accelerate

Meditation is inspired by fragments of poetry by the Chinese poet Wang Wei (699-759 CE) and is meant to highlight the expressive possibilities offered by a new viola bow design by the French-Italian bow maker Marie-Eve Geeraert. The piece is written in 24 tones equal temperament and uses, at its foundation, harmonic hierarchies and rhythmic sequences based on a compositional design derived from complex network analysis.

Meditation
Thin cloud. Light rain.
Unfold your thoughts.
Against the light.
Sit. Look.

Kathleen Crabtree, viola, Justin Kujawski, contrabass,
Morgan Horning, soprano

Meditation

Tout ce qu’on perd

for voice, flauto d’amore and flugelhorn
after a poem by Hyam Yared
music by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli

voice and text, Hyam Yared
flauto d’amore, Ginevra Petrucci
flugelhorn, Nathan Hudson

For the Creativity Quarantine of the Flauto d’Amore Project
(world premier on BandCamp, April 17, 2020)

J'ai mis leur desert dans mon plat. C'est
tout ce qu'on sert.
Tout ce qu'on perd. Du sable ou
des pierres avec
presque pas d'eau. Ma soif est mon
clou. Je mange
ton absence. Les passages ne sont pas
ou l'on pense

​

(with permission from the author)

ToutCeQuOnPerd

Marco Buongiorno Nardelli is Regents Professor at the University of North Texas, a  composer, flutist, a computational materials physicist, and a member of CEMI, The Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia, and of iARTA, the Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Institute of Physics, a founding member of the AFLOW Consortium and a Parma Recordings artist. 
materialssoundmusic is a new computer-aided data-driven composition (CADDC) environment based on the sonification and remix of scientific data streams.

materialssoundmusic

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