étude 1bis (d'après Scarlatti)- 2002

Ridotto del teatro Grande, Brescia, nov 2006

Arrangement in Black - Dèdalo Ensemble - Patricia Alessandrini

Nani, version 1 came out of my collaboration with the flutist Chryssi Dimitriou, and was premiered at her recital at the Salle Cortot in Paris in January 2009. It was Chryssi who introduced me to several different versions of the traditional Greek lullaby Nani, including an a cappella version by Stella Gadadi. I listened to this version several times without understanding the text; when I read a translation afterwards, I was struck by the fact that there was something of the strange mixture of tenderness and anguish of the text (see below) in the musical expression of the work, particularly in the inflections of the voice of Gadadi. I decided to try to convey these characteristics without maintaining either recognisable elements of the text, which would retain some traces of the meaning of the words, or explicit quotations of the harmony, which might transmit coded expressive associations; I therefore limited myself to the use of a few brief samples of the noise content of Gadadi’s voice, drawn principally from her breathing between phrases. I hoped to thereby preserve aspects of the interpretation without reproducing the work itself; however, the temporality of the work is conserved, as the breaths used in my version to excite ‘virtual’ percussion instruments (creating through physical modelling) occurring in the same time frame as in the original recording.

Nani, version 1

Ensemble Intercontemporain
Live Recording, Festival Acanthes, 2003
Technical support: IRCAM

Trio après Schoenberg - Ensemble Intercontemporain

Abhanden - Klangforum Wien

Tracer la lune d'un doigt

a short feedback test with piano and small amplifier

in which the strings are made to sound by the vibrations of the feedback

Q-02 - another test with distortion

De Profundis Clamavi (hommage à Alban Berg)

Forklaret Nat

When David Heard for contrabass and percussion with live electronics (2005)		12:03	
Patricia Alessandrini	
Frédéric Stochl, contrabass, Niklas Brommare, percussion
		Mikhail Malt, musical assistant, Joachim Olaya, sound engineer, 
technical support, IRCAM
live recording, Espace de projection, IRCAM, 2005


When David Heard

Funeral Sentences (hommage à Purcell) for violin, cello, guitar, percussion, live electronics	9:34
		Ensemble Vortex with guest cellist Esme DeVries 
		Fred Miguel, sound engineer
		technical support: MIA and La Muse en Circuit 
		Geneva, Festival Archipel, 2007

Funeral Sentences

Recording by JACK quartet of an excerpt from A complete history of music for string quartet and electronics.
Commissioned by Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik (WTK) 2020.
Broadcast première on WDR3, April 2020.

A complete history of music - Appendix 2

Song of Alma is the first in a series of "songs" commissioned by the Argento Ensemble, which focuses on the role of memory in the compositional process, taking both the musical works and the life story of Alma Mahler as a starting point. 
After writing some very successful pieces as a promising young student of Zemlinsky, Alma Mahler was obliged to stop composing by Gustav as a condition of their marriage. Once he discovered her affair with Walter Gropius, he regretted this decision, and encouraged Alma to compose, but she found it difficult to pick up her musical life where she had left off. As a female-identifying composer/sound artist, aspects of this story of obstructed ambition and attempted redemption seem familiar; these themes also resonate with the resurgence of the #metoo movement in 2017.
In 2018, I worked with the members of Ensemble Argento in developing this brief piece beginning the series, over the course of a residency in NYC. This residency culminated in a performance of this brief work for soprano, large ensemble and embedded electronics in the Moving Sounds Festival of the Austrian Cultural Center.

Song of Alma for soprano, ensemble and electronics - ArgentoEnsemble, Moving Sounds Festival

Leçons de ténèbres is based upon various settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, including compositions by Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso, Tallis, Zelenka, and Couperin (from whom the title is derived), using only the Hebrew letters which precede each verse. Musical materials are derived from various performances and various settings of given letter for each section of the composition. The idea behind this process is that the content of the text of each verse is expressed by the setting of the letter that precedes it. What remains are traces of expressivity, without the semantic content of the text.

These traces of the original settings are contained in the instrumental parts, but also in the electronics, which are transmitted through the instruments with the use of transducers. At times the resulting effect is that there is an ‘original’ source which emanates from the certain instruments and propagates itself through the ensemble, but it can also be the reverse, that there is a resonance which is a consequence of the instrumental parts, which is in turn a resonance of the original composition referenced. This is heard in traces of harmony and melodic lines which emerge from a sometimes noisy and complex musical texture.

The pianist pilots the electronics in part by playing on a small midi keyboard placed on/in the piano. In order to superimpose a 20th-century figurative language on materials originating in earlier musics, the pianist employs some gestures and figures inspired by the Ligeti études on both the piano and keyboard. This stylistic juxtaposition is apparent as well in the use of extended techniques in the other instruments, which also have the effect of suppressing the recognisable timbre of each instrument to create one unified ‘meta-instrument’ from the ensemble.	

This work is dedicated to Ensemble Recherche, with gratitude for their insights during the compositional process. I would also like to thank other musicians with whom I have had close collaborations preceding this piece, as their advice has shaped the work, particularly members of Ensemble Interface and Ensemble InterContemporain. Many thanks as well to Donaueschinger Musiktage and the SWR for their kind collaboration in providing the required materials for the electronics.

Patricia Alessandrini

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