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Circus DeMille — Andy Blaney

Contemporary History

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Restoration

Island Gray Over Waves

dedicated to Henri Demarquette

performed by Henri Demarquette and Sequenza 9.3., cond. Catherine Simonpietri

Plonge tes yeux dans les yeux fixes / Des Satyresses our des Nixes                            Charles Baudelaire (L'Avertisseur, Fleurs du Mal)

1st performance: 3rd of June, 2015, Philharmonie de Paris                                       

"Plonge" (eng. "Plunge") for cello and 12 voices (2015) was commissioned by Henri Demarquette and the vocal Ensemble Sequenza 9.3  for their programme "Vocello" and premiered at a special concert at the Philharmonie de Paris on the 3rd of June.
As my previous pieces were mostly written for strings (especially cello) and voices, usually in "monochrome" ensembles, I was really curious to mix, fuse these timbres together in a very homogeneous texture, revealing the "cantabile" quality of both and exploring very different colours of different ranges of the cello which may correspond to different timbres of the choir.
When I discovered "Vocello" repertoire, I got completely taken by Dido's Lament by Henry Purcell the musicians included into their programme, which is based on a continuously descending basso continuo. In terms of baroque rethorics this figure is called catabasis, a musical symbol of the descent to the underworld. Then by a pure accident my attention had been captured by a related ecxerpt from Charles Baudelaire's poetry, creating a mystic vision of sinking into a state of stasis (Plonge tes yeux dans les yeux fixes / Des Satyresses our des Nixes from L'Avertisseur, Fleurs du Mal). So my piece is an acoustic metaphor of all these inspirations together. The musical process is an extremely gradual catabasis although with a "happier end", rather bringing to an ecstatic, hypnotic state unlike the tragic Purcell's final. The musical structure of the piece could remind of a whirling vortex that is gradually getting more and more slow, wide, profound until the cellist gets drowned and melted in the sea of voices which accumulate like increasing resonances of the cello line... Through this slowing vortex the connection between the musical time sensation and space is also being explored: the more the acoustic space is filled in with sounds, the more their spectrum becomes wider and richer, the more the time gets slow until completely freezes. Juste Janulyte

"Plonge" for cello and 12 voices (2015)

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Ostinato Strings: The phrase library for complex chords
Ever since we started developing phrase libraries (and we've done quite a few now), we've been wanting to expand the harmonic material these libraries could output. We've never really been able to go beyond standard major and minor chords with our recorded phrases. There are many reasons for this; because our phrases are recorded live as a whole rather than constructed from smaller pieces, because there are hardware limitations to user's computers and because there are limits to the recording time we can allocate to a specific product while still keeping it affordable. Some of our products do contain different material, and with the harmonic shift function there are ways to approach things like 7th chords and sus chords, but until now we didn't have a way to play all the chords we wanted and also offer different inversions of these chords.
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Piotr Ługowski 1