This work, for solo tuba and live-electronics is the result of a close work with Melvyn Poore. It uses widely morphed sounds (tuba-voice) transformed live and spatialized over 4, 8 or more loudspeakers (at ZKM over the Klangdom).
It is composed on sonnet by John Donne:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy picture[s] be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou’rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke ;  why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more;  Death, thou shalt die.

SONNET X

why the trees were murmuring 
for orchestra, improvising trombonist and two spatial ensemble 
commissioned by Steven and Brenda Schick
soloist: Peter Sloan 
conductor: Steven Schick
written for the La Jolla Symphony
Premiere, San Diego, February 2020 
live-recording
----
some words about the piece: 

Why the trees were murmuring is an appreciation of diversity and community. 
In writing this piece, I was moved to explore these themes from various perspectives. Performers are positioned around the concert hall and sounds are embracing the audience. A unique collection of diverse materials and practices has come together and formed a hybrid assemblage in which different kinds of musical practices such as - improvisation, vocalization, and spatialization have joined the orchestra and created a multi-diverse community. 
 
The composition of the musical material is also influenced and shaped based on the qualities of a diversified community.  Aside from having an improviser soloist on the stage, the spatialized ensemble surrounding the audience, and the extensive exploration of instrumental colors, every group of instruments functions additionally as soloists in one or more parts of the piece. At the same time that everything is precisely notated, there is always a level of freedom in every section, which allows the realization of the piece to be a co-joint act.  
 
 
Why the trees were murmuring reveals a journey of the colorful pallet of instrumental sounds hybridized with the whisperings of the fragmented texts. These snippets of texts are selected from Braiding Sweetgrass, written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and poems by the iconoclast Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad. 
The piece unfolds into an improvised coda by the orchestra, amidst the bird calls, various bells, the traces of hope, light, and love from the orchestra and the solo trombone and ultimately the orchestra whispering  … “I will greet the sun again” …
 
****

why the trees were murmuring (2020)

Where darkness swallows the sky (2024)
from The Memory of Water Vol. II

Premiered by Martine Thomas, viola, Thea Mesirow, cello and voice on March 16, 2024 at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City, NY.

Where darkness swallows the sky

Paracusia III.descry (2019-2020)
by Camila Agosto

World premiere performed by Justin Massey (saxophone) at Lenfest Center for Arts, February 2020. 

Audio Recording by David Adamcyk.

Paracusia III. descry

With the term "countersinging" bioacousticians refer to the vocal interaction between two or more birds of a same species. It often appears to be a territorial negotiation, but it could also be a kind of courtship display or a way to exchange other types of information. During countersinging the individuals behave according to precise rules conveying messages whose meaning, however, we mainly fail to understand. This piece takes some of the evidence at our disposal about countersinging in birds as a starting point to build an evolving interaction between two instruments. 

Written for and premiered at ilSUONO Contemporary Music Week 2025
Michele Bianchini, baritone saxophone; Giacomo Piermatti, double bass
Audio Recording/Mixing/Mastering: Theocharis Papatrechas
July 13, 2025
Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Servi
Sansepolcro, Italy

Countersinging

This is the short edit, the long edit is on Bandcamp: https://ausgesuchtestenohren.bandcamp.com/album/memorial-to-a-long-lost-piano

The present work originates from an intimate engagement with a personal sound archive. In 2017, I recorded the interior resonance of an upright piano that had accompanied my childhood — an instrument now lost, along with the family home in which it stood. These recordings, focusing on the raw timbral qualities of the strings, became the basis for Exercises in Minimalism (2018). The material was subjected to reductive processes: attacks were removed, durations extended, and harmonic overtones isolated and layered to form sustained piano drones. Through this process, the familiar sound of the piano was transformed into an abstract field of resonance, emphasizing texture over gesture and continuity over articulation.

Eight years later, I returned to these recordings and composed a new piece derived entirely from the earlier material. Conceived as a funeral music for the lost piano, the work employs convolution reverb generated from the Hamilton Mausoleum — a site renowned for its exceptionally long and unpredictable echo. The resulting spatialization situates the reconstructed piano sounds within a vast and reverberant acoustic environment, blurring the boundaries between presence and absence, memory and space.

This composition explores the intersection of personal memory, acoustic space, and sonic decay. By recontextualizing archival sound within an architectural reverberation, it examines how listening can become an act of remembrance.


Bandcamp

Memorial to a long-lost piano (edit)

Tiroler Symphonie Orchester Innsbruck
RepertorioZero [Séverine Ballon (amplified detuned Cello), Simone Beneventi (amplified Cellodrum and Bell Plates), Francesco Zago (prepared 7-string Electric Guitar)]
Johannes Schütt: Ambisonic diffusion system (ICST Zürich)
Carlo Ciceri (live spatialization)
Paolo Brandi (sound engineering)
Francesco Angelico (conductor)

Klangspuren Festival Schwaz, 10.09.2015 - live recording 

(headphones suggested)

|Vɔɪz| (2015), for amplified Orchestra, three soloists and live spatialization

Zaubersprüche (2019), composed on ritual texts from old German (Althochdeutsch) features six solo voices performing in various spatial disposition so that acoustic sound projection simulates a sound spatialization.
Each refrain or section is composed on a different text representing an old ritual, whereas singers are placed in various positions in order to create a timbre (and dynamic) variation of a single pitch/word. 
Further tools and small objects will also be used to project the vocal sounds in some peculiar ways, giving to each movement a special timbre and atmosphere.

The character of such texts consists on one hand in their unique linguistic nature: words sounding familiar but are actually rather inscrutable, on the other, in the incomparable mix of christian religion with archaic and popular practices, sort of esoteric rituals suggesting unusual music (sonic) situations.

Zaubersprueche (2019)

Adumbration: to suggest, disclose, or outline partially; to foreshadow vaguely; overshadow, obscure.

Adumbrations goes through a series of statements towards a sensibility of ideals and shadows, utilizing female voices reciting a series of tongue twisters that iterate sibilant, fricative, and bilabial sounds. If spoken incorrectly, the sound qualities of these tongue twisters are heard as curse words. Therefore, there needs to be consistency in the process of speaking these tongue twisters explicitly. In the English language curse words can function as multiple parts of speech, and as the saying goes, people who curse more frequently are more honest. 

This piece explores the dichotomous relationship between certain ideals and shadows, i.e. consistencies and inconsistencies, actuality and potentiality, and the explicit and the honest, as it goes through a series of musical adumbrations that “halo” the process of these tongue twisters. Through these adumbrations, the contradictory can be either one or the other of the ideals or shadows turning on itself, and at times the appearance of the clarity and the inaccuracy are in an indefinite flux through these halos.  This occurs as inconsistent phonemes are turned from inaccurate iterations of the tongue twisters into something sounding consistent.  The halos are supplementing the voice within varying simultaneous parameters that include shimmering, radiating around the iterations and vice/versa, and existing as a spatial supplement revolving in different stereo planes around and as a process, and out of the immersive comes our personal perception of the contradiction.  One can think of this adumbrated halo, in this sense, as a place where the dichotomous relationship becomes indistinguishable, and laughter for a flawed system. 

This piece is partially inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s movie Persona.

Thank you so much for the wonderful voice recordings:
Elizabeth Gartman
Caroline Mckinzie
Logan Piker

Adumbrations

Whale Song Stranding


Inflections as sound process to sound quality
Emanating otherness of the
Sound quality to sound process from the reflective

Resulting in an immersive rhizome-like sound world of the omnipresent of the dream like and the very literal 

As different zones are successive, simultaneous, above, below, before, and after, to neither rise nor sink but only float 

A longing as the friction, disputes of the literal and dream-like

And

A persistence of a pulse, heavy, through the literal as a constant movement and the abstract ingenuous stillness, a sound world of the discursive and the narrative

Chiastic process and quality is undermined as the reflections and inflections recur in rounded proportions.  The immersive and form is only tangible through this insistence that is perceived as a dream occurring in real-time

Figuratively
Whale Song suggests, quite literally, uncertainty that is

Stuck between the discursive and the narrative,
The moving streams/waves and the pure tones surrounding within,
Stranding

Whale Song Stranding

Camila Agosto is a composer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator whose electroacoustic music examines how
we perceive sound and vibration, exploring their physiological, mental, and emotional impacts. In her work, Camila collaborates with
musicians, visual artists, choreographers, and instrument builders, seeking to uncover intersections across artistic fields. Her work
includes both fully notated and improvisational compositions emphasizing timbral and textural exploration. She aims to reveal the
sonic potentialities of acoustic instruments while highlighting the human element in live performance. Her projects encompass
acoustic and electroacoustic concert works, interdisciplinary collaborations with visual media and dance, installations, and fixed media
creations.

Camila was honored to be the youngest fellow to be accepted to the American Academy in Berlin and is a recipient of the Fall 2023 Berlin Prize and Deutsche Bank Fellowship in Music Composition from the Academy. Her music has been commissioned and performed by leading artists and featured by venues throughout the United States and abroad. Camila is currently an ABD doctoral candidate at Columbia University in Music Composition.

David Quang-Minh Nguyen is an audio engineer, sound designer/re-recording mixer, and composer of concert music. His current interests lie in composing acousmatic works that explore multi-channel loudspeaker expansion, various types of sound spatialization, and immersive audio.

Recognized nationally and internationally, David has had his works presented at the June in Buffalo New Music Festival, where he received individual master classes with Harvey Sollberger, Martin Bresnick, Roger Reynolds, and Brian Ferneyhough. He was an active participant in the Festival DME under the direction of Åke Parmerud, Musique & Recherches Académie d'été de composition électroacoustique under the direction of Annette Vande Gorne and João Pedro Oliveira, and the Sounds Around Me Festival under Thomas Gorbach. He was also selected by Master Artist Robert Normandeau for a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

His works have been presented at more than fifty national and international events, and he is a laureate or finalist in numerous competitions.  He has been published on ABLAZE Records' Electronic Masters Vol. 7 and received an honorable mention at the XII° Destellos Electroacoustic Competition 2019 for his work Misprints.  He also placed 2nd in the XIII° Destellos competition for Adumbrations, was a finalist for the PRIX CIME 2019, and won 2nd place for the ASCAP/SEAMUS Award for his work Weight Stranding. In 2021, his SEAMUS-commissioned piece Whale Song Stranding was selected for presentation on the SEAMUS 31 CD and received the Ars Electronica Forum Wallis selection.  David was awarded the Prix CIME 2023 Residency Award for Whale Song Stranding.  His work Texture Arc the Points won 1st place in the ULJUS Međunarodno Pijanističko Takmičenje Smederevo Competition and 2nd place in the prestigious Concours Biennal de Composition Acousmatique Métamorphoses.

David Q. Nguyen holds a BM from Old Dominion University, where he studied with Andrey R. Kasparov and Mark Chambers.  He also graduated at the top of his class from The Omega Studios School of Applied Recording Arts & Sciences with a focus on Audio Engineering in the Music Industry and Film/Television.  He has received his Master and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where his primary teachers are Reynold Tharp, Erik Lund, Eli Fieldsteel, Sever Tipei, and Scott A. Wyatt.

Composer based in Lugano (Switzerland).
Member of the Executive Committee of RepertorioZero.

Acousmatic music, sound art and field recordings from Vienna and elsewhere.

The works of the composer and conductor, Valerio Sannicandro, are the product of different cultural influences and of his own reflections about the parameter 'space' that he researches consequently, first as compositeur associé at IRCAM (Paris), then at the Technische Universität (Berlin) where he got a Ph.D. in Musicology and at Experimentalstudio (Freiburg). Compositions like Strali (2002), Fibrae (2005), Ius Lucis (2006/2007) and Forces Motrices (2010) are the most outstanding examples of his interest in large orchestral instrumentations, as well as of his concern with the role and the aesthetic of (live) electronics. He is currently working at Experimentalstudio of SWR (Freiburg) on Finesterrae, a new work for voices, viola and live-electronics. He has been awarded among others the Claudio-Abbado Prize from the Academy of Berlin Philharmonics in 2014, the Musica Viva Composition Prize, München in 2002 and 2010, the Giga-Hertz production Prize as well as the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (2000). His works have been recorded on CD for Wergo and Telos Music Records. He has been invited at the Villa Kujoyama (Kyoto) and is new music advisor at the Philharmonisches Orchester Cottbus (Germany). His works are published by Edizioni Suvini-Zerboni (Milan).

Anahita Abbasi’s music has been described as “a dizzyingly sophisticated reverie, colorful and energetic. It embodies tremendous timbral exploration and multilayered performance gestures”… (Classical Voice America and A Cunning plan). 

According to Guardian …”She takes even a more radical line with creating dense and pulsing textures”… “Her music has the capacity to immerse the hall into a dark multichannel throat and hissing” … (Bachtrack) 

Volkskrant describes … “the Iranian Anahita Abbasi, shows herself to be a composer with guts in the two-year-old Intertwined Distances Alienating whistling noises and furious fistfights with the keyboard, alternated with delicate strings, lead to a theatrical listening experience” ...

Ernst. M Binder also writes: …“As it is also vivid from the titles of her works such as Dialogues, Situations, Distorted Attitudes, she investigates and gesticulate thoughts and emotions. It is manifestation/ observation of a scene or multiple scenes, which occur simultaneously. She has the tendency to take us with her music on a mystical, puzzling journey and leave us within our thoughts, to find out the “ending” ourselves”… 

About her piece for Mahan Esfahani Boulezian Blogspot writes: …” There was, without doubt, an extraordinarily inventive musical imagination at work, but it was never merely invention: it was a sonic and instrumental drama that seemed somehow to summarise, to extend, and quite properly to question many of the tendencies we had heard so far”…

Anahita Abbasi’s music has been commissioned and performed by distinguished soloists and ensembles such as Mahan Esfahani, Steven Schick, Vimbayi Kaziboni, Rebekah Heller, Sergej Tchirkov, Artyom kim, Ensemble Modern, International Contemporary Ensemble, UmeDuo, Klangforum Wien musicians, Wavefiled Ensemble, San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, Disonart Ensemble, Platypus Ensemble, Quatuor Diotima, Mivos Quartet, Argonaut Quartet, Tak Ensemble, Schallfeld Ensemble, Zafraan Ensemble, Contemporaneous, Blaue Reiter, Off Spring Ensemble, and has been showcased at festivals all around the world among which: Mostly Mozart Festival, The Kitchen, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Niefnorf, Soundnow Festival- Bent Frequency, Roulette, National Sawdust, Mise -En festival (USA), Darmstadt Ferienkurse (Germany), IRCAM – Manifeste Academy (France), Matrix –Experimental studio des SWR, Alte Oper (Germany), BIFEM (Australia), Klangspuren Schwaz (Austria), Sound State festival (Southbank Centre, London), Tectonics (Glasgow), Akademie der Künste (Berlin), United Berlin, Klang Festival (Copenhagen), Tage Neuer Musik, Open music (Austria), Omnibus Ensemble (Uzbekistan), Contempuls (Prague), Tangram Trio (Switzerland), Tongyeong International Music Festival (Korea), neuverBand Ensemble (Switzerland), Ensemble Kollektive (Germany), Acht Brücken Festival (Cologne), Impuls Festival (Austria), Time of Music (Finland), Atlas Festival (Netherlands), Grachten Festival (Netherlands), duo Verso and Bilitis and many others.

Ms. Abbasi has received several awards, including a work-scholarship from the Experimentalstudio des SWR, Freiburg (2014), a Morton Gold ASCAP young composers award (2015), a nomination for “women composers of our time” (2017) as well as the composition prize of the Acht Brücken Festival (2020). In 2022 she has been awarded the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy and UCROSS Foundation residency in Wyoming. 

Aside from teaching composition, giving lectures and curating workshops on fundamentals of creation, and serving as a juror at composition competitions, she is also a founding member of Schallfeld Ensemble in Graz, Austria as well as IFCA (Iranian Female Composers Association) in the USA, New York..; where she is curating concerts, workshops, conferences, creating platforms and advocating for young composers and acts as their ambassadors in presenting their music to others. 

Anahita Abbasi (world citizen-1985) was born and raised in Iran. In 2005 she moved to Austria and pursued her undergrad at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, where she studied music theory with Clemens Gadenstätter and Christian Utz & composition with Beat Furrer and Pierluigi Billone; while working closely with Georges Aperghis, Franck Bedrossian, and Philippe Leroux. In 2014 she moved to the US to pursue her Ph.D. degree in Composition with Rand Steiger at UC San Diego.

Currently, Abbasi is residing in New York and in Paris, where she has been awarded a three-year-long residency with Fondation Singer Polignac and Ensemble Le Balcon (Paris, France). Her upcoming projects are commissions from ensemble “der gelbe Klang”, Kommas and New Babylon, Podium Esslingen, and Ensemble Modern for Darmstadt 2023.

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