We really enjoyed this piece. The performer was talented. Basson, sometimes sounded like a clarinet or saxophone. A very interesting piece requiring an accomplished performer. I’d like to hear mor like this for different I strummers. Thanks, Haodong. MikE

for recordings of satellites, string quartet and electronics

Paris, Centre Pompidou April 18th 2021
Quatuor Diotima

**********************

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)

This is the excerpt of my solo work for saxophone. Drowning flame -- submerged flame is still trying to burn under the water. Changing colour silently and losing heat gradually.

Composer:  Haodong Wang
Saxophone: Dan Gribbin

Drowning Flame(excerpt)

Performed by musicians at the Royal Northern College of Music on 2/2/23. Conducted by Steve Berry.

Nearly Home

12 world premières of the selected composers at the 7th International Young Composers Academy in Ticino, performed by the acclaimed Neuevocalsolisten Stuttgart and Musikfabrik at concerts in the Onsernone Valley (Loco and Comologno, June 30 and July 1st 2023).

TUTORS
Oscar Bianchi (director and professor) - www.oscarbianchi.com
Clara Iannotta (professor) - www.claraiannotta.com
Lisa Streich (professor) - www.lisastreich.se

Linxi Chen (China, USA - 2000): Chatoyant Of Somberness

Bernat Pont Anglada (Spain, Switzerland - 1998): La Sagrada Família

Commission: Südwestrundfunk for the Donaueschingen Musiktage 2022

Live recording of the world première, Musica Nova Helsinki, 3 March 2023.

Performers:
Mattie Barbier, trombone
Weston Olencki, trombone
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra
Janne Nisonen, conductor

Photo: Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra

where the dark earth bends (2022, rev. 2023), for RAGE Thormbones, orchestra, and electronics

For flute, Horn, E-guitar, Violin and Double Bass
Performed by: Ensemble MusikFabrik
Conductor: Angus Young
International Young Composer Academy Ticino

Parallax Ga(s)p (2023)_for ensemble

1 August 2023, Theater im Palais, Leonhardstraße 19, 8010 Graz

zone expérimentale basel

Clara Giner Franco, bass flute 
Manca Dornik, accordion  
Pietro Elia Barcellona, double bass

‘’Eros concerns the other in strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego.’’*
- 
Byung-Chul Han

Throughout the composing process I deeply hesitated  to write any words about the piece. This uneasiness was not caused by the complicatedness of the questions and intentions behind the piece. Rather, it was their inner contradictions and radical dispositions which made articulating them so difficult. They seemed to me very irrational, erratic and reactive to be helpful  to the listener throughout the listening process. 

However, at first the piece was motivated to explore perceptual roots of erotic experience caused by an encounter with the other or  one's own otherness. Unfortunately, the exploration did not  succeed. Rather it turned out to be a confrontation with the agony of Eros who is burning in the inferno of the same.

Ankara, 12.04.2023
*Han Byung-Chul et al. The Agony of Eros. MIT Press 2017.

Eros therefore Psyche (or not an Oriental rug) (2023) for bass flute, accordion and double bass

Concerto for Violin Solo and Orchestra

Recording performed by ORF Wien Modern, Carolin Widmann and Sylvain Camberling

First performed at Darmstadt Summer Course 14. August 2016, Radial System Berlin and Weimar Festspiel by Carolin Widmann, Sylvain Cambreling, Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and dancers from Sasha Waltz and Guests. 
Choreography by Antonio Rúz.

https://issuu.com/editionpeters/docs/ep_12015r__rebecca_saunders__still_

Drowning Flame(excerpt)

Haodong Wang

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