Mecanismos - premiered during the 2023 Distat Terra Festival
Quartetto Maurice
Sound recording: Pablo Boltshauser

Mecanismos - for string quartet

Planetarium:Beta (2022) for Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Violoncello and Piano

From the cycle: "Kilpisjärvi Sessions"

@Collettivo_21 :
Eleonora Liuzzi / Alessandro Mazzacane / Giulia Pastorino / Daniele Nava / Lorenzo Moretto / Lorenzo Di Marco / Luca Guidarini

Recorded 6th of August 2023 at Casa Della Musica San Michele, Montaldeo / Foresty Festival
Mix: Alessandro Perini
Master: Luca Guidarini

www.collettivo21.com
www.alessandroperini.com

Geology. Earth Data Collector (Collettivo 21), 2023

A fiftieth birthday piece for Brian Ferneyhough, for two prepared vibraphones. The overall form of Jam Karet (1994) is a that of a set of interlocked refrains and ostinati of various types. The title is an Indonesian expression which in literal translation means “elastic time”, and is obviously suggestive in terms of musical process. Its point of departure is a one-measure quotation from Lemma-Icon-Epigram. (The whole idea came to me in a weird flash where I imagined subjecting a Ferneyhough quotation to a developmental process as if a secretly spectralist Donatoni had briefly adopted a minimalist aesthetic with a Takemitsu-esque touch, while still keeping the irrationally subvidided subdivisions. As it turned out, when Brian heard the piece, he didn't recognize the quote, and he liked the piece.) The work was begun in 1993, set aside, and then completed by the summer of 1994; it was first performed at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik that year by Yuko Suzuki and Kuniko Kato. The American premiere was given by Terry Longshore and David Shively during the Emerging Voices Festival in February 1995 in San Diego, California. The Asian premiere was given by Kuniko Kato and the Paulownia Percussion Ensemble in Tokyo in April 1996.

Jam Karet (1994)

Recording by Pablo Rubino (violin) and Diana Gasparini (viola), June, 2023 in Buenos Aires.

Score purchase: https://www.babelscores.com/catalogs/instrumental/5442-not-here-not-there-somewherei-ii

This piece is a study of human relationships. Genders and types are irrelevant. In a relationship, each individual is both dependent and independent. The conflict and struggles between us bring us closer while generating confusion. Who am I, who are you, what am I to you and what are you to me? By trying to find the self compared to others, we are also losing the self to the others.

Parallel to the physical space, we also live in an immense psychological space inside of our minds. Since we often face difficulties locating ourselves in this invisible world, we feel uncomfortable. We don’t like to lose the control of our positions, so we try to offer, to lie, to love, to harm, to kiss, and to kill. What do we get in the end?

Maybe human beings are a kind of creature that can only be either absolutely lonely or extremely complicated.

Cover image © Alice Farion

not here... not there... somewhere... II 花犯 II (2020) for violin and viola

Live recording by Ding Zhang (saxophone), Ao Peng (viola), and Siyuan Li (piano), April 11, 2024, in Shenzhen, China.

Recording Engineer: Xikun Guo

The inspiration for "Playground" comes from an experience of survival senses in an alienated space. Imagine walking into an amusement park where all the rides are present but distorted in shape and altered in operation: the bouncy castles are as hard as granite, the roller coasters are suspended above the tracks, and the pirate ships hang upside down in mid-air... If we are told or forced by some external power to complete these amusement activities, knowing their abnormal state yet compelling ourselves to treat them as usual and immerse ourselves in them, we will undergo tremendous alienation of body and mind; this alienation would leave a person's body and mind scarred. When such alienation is finally accepted, and at that moment, we look at the prominent characters of "Playground" on the amusement park gate and smile, how should this "smile" be interpreted and defined? What is the meaning of its existence?

Score Purchase: https://www.babelscores.com/catalogs/instrumental/9149-playground9149

Cover photo © Sopor Aeternus

Playground 樂園 (2024) for soprano saxophone, viola, and piano

Composed for the 80th Composer Conference - Avaloch Farm Music Institute

Conducted and Performed by:
Vimbayi Kaziboni (Conductor) 
Barry Crawford, flute
Sarrah Bushara, oboe
Benjamin Fingland, clarinet
Adrian Morejon, bassoon
Sam Jones, trumpet
Daniel Linden, trombone
Steve Beck, piano
Adda Kridler, violin
Marina Kifferstein, violin
Liuh-Wen Ting, viola
Chris Gross, violoncello
Greg Chudzik, contrabass

Programme notes:
Recantation explores sonic gestures, timbres, and a collection of folk melodies that evoke a sense of withdrawal. Throughout the piece, these elements undergo transformations that suggest a retraction or reversal of previously established themes and textures. But eventually, these musical ideas gradually lose their energy - illustrating the inevitable decline and become unable to sustain their original form.

Recantation for Twelve Instruments (2024)

Atento (2013) | Agustín Salzano

Grabada en vivo, 9 de octubre de 2014, sala Astor Piazzolla del Teatro Argentino de La Plata, estreno mundial.

Emilia Martínez, flauta
Federico Nuñez, clarinete
Federico Jaureguiberry, saxo alto

Atento

Atento (2013) | para flauta, clarinete y saxo alto

Nahuel Ruiz [contrabajo] - Festival TARA - SUM de la ESM n° 6003 (Salta, Argentina).

Brocal [contrabajo solo] - (2023)

Travesía (1994) para clarinete, violonchelo y piano / for clarinet, cello and piano.

Thürmchen Ensemble (Diego Montes, cl., Caspar Johannes Walter, vc., Dorothea Eppendorf, piano).

Travesía

Phalanges, for Harp solo (1995) - program notes
The title "Phalanges" refers to the fingers' bones, the very skeleton of the player, the subcutaneous motor skills that underlie the act of playing/touching the strings. Compositionally, there are three main ideas that intersperse in this piece:
1) The ergonomic or motoric one, referring to the way the hands accommodate the technical demands of the instrument; 
2)The Rhythmic ‘sculpting,’ referring to the interaction of complex rhythms and the use of my system of Micro-Metric Modulation, a mathematical way to link very complex rhythms/ratios through common denominators speeds; 
3)The use of extended-techniques dividing the harp into three different sonic regions in which the middle one employs a cloth/paper that mutes the pitches subsequently creating a kind of timbral asymmetry in the sonic presentation of the instrument.
First, the ergonomic aspect: the creation of motives and themes in this piece are a direct result of the very patterns of the player's hands/fingers. New sonic material emerges as a result of the dislocation of the hands throughout the harp. This is accomplished in two ways: a) When the harpist stretches hands widening or contracting the gaps between fingers while maintaining similar fingerings’ patterns - thus, creating small melodic distortions; b) Through the mere pedal- retuning of the strings providing a diverse melodic or harmonic contour for similar hands' patterns; Even if the fingers’ patterns are not “thematically audible,” (since they only refer to the techniques that propel the sounds) they acquire, nevertheless, the status of "articulatory themes" being as important as the audible ones.
Second, using a mathematical way to mediate between two adjacent rhythms through a system I developed called Micro-Metric Modulation. Although complex rhythms can be very demanding to execute it is possible to imagine an effective rhythmic bridge that is common to two adjacent and differing rhythms or ratio configurations. This approach is based on commutative and associative properties and is derived from Elliott Carter’s polyrhythmic ideas, but in a “compressed” way. It is fully developed on my Doctoral Thesis from 1997-8 (Micro Metric Modulation: New Directions in the Theory of Complex Rhythms), although uses of it on my own music are anterior to the thesis itself).
Third, employing a series of devices (paper between strings, tuning fork, constant pedal glissandi, half-pedal “buzz” sounds, etc.) I managed to destabilize the typical way of playing the instrument and the way it is commonly heard. More than seeking mere effects, I was “seeing” the instrument as a sonic (found-)object that could be “subjected” to different types of timbristic and ergonomic demands. Finally, studying the way the instrument behaves under certain rhythmic constraints it was possible to manipulate with similar flexibility pitch and noise (extended-techniques) zones. The theatrical aspect of Phalanges conveys its deep meaning: Navigating between the fingers' technical demands and its almost magic output (the music itself) the harpist questions the public with a bleak and distancing (‘Brechtnian’) look, as if saying, - “...where does music begin? And where it ends...?”
© Arthur Kampela 2014

Mecanismos - for string quartet

Pablo Rubino Lindner