Sonic Fountain II

An excavation filled with milky water, Sonic Fountain is surmounted by nine taps distributed in a grid which taste according to a precisely written score. In the water, microphones record the sound of drops of water – sound broadcast live in space, like a concert. In the artist’s words, Sonic Fountain “is a deliberately abstract work that bares architecture and reveals its rhythm, tempo and language”.

Sounding Qubits

FILE 2024 | Quantico
International Electronic Language Festival
Eduardo Reck Miranda – Sounding Qubits – Brazil

Although he has learned classical musical instruments since childhood, Eduardo Miranda’s favorite tool for composing is the computer. The researcher has been delving into artificial intelligence and innovative computing methods for compositing for some time, as they offer fresh insights and ideas beyond his own.

A quantum computer deals with information encoded as qubits. A qubit is to a quantum computer what a bit is to a digital one: a basic unit of information. In hardware, qubits exist in the subatomic world. They are subject to the laws of quantum mechanics.

Quantum computers are like super-powered versions of classical digital computers. While a digital computer processes data in a linear, step-by-step fashion, a quantum computer can explore many possibilities at once.

Operating a quantum computer requires different ways of thinking about encoding and processing information. This is where composers can benefit greatly. This technology is destined to facilitate the development of unprecedented ways of creating music.

Bio

Composer who works at the intersection of music, science and new technologies. His background as an artificial intelligence scientist and classical composer with early involvement in avant-garde pop music informs his distinctive music. He has composed for BBC Radio 3, BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC Singers and Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He is a professor at the University of Plymouth and a research associate at Quantinuum, where he explores music composition with quantum computers.

Henryk Górecki
Concerto for Harpsichord and String Orchestra Op. 40
Harpsichord: elisabeth chojnacka
Less than nine minutes long, the bipartite Concerto for Harpsichord (or Piano) and String Orchestra, which the composer sometimes called a “prank”, is a veritable volcano that carries the listener away from the very first bars with its immense energy. Its repetitive, motoric nature and rhythmic vigour suit the specific, slightly clattery sound of the harpsichord which is usually somewhat amplified, complemented by the chordal texture of the strings. In both parts, the mood of the piece clearly draws on the highlander music of the southern Podhale region, of which Górecki was a great admirer. In the context of his monumental sacred music from the same period, this Concerto is like the artist’s brief “respite”. It reflects the whirl and “profane” energy of a folk dance.
Elżbieta Chojnacka, to whom the piece was dedicated, has always stressed that every performance of the Concerto, which she has played throughout the world, ends with an encore. The piece meets with such acclaim from the audience, and is one of the most striking – and most joyful – compositions in the composer’s output. “A spectacular plaything”, as Teresa Malecka has described the piece.

Beethoven recomposed
Het audiovisuele project Beethoven hercomponeerde in opdracht van de Duitse omroep WDR is een unieke aanpak om de muziek van Ludwig van Beethoven tastbaar te maken voor mensen met en zonder gehoorbeperking. Om het hele publiek een klassiek concert met hun ogen te laten beleven, werd de symfonie vertaald in een visuele reis door drie generatieve werelden die de melodische beweging, het ritme en de stemmingswisselingen volgden. Deze visuals werden geprojecteerd op een groot monolithisch canvas dat boven het orkest hing. Aan elke kant van het canvas werden drie LED-strips toegevoegd om het toneellandschap te openen in de vorm van de orkestbak. Terwijl de projectie erop gericht was een samenhangend verhaal te vertellen en de verhalende en emotionele aspecten van de muziek weer te geven, werd de lagere resolutie en verschillende lichtintensiteit van de ledstrips gebruikt om de muziek op een nogal didactieve manier over te brengen.

EONTA
“Eonta (beings) is so entitled as a homage to the ancient Greek philosopher and poet Parmenides. The original printed form of the title word is Cypriot orthography of Creto-mycaenean origin, lost for over 24 centuries and only recently deciphered. Eonta, written in Berlin during 1963-64, was first performed at the Domaine Musical concerts in Paris, conducted by Pierre Boulez, in December 1964. It makes use of stochastic music (based on the theory of probabilities) and symbolic music (based on logistics). Some of the instrumental parts, notably the piano solo at the opening, were calculated on an IBM 7090 computer at the Place Vendôme, Paris.”
(Iannis Xenakis)

Deep Space Music reúne som e imagem, música e animação por computador de uma forma que transforma o espaço de projeção em um cenário para experiências íntimas. Nele, o pianista japonês Maki Namekawa apresenta um programa de obras de três compositores visionários que também são considerados grandes pensadores. Seu concerto de piano comemora musicalmente o 60º aniversário de Ryuchi Sakamoto (JP) e Philip Glass ‘(EUA), e comemora o 100º aniversário do nascimento de John Cage (EUA).

Transitorio
Transient – Impermanent paintings è un concerto audiovisivo per due pianoforti motorizzati e due direttori in collaborazione con algoritmi generativi. Le pennellate digitali iperrealistiche si articolano all’infinito su una proiezione su larga scala come su una tela reale. Ogni pennellata è sonificata con una nota di pianoforte, creando paesaggi sinestetici polifonici. Il progetto prosegue la ricerca di Quayola sulle tecniche artistiche tradizionali nel contesto del rapporto uomo-macchina, stavolta allontanandosi gradualmente dai soggetti formali e cedendo il passo alla sostanza computazionale: l’algoritmo.

Équinoxe
A concert-show. A visual and audio journey. Moving digital images. A moment, ephemeral and unique. An immersive road movie with live music, created as an allusion to the performance Hakanaï. The encounter of two worlds : that of the band Limousine with its instrumental music, both pop and jazz, contemplative and graceful with that of Adrien M & Claire B and its abstract landscapes of images, vertiginous and poetic.

Gogol
“The opera’s three acts are divided into seven scenes which blend fact with liberal amounts of invention. Among other things, Gogol wrestles with his (and Russia’s) demons by night, obsesses over his will and funeral arrangements, gets abused by doctors (‘but I don’t drink alcohol,’ he cries; ‘all the more reason for a leeching,’ they reply), bats away bothersome suitors with disconcertingly large papier-mâché breasts, falls in love with a nymph, and undergoes a literary show trial which culminates in his death.”
By Zwölftöner

克劳斯奥伯迈尔
the concept of … (here and now)

In front of a giant screen, two dancers interact with a cohort of cameras… Their movements are captured by infra-red sensors and projected onto the screen, whereby their bodies become the canvas on which new images take shape. The result is a shifting kaleidoscope of strange, living, quasi-mathematical visual worlds which sometimes seem to be emanating or even escaping from the dancers’ bodies. “Who decides which movement to make: the man or the machine?” Blurring the line between the real and the virtual, Klaus Obermaier loves to subsume his performers’ bodies and physicality in a disconcerting digital universe. With his latest creation, the choreographer/artist has taken a bold new step. He has constructed a system of projectors and infra-red sensor-cameras, trained upon the movements of two dancers. The performers thus find themselves thrown headlong into a living, moving graphical universe: their movements are projected onto the screen, but at the same time their bodies are illuminated by more projected images. This is a true artistic performance, pushing well beyond the frontiers of a standard dance recital, or even a contemporary dance show. A corporeal, temporal performance. A choreography which makes subtle use of its raw materials, deftly combining lights, video, perspectives and the real-time power of bodily movement.

Transient
Transient – Impermanent paintings is an audiovisual concert for two motorized pianos and two conductors in collaboration with generative algorithms. Hyper-realistic digital brushstrokes articulate endlessly on a large-scale projection as if on a real canvas. Each brushstroke is sonified with a piano note, creating polyphonic synesthetic landscapes. The project continues Quayola’s research on traditional artistic techniques in the context of human-machine relationship, this time gradually withdrawing from formal subjects and giving way to the computational substance: the algorithm.

moving in concert
Moving in Concert imagines a universe where humans, technologies and natural materials coexist to create an abstract set of movement. Inspired by how bodies are sensorially affected by living in a digitalized world, the performance explores a poetics of plasticity, abstraction and imagination.

Роберт битва
No Longer Silent
Robert Battle’s dramatic ensemble work No Longer Silent, set to Erwin Schulhoff’s percussive score “Ogelala,” features dancers evoking a complex and mysterious ritual. Originally created in 2007 for The Juilliard School, Battle’s alma mater, the work was part of a concert of choreography that brought to life long-forgotten scores by composers whose work the Nazis had banned. Powerful phrases stir the imagination with images of flight and fatigue, chaos and unity, and collectivity and individualism as dancers, clad in all black, travel in military rows.

Tête de mort
Tête de mort pourrait être une scène de concert, qui attend son performeur, la scénographie d’un spectacle, d’une comédie musicale, le scénario symbolique d’un rêve. Les grosses bulles métalliques, connotant l’éphémère (de la vie, de la fête) et l’étrangeté (du rêve ou de la fiction), attirent l’œil comme un appât, un miroir aux alouettes.
Le pavement géométrique du plafond contient l’anamorphose à l’envers, dont le motif « tête de mort » ne se révèle au regardeur que dans le reflet des boules miroir, selon un certain point de vue.

Bowed Piano
Few chamber groups deploy their musicians as oddly as the Bowed Piano Ensemble. The 10 players, students led by the composer Stephen Scott, stand around, and sometimes under, a concert grand, armed with items of all kinds — nylon fishing line, piano hammers, guitar picks, strips of paper, rolls of plumber’s tape — and reach into the instrument to draw sounds from its strings.

Post Silentium
Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra
Jens Goerg Bachmann

24 Preludes for Piano, Op. 41
Performed by Hyeri Choi

Ludwig’s Nightmare
Performed by Yael Weiss

Born in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on the border of Siberia, Russian-American composer,
concert pianist, poet and visual artist Lera Auerbach has become one of today’s most sought
after and exciting creative voices. She has published more than 100 works for orchestra, opera
and ballet, as well as choral and chamber music.

Guintche
This piece derives from a person I drew as a memento of a concert. I called it Guintche and meanwhile it grew, acquired self-life, autonomy, rebelled. Guintche is a word in creole, cape-verdean spoken language. more…

Exploded Chair
This piece takes traditional conception of what a chair is, dismantles it, and places it in clear perspex containers. The maple-wood chair that sits loosely within its crystalline sarcophagus looks much like the archetypal kitchen seat. As the ‘Exploded Chair’ is moved, its wooden pieces rattle around inside their compartments. The piece is both familiar and disorienting, playful and disconcerting — a dichotomous piece on which to seat yourself.

a far cry
concerto grosso no 1
V. Rondo: Agitato
Alfred Schnittke’s haunting first Concerto Grosso for 2 violins, harpsichord, prepared piano and 21 strings,
violinists; Nelson Lee & Meg Freivoge
harpsichord & prepared piano: Andrus Madsen

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“It’s a piece by Alfred Schnittke, a Russian polystylist composer who spent most of his life behind the Iron Curtain. Schnittke is underrated. This is perhaps due to his post-modern tendencies, which for lesser composers can be a veil for lack of substance. That’s not the case in this piece. Take a listen to the fifth movement of his Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977).  It is a great example of how Schnittke freely takes from disparate styles to create an unpredictably effective result”. David Werfelmann

Wadala tower
Tower of India is a one kilometre tall mixed used super tower comprising of residential apartments, hotels, offices, urban farms, sky park, museums, shopping mall and concert halls. Situated in the Wadala District of Mumbai, the design was invited by the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) to achieve the world’s tallest tower in India and also as a new vertical urban district without the need for sprawling road networks. more…

MENSKE

Even the standing room only tickets have sold out, and the raging mass of disappointed kids looks like they may start a riot: the atmosphere before Ultima Vez’s performance is akin to a rock concert. Choreographer superstar Wim Vandekeybus’s company has toured the world with their trademark vocabulary of acrobatic, extreme, often violent movement, soaked in multimedia and energetic music. Menske (meaning approximately ‘little human’), their latest work, has all the typical flaws and qualities of classic Vandekeybus. On the conservative end of political intervention, Menske is an explosive concoction of brash statements about the state of the world today, a sequence of rapidly revolving scenes of conflicting logic: intimist, blockbuster, desperate, hysterical. The broad impression is not so much of a sociological portrait, but of a very personal anguish being exorcised right in front of us, as if Vandekeybus is constantly switching format in search of eloquence. Visually, it is stunning, filmic: a slum society falling apart through guerrilla warfare, in which girls handily assume the role of living, moving weapons. A woman descends into madness in an oneiric hospital, led by a costumed and masked group sharpening knives in rhythmic unison. A traumatised figure wanders the city ruins dictating a lamenting letter to invisible ‘Pablo.’ Men hoist a woman on a pole her whole body flapping like a flag. “It’s too much!” intrudes a stage hand, “Too much smoke, too much noise, too much everything!” And the scene responsively changes to a quiet soliloquy. At which point, however, does pure mimesis become complicit with the physical and psychological violence it strives to condemn? Unable to find its way out of visual shock, Menske never resolves into anything more than a loud admission of powerlessness.

Music of Changes

Music of Changes was the second work Cage composed to be fully indeterminate in some sense (the first is Imaginary Landscape No. 4, completed in April 1951, and the third movement of Concerto for prepared piano also used chance), and the first instrumental work that uses chance throughout. He was still using magic square-like charts to introduce chance into composition, when, in early 1951, Christian Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the I Ching (Wolff’s father published a translation of the book at around the same time). This Chinese classic text is a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. For Cage it became a perfect tool to create chance-controlled compositions: he would “ask” the book questions about various aspects of the composition at hand, and use the answers to compose. The vast majority of pieces Cage completed after 1951 were created using the I Ching.

黒川良一
Syn
2011 –
Audiovisual Concert
Diptych | 2.1ch sound
Duration: 30’00” – 45’00”
The Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa has been a pioneer in audiovisual art in the past fifteen years, working with multiple media that bring together sound and image in a totally new language. Currently based in Berlin, Kurokawa continues to explore the symbiosis between technology and nature, order and chaos.Kurokawa stands as out as a new international reference in the field of digital art, a creator of trends and a pioneer in new aesthetics in artistic work.