Bio English – Page 3 – Cecilia Arditto Delsoglio

About notation

Kagel en andere Argentijnen kunnen lachen met muziek

Jochem Valkenburg
NRC 11 december 2006

Concert: De metafysica van de humor – Muziek uit Argentinië. Werken van Kusnir, Rodrigues Kees, Arditto en Kagel. Gehoord: 10/12 Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, Amsterdam.

‘Een wolk van vrolijkheid’, zo omschreef de Argentijnse componist Eduardo Kusnir zijn theatrale muziekstuk Brindis (1972-1977). Niet de individuele grap telt, maar het geheel van clowneske, onverwachte en twijfel zaaiende acties. Is het nou een grap, of niet? Zit die schaterlachende toeschouwer in het complot, of vindt hij het écht zo leuk?

Brindis werd uitgevoerd tijdens het eerste concert van het drieluik ‘Latijns-Amerikaanse componisten aan het IJ’. Op de volgende edities (in februari en mei 2007) staan Mexico en Venezuela centraal. Gisteren ging het om de traditie van absurdistische, neo-dadaïstische muziek uit Argentinië. Muziek die haar klanken vaak ontleent aan de (Europese) avant-gardistische concertmuziek, maar dit genre tegelijk ter discussie stelt, of – vaker nog – vrolijk bespot.

Vaandeldrager van deze traditie is de Duits/Argentijnse componist Mauricio Kagel. Hij is in Nederland zó geliefd dat hij op 24 december met het Schönberg Ensemble een dag lang zijn 75ste verjaardag viert in het Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ. Gisteren klonk van hem alvast Acustica (1968/1970), een werk voor ‘experimentele geluidsbronnen’.

Het betekende dat de musici, aangevoerd door slagwerker Arnold Marinissen, een hele verzameling rekwisieten op alle mogelijke manieren als ‘instrument’ gebruikten in een typisch Kageliaanse klankwereld: staalborstel op pick-up, steentjes in emmer water, fluitjes op gasfles. Het ging alleen wat erg lang door; de spanning ebte na een tijdje toch echt weg.

Erg beeldend, goed uitgevoerd door pianist Guy Livingston en ook muzikaal nog effectief was Traficante de bananas (1996) van Damián Rodríguez Kees. Ongedefiniëerde bliepjes die uit luidsprekers klonken, bleken regendruppels die in de piano vielen. Als de pianist op de goede plek in zijn instrument een leeg conservenblik zette, veranderde het gedruppel in een droog ge-‘ploenk’, waarmee de pianist vervolgens in samenspel ging. Omdat het aantal druppels en conservenblikken toenam, werd de muziek ritmisch steeds interessanter.

Componiste Cecilia Arditto, geboren Argentijnse, maar werkzaam in Nederland, was gastprogrammeur van het concert. Van haar klonk een wereldpremière: Alrededor. Hierin wordt een wat voorspelbare act gemaakt van alle zaken die tijdens een ‘normaal’ kamermuziekconcert in de marge te zien en te horen zijn, zoals het stemmen van de instrumenten en de lichamelijke communicatie van de musici.

Doordat er ook steeds meer misgaat – er zijn foute en mislukte inzetten, en ook vallende strijkstokken – straalt het werk tegelijk een soort machteloosheid en vergeefsheid uit en krijgt het toch nog iets van poëzie.

Anatomy of a jar (2020)

Program notes

for female choir (SMA) and glass containers
commissioned by Zembla Music

Anatomy of a jar explores the sound quality of discarded objects, making music with bottles and jars literally rescued from the glass container. These objects refer clearly to a known and familiar world, that through the composition process acquires an abstract and a poetic condition. This piece explores the subtleties of sound, both in the choir and in the objects. These sounds free themselves from their sources, having their own musical value independently of coming from the vocal tradition or the trash can.
Anatomy of a jar makes chamber music with objects converting them into refined musical instruments. Objects are now empowered on stage, and their sounds are written in a music score, acquiring thanks to the music notation “eternal life.” The act of re-appropriation is not related to the idea of nostalgia but to resistance and change.

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Out loud #1, #2 and #3 (2013-

Program notes

Out loud is a music piece in the shape of a strainer where most of the sounds have gone away. The main composing was intentionally erased and only the leftovers of a gone piece survive, the unwanted, the declassed sounds.

I say voiceless: I don’t want to write one more piece.

The music vanished and we are facing now its remains: breaths, movements, mistaken notes, eye contact. As if it were junk spread on the beach, this “new piece” invites to draw the shape of a missing party from the waste.

The music is defined for what it is omitted instead of for what it shows, like a post-Cage experiment reloading the forgotten declassed sounds.

I write a silent piece with a lot of notes.

The musicians and the audience are still there, occupying the hall, facing a full nothingness a bit silly. Both audience and musicians are repeating its concert rituals with the hope of recovering some sense.

Tired of being told…

Tired of solfège…

Tired of abstraction

Talk to me in my face!

The musicians are asked to play the shell of the egg, better said the air around the egg and the trombone return the notes from the outside in, blowing comebacks. Hopefully, the audience laughs, filling the air around like a breath of spring.

Out loud #1, #2 and #3 (2013- Read More »

Life on Mars (2016)

Program notes

for clarinet, accordion and cello
for Roadrunner Trio

Life on Mars is a trip between tonality and micro-tonality. When zooming in from a scale to a single tone and within that single tone to a micro-tone scale, our perception moves progressively deeper and deeper into the sound. Imagine that the perception of tones and micro-tones resembles observing Mars from Earth while getting increasingly closer to its surface; after a while, our eyes can’t embrace the whole planet anymore, only the small details.

The clarinet uses extremely micro-tonality: scales of 32nd of tone obtained by the usage of specific ventilation holes. The aim is not to turn the audience into listening machines but to create a context that opens perception.

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El libro de los gestos / The book of gestures (2007 revised 2008)

Program notes

for violin, cello, piano, percussion and lamps
commissioned by Ensemble Musas, Santa Fe

There are four people in a room making music. Each one has a lamp. They play their musical instruments, and they also play the lights, on and off, creating with this action different atmospheres. The staging of the piece is constantly changing, in real-time, by means of the lights.
The book of gestures proposes a counterpoint of different layers: the rhythm of the music, the rhythm of the lights, the rhythm of the room…
There are spaces to be seen, spaces to be heard, spaces to be imagined. Some of the music is played in the dark, in a room full of presences.

• Video
• Notes for performance (English)
• Analysis (Español)

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Spiegeltjes (little mirrors) (2016)

Program notes

5 pieces for clarinet, tape and objects
The tape can be replaced by a second clarinet OR by any other melodic instrument: transpositions can be applied.
The different pieces of this project can be played as a cycle or individually.

This cycle of pieces (five in total) is inspired by the renaissance Flemish composers and their use of mirror techniques. Most of them are written for a solo instrument in dialogue with a tape/vinyl pre-recorded by the same instrument. Duo versions replacing the recording for a second player, are very welcome.

The music score is not published yet. Please send me an email if you are interested in this work.

# 1. Spiegeltjes / little mirrors: is symmetrically split into two equal parts with a vertical line, organizing the musical material with retrogrades and inversion techniques. On a smaller scale, the clarinet plays in counterpoint with itself conforming little mirrors which are expressed in groups of notes with stems up and down.

# 2. Snel / fast: the recorded clarinet is partially duplicated by the live clarinet creating a new melody (a mirror with holes). Mirrors are not only present in the music but they also reflect the acoustical space. This intriguing “quasi unison” shapes the harmony of the piece. It is advisable to explore the acoustics of the hall finding the most appropriate location for both performers, which will be different in every venue.

#3. Zand / sand: the pre-recorded clarinet plays in counterpoint with the live one in canon. The multiphonic chords are shaped by this written delay creating interesting harmonies.

#4. Tekening / drawing: (two players), the flutists and a drawer who draws in the mirror in synch with the clarinet.

#5. Terug / backward: an evergoing melody is played back and forth, written in classical retrograde style.

The inclusion of real mirrors on stage creates not only visual duplications but a blind spot behind. The two performers have a different setup for each piece of the program playing with the mirror but also taking different locations on the space. Simple movements create very different scenarios and emphasize the acoustics of the hall in a “hide and seek” but “always listening” game.

Spiegeltjes stage design – practical and flexible

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The dearest dream (2018)

Program notes

anti concerto for percussion and ensemble of 10 instruments
2nd prize Wilde Lieder Marx Competition by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group

The dearest dream is an anti-concerto for simple means based on concepts by Karl Marx.
The music has 4 sections displaying different relationships between the soloist and the ensemble.
I. Dialectic of the strings, a string-telephone quartet is in dialogue with the ensemble strings.
2. The song of the land makes music with grains.
3. The man (repetition and alienation) where the percussionist sweeps the concert hall floor with a broom.
4. The machine is characterized by 4 electric fans with rotating heads.

The sound architecture of The dearest dream is based mainly on one note: it uses the spectrum of the note F-1, starting with A 440 (20th overtone) which progressively opens to the complete overtone series.
The sound changes during the piece from sine wave at the beginning to noise at the end, making changes in color but always respecting the overtone hierarchy. The rhythms used in the piece are mainly repeated notes, just slight fluctuations of the fixed sounds: in other words, they represent variations over the same. The whole ensemble play basically only one note and its overtones represents the tradition that perpetuates itself (status quo), leading to movement but without real changes. The dialogue with the outside objects breaks the fixed order bringing an unorthodox musical dialogue. The percussion plays diverse objects that impregnate the rest of the music. He is a soloist, or better said, an anti-soloist. Some members of the ensemble also play some objects apart from their instruments, to show some sympathy to the percussionist.

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Related post/s in my blog
“Barrer en quintillos” (Spanish)

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Las trampas del tiempo / traps of time (2011)

Program notes

for early music ensemble and voices
based on texts by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
commissioned by Borealis Festival, Norway

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast.

Walter Benjamin “On the concept of history”

I like to think about the mechanism of time as a switch with a bad contact that turns randomly the light on and off. We are in an intermittent room where the chairs, the stage, the instruments appear and disappear in flashes of sense; the full picture of the continuous space is only in our minds; the real space is in fact fragmented, full of emptiness. The present is even more ungraspable than the past.

Time is a bunch of threads all tied up together with our precarious mind mechanisms, wrapping the emptiness around with more hope than certainties. Most of the time, time is about jumps or just a continuous waiting we attempt to fill with notes. But when more notes, more emptiness.

As in a science fiction movie, the music I am imagining is related to the idea of teleportation where remote music from the XVII century travels through time to nowadays, but for some inner mechanism of the travel process, the essence has been altered.

The new space of reproduction is also different from that original one, so the old music lands in a fragmented present. In this distorted present, full of inhabited spaces, a record player inside the harpsichord talks like a guitar; some instruments are activated from the distance and old cassette tapes are reflecting the other music like acoustical mirrors, express not only the shade of early voices but also the alteration of time itself.

The new landing experience from the XVII music failed and music is hence spread on a present that is also fragmented, full of holes. But the travel was not about the historical reproduction of a past forever gone. It was mainly about showing the backstage of our present, which is so discontinuous, distorted and fragmented as the past we recall. Maybe this music is not about a specific time location, even not about a dialogue, but about the mysterious nature of time itself.

Related post/s in my blog:
“Las trampas del tiempo” (English)

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I love you (2016)

Program notes

for flute, guitar, tape, slides and objects
for Luis Orias Diz and Alu Montorfano

I found a collection of slides in a flea market in Holland. The slides reflect a house being remodeled. No holidays, no people, no landscapes. Electric installations, wallpaper being ripped, traps and a gas meter.
In the ’60s, people were really careful about taking pictures, different from the click and through away of the digital pictures.
The story behind is unknown. Just I’ve got images of an empty house in remodeling. The slides show a garden, a window, gas and electricity meters, a ladder, the bedroom.
In these scenarios, a man and a woman play music. They make music in counterpoint with the electricity sounds, they sing together with the gas pipes and play pianissimos in synchronization with the wallpaper that slowly, maybe for decades, is falling down.

• Audio files

Related post/s in my blog
“I love you too” (Español)
“La vida de los otros” (Español)

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