23 Results for : partials
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Kosmogonia
PIANO DIARIES OF A MUSICAL ALCHEMIST Every single composition on this CD represents a time capsule from my life. Each piece I played and recorded on a different piano, in a different city, and in a different period of my life. In all of the pieces I applied the method I call 'preparation in real time'-the personal performance practice I often use in my live performances. It implies using devices, easily movable objects, and different fingerings to temporarily shift the instrument's timbre from that of the piano to that of a harpsichord or clavichord. For instance, in Genesis (2009) and Kosmogonia (Cosmogony) (2005), following the proverb 'necessity is mother of invention,' I came up with a vibrating glove. When placed on the piano strings, the electromagnets stuffed into the glove's fingertips helped create the sostenuto-sounding strings, mockup flute sounds, and bass clarinet I needed. Mappa della Memoria, for acoustic baby grand piano, was recorded live during my recital at the Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, Italy, where I held a composer's residency in 2004. Based on the eponymous work by the ingenious Italian visual artist Mario Fallini, the Memory Map is a fitting piece to start this album with. Like a traveler who retraces his own footsteps, Fallini draws his version of the iconic medieval allegory of memory, traditionally depicted as a portly matron in elaborate dress, by 'stitching' the titles of his own works in each fold of her sumptuous attire. Sonatina No.1 was composed in 1996 and recorded in 1997 on an upright piano after I rescued it from the local bar and somehow fit it into the kitchen of my studio apartment in Manhattan. I dedicated this piece to Morpho, a large, mysterious South American butterfly with iridescent wings who lives for only a day before being sealed for eternity into a pendant by a jewelry maker. Sonatina No.2 and Sonatina No.3 were composed in 2004 and recorded on an amplified Chinese-made baby grand piano I purchased at a liquidation sale at the San Francisco Opera. In the already-mentioned Genesis, I wondered what it sounded like when God went about making the world. During my college years, while sitting in the symphony orchestra and counting numerous empty bars in my harp parts, I entertained the idea of getting a job in a planetarium. I recalled that fantasy many years later in Kosmogonia, where I explore the ways to depict in sound the mindboggling theory of the ever-expanding universe. This album is dedicated to my dad, Dr. Vladimir Jordano MD. Victoria Jordanova Los Angeles, May 2012 Notes by Dean Suzuki Victoria Jordanova, an American composer born in Kragujevac, Serbia, is probably best known for her magnificent Requiem for Bosnia for broken piano, harp and child's voice. The current CD is her first for piano since the release of the Requiem in 1994. Unlike the Requiem, which exists only as a recording and cannot be performed live (the namesake broken piano no longer exists), Kosmogonia is comprised of works that can be performed in concert. Born in Serbia, a longtime San Francisco resident, and now living in Los Angeles, Jordanova's aesthetic forebears include West Coast American experimentalists and mavericks, Henry Cowell and John Cage. She is inspired by their innovative piano compositions, and especially by Cowell's 'string piano' (when performers bypass the piano's keyboard and play directly on the strings, variously plucking, strumming, rubbing and otherwise manipulating them), as well as his generous use of tone clusters, and Cage's 'prepared piano,' inspired by and extrapolated from Cowell's string piano, in which items such as screws, bolts, bits of rubber and other materials are inserted and wedged between the strings, thus dramatically transforming the instrument's timbre. It should be no surprise that other important influences on Jodanova include Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti, both composers who experimented with and explored sound masses, unorthodox timbres, and unconventional musical textures and techniques. In an undergraduate class taught by composition professor Dr. Jere Hutcheson, Jodanova encountered Penderecki's Kosmogonia (1970) (a work that inspired her own work of the same title found on this CD), Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) and Ligeti's Atmospheres (1961). The music left her awestruck. Such inspiration is borne out when Jordanova states that she uses a computer and MIDI-instruments to compose, 'But whenever I really want to test an idea, only the piano will do. I open it, knock on it, touch every part of it, play it inside and out, amplify it to hear it's softest whispers, and present it with all kinds of toys and devices to coax every possible sound out of it. And it always gives back more than I expect, surprising me with new sounds and possibilities.' Jordanova's wide-open ears are on a never-ending quest for new sounds, timbres and sonorities. She says, 'Some of the best times of my life were spent with pianos. I have played many pianos in my life and I've never found one I didn't like. From the old upright, which never could be tuned properly, that I rescued from a local bar and worked on in my Manhattan apartment, to the one that fell down two flights of stairs in the French-American International School in San Francisco, which I used to record my Requiem-all gave me something unique. Sometimes I feel that there is more at play than a mere material object, as in the medieval concept of Anima mundi--a pure, ethereal spirit diffused throughout all nature that animates all matter in the same sense in which the soul was thought to animate the human.' She concludes with a rather cunning and insightful proposal: 'Maybe the piano participates in my compositions as much as I do.' In her Sonatina no. 1 for upright antique piano, Jordanova coaxes beautiful sounds from an instrument that would have horrified Chopin and would be considered beneath contempt by contemporary concert pianists (can one imagine Lang Lang performing on an upright piano, much less an antique one?). Instead of regarding the faults of the antique piano as shortcomings, she views them as opportunities for sonic exploration. Indeed, the Sonatina would be a completely different and much less successful work were it played on a pristine concert grand. Those familiar with the string piano and prepared piano, and with works by composers such as Stephen Scott who also use extended techniques on the instrument, including 'bowing' the strings (for example, strands of rosined nylon fishing line are threaded under the strings then drawn back and forth to excite the strings), will recognized the instrument as a piano, but may be bewildered by the manner of sound generation in Genesis and Kosmogonia. These compositions require a vibrating glove, in which small electromagnets are placed in the fingertips. Jordanova does not insert her hand in the glove to stroke or massage the strings. Rather, she uses the glove as a holder for the electromagnets, which are placed directly on the strings. Further manipulation, including use of the keyboard, sustain pedal and touching the string with the fingers, changes the overtone structure for the purpose of discovering new timbres and advancing the music. The amplification employed in several works on this CD is used only to precisely reveal the subtleties and nuances of the piano, rather than to increase power and volume. By running the sound from the microphone directly into the computer input, the normal recording studio problems of trying to accurately capture acoustic sound are circumvented. The amplification and recording techniques allow the listener to hear everything--harmonics, partials and other acoustic phenomena--in a way that would not be possible using traditional recording methods. As a result, one hears the music differently and in a way that enhances Jordanova's compositions and reveals her special gifts. Dean Suzuki Associate Professor of music- Shop: odax
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Portuguese Music for Solo Cello
'In Antagonia, for solo cello, the first and second strings are tuned half a tone lower (A and D flat). This tuning divides the instrument in two contrasting fields: two perfct fifths separated by an augmented fourth that makes them "antagonistic". This antagonism is transposed to every aspect of musical construction: there is one force trying to ascend and another one pushing down (or vice-versa), rhythmical characters opposing each other in expansions and contractions, and dynamic progressions in different directions. The work is divided into six parts: prologue (pesante), four variations (fuido, presto, allegretto, lento) and epilogue. In the introduction there is no theme but a structure that is transformed in tempi, textures and sonorities peculiar to each variation. In the epilogue there is a deformed condensation of all the previous sections: it is the non-resolution of an untransposable conflict. It's anguish is intensified by the dissonances of the scordatura, wich "repress" the natural tone of the cello. Written in Almoçageme in March 1990, it was first performed in Barcelona three months later, in a concert in memory of Jean Etienne Marie. It was recorded by the Czech and the Portuguese Broadcasting Companies, and selected by the jury of the International Society for Contemporary Music for the World Music Days that took place in Mexico City, in November 1993. It is dedicated to the Portuguese cellist Irene Lima.' Alexandre Delgado 'The composition of this piece, like all my music, is based on listening and spectral understanding of the sound phenomena, taking into account the acoustic properties of the musical instrument, which is the subject of research, leading to the abstract speculation on the compositional process. The piece is based on a defective spectrum on C (one octave below the C on the cello), in which only 11 partials (from the fundamental up to the 29th harmonic) are taken into consideration. From this defective spectrum I realized 8 micro-intervallic frequency shifts, resulting in a total of 9 sound aggregates. These aggregates have a slightly different intervallic structure between them, yet this small difference is of great importance - in terms of acoustics and perception it changes considerably the harmonicity / inharmonicity of the aggregates, what actually means being more consonant or less consonant in terms of perception. Each of these sound aggregates corresponds to a section of the piece. Although the sections succeed without interruption, some interludes and transitions are introduced here and there between them. There are also few sections, where some of the material presented earlier is reintroduced from a new perspective. Within each section, every aggregate is the subject of successive transpositions, yet retaining the same intervallic structure and also conforming to the base harmonic spectrum. These transpositions give origin to numerous melodic figurations, often in accelerando and appearing throughout the piece. The electronics operates primarily as a shadow or double of the acoustic instrument, blending with it, and extending it's identity. Occasionally, it can also act as a counterpoint.' Miguel Azguime, 29th July 2014 'Labirintho was written for the cellist Filipe Quaresma. The piece is clearly divided into two major parts recognizable by the change in tempo. The construction of this piece is centred on a theme that is constantly repeated and varied, resembling an obsession from which it can not escape (like in a maze).' Carlos Azevedo 'One of the salient features of the work of Corte-Real has been it's umbilical relationship with Portuguese culture and, above all, with it's poetry. Poets that the composer has put to music or from whom has taken inspiration are already numerous: Pessoa, Pascoaes, Régio, Agostinho da Silva, Eugénio de Andrade or Florbela Espanca. The work Bicicleta do Poeta (The Poet's Bicycle) (2014) for solo cello, is inspired by the poem Bicicleta (Bicycle) by Herberto Hélder. As in the poem, the music is full of sudden changes of speed and pace, unpredictable changes of direction and hard braking. The calm, relaxed, summer's-day ride itself gives way to the speed and vertigo inside...' Afonso Miranda 'Ostinati (2010) represents a change of direction in the composer's work: a turn that incorporates previously rejected elements, guided under a greater freedom, in the sense that it suffers less from the denial of material and solutions than from the meeting of musically sufficient ideas in order to create one sound identity. The material found in the origin of the score is, therefore, quite concise. Like other works from Ricardo Ribeiro, if the thought associated to the electronic processing is present since the first moment, it is true that the instrumental part lives by itself as an autonomous piece. This phenomenon doesn't work both ways: the electronic is only possible as a factor that improves the original idea, sometimes even recreating it, according to the notes which date from the elaboration of the instrumental part. The idea that each performance consists in a unique piece is, in Ostinati, taken a step further, since the electronic program was designed with some characteristics of randomness concerning to the degree of microtonality's range and overlapping of elements closer or furthest in time, which can be triggered in certain sections. The same electronic works as an orchestration of a particella, adding the microtonality and enhancing the timbre. The persistence of ideas and gestures is a metaphor of the idea of repetition, a presence that is increasingly evident in the last works of the composer. The repetition that in Intensités (2001) happened at the harmonic level, is present in Ostinati at a much more immediate level, in the movement, in the heights, in the continuous manifestation of strength which simultaneously transmits serenity.' Diana Ferreira.- Shop: odax
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