your body....your voice
for piano, 3 players and 24 rattle-singing magnets
dialogue between algorithmic procedures and intuitive variation of the materials, that is to say (simplifying), between the deterministic and the non-deterministic. The algorithmic substratum is always linked to an idea of ciclicity: Vuza canons, Markov chains, cellular automata, genetic algorithms, planetary orbits. They never generate or vary the materials, being used only to organize the musical elements; the "evolution" is realized "by hand", thus resembling, metaphorically, the unpredictable modification.
Some sections are, instead, completely extraneous to the algorithmic, cyclical development, presenting crystallized versions of some musical materials. Only at the end this sound world is subject to a cyclical repetition, thus alluding to a higher order time cycle.
Nature presents us the lively relation between repetition and change in many ways. For a huge number of species the cycle of life is generated and maintained by their mixture and contatenation: on one side, a kind of mechanism forces the process of birth to happen always the same way (the combination of the genetic material coming from mother and father); on the other side, the high complexity of the process itself and the possible emergence of unpredictable new features guarantee the generation of an unprecedented individual, who is not the exact replication of someone existed before. Thus, a circular process is combined with a linear one, producing a kind of spiral.
The latin verb volvo, volvere means "to rotate". In the medieval culture it was linked both to the Rota Fortunae, the wheel of fortune, and to the movement of astra (celestial bodies). Thus, it represents this ambiguous condition between mechanical repetition and variety.
In Volvitur I wanted to create a
