your body....your voice
for piano, 3 players and 24 rattle-singing magnets
with hands; instead, rattle-singing magnets are the only way of contact with the instrument.
At the same time, the distinction between vibrational bodies (strings) and activators (mechanics) is over. The keyboard itself can be a sounding object.
your body....your voice
for piano, 3 players and 24 rattle-singing magnets
One of the main interests in my recent work consists in finding personal perspectives on common instruments; I look for hidden voices, unexpressed possibilities.
Thus, an instrument with a long and glorious history becomes a sort of found object, still unknown and with mysterious characteristics. Such a shift in point of view can happen only by negating the greatest part of its performance practice: piano is no more played
The entire body of the piano is now a part of a new instrument, or an instrument itself. And, at some extent, its physical nature corresponds with its sound possibilities. The body is now the voice.
The limitation to one little and not atriculated tool as the only interface with this new apparatus is a bottle-neck in the compositional process; nevertheless, instead of limiting the sound-world, such condition makes the instrument "explode", generating a large amount of new instruments, with different sound qualities and technical possibilities.
Such change in the perspective of the performance practice has a price in the scarse practicality for live performance. The composition requires three players to
learn a new set of techniques not related to piano history.
Stand positioning and posture have not really a comfortable solution; amplification, necessary for the perception of numerous sounds, may be and additional problem.
Consequently, the best suitable condition of reproduction for this piece consists in the recording. While the live performance is not impossible, and the score plays an important role, as in many pieces of chamber music, this composition was conceived and developed as an example of "acousmatic instrumental music".
Its first performance (Basel, Jazz-Campus, 6.6.2016) consisted in the projection of the recording spatialized over six channels (but theoretically it is for n-channels). The only live intervention consisted in playing the spatialization itself using LeapMotion (device for hand position tracking).