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Architecture buro

Audio

E tuo veder s'inluia

"E tuo veder s'inluia" is a sonic magnifying glass placed over the interview of a Syrian refugee who fled Syria to Switzerland after deserting the Syrian Army. The aim of the work is to amplify the energy and expressiveness concealed in the prosody of the deserter.
The title refers to Dante's neologism of indwelling by the the other-than-self, searching for the co-equality, in some degree at least, to God's own intellection: "...e tuo veder s'inluia", to "...e s'io m'intuassi, come tu t'inmii" (Paradise IX, 75 and 81)
"E tuo veder s'inluia" is a glimpse of an utopian 'in-theiring' back toward us all, comfortably distant from many of the tragedies of our world.

Commissioned by  Cantierezero per Teatri del suono / Paradiso.
Live recording - Vienna 17 - 05 - 22 - Istituto Italiano di Cultura

Stefania Amisano, piano
Claudio Cristani, sync-device
Marco Gasperini, sound direction

XVIII

on the Bolgia dei Ruffiani in Dante's Inferno, for string quartet (2020)

Quartetto Indaco

In this first Bolgia a viola introduces and greets four ruffians: they are Carmelo Bene, Roberto Benigni, Vittorio Sermonti and Vittorio Gasmann.
Amidst stifled sighs, the famous actors still try to flatter the listener, with their voice here laid bare into the four instruments of the quartet.
Beware though, they are cheating you...

Voci vicine I (excerpt)

Kammarensemblen
Renato Rivolta, conductor

check the video clip of the same excerpt on youtu.be/-pMc9pT6_mk

Fabio Cifariello Ciardi - Voci vicine (2014)
Passion in 4 parts for journalist, video, ensemble and electronics
with Gad Lerner, journalist
A commission of Festival Aperto 2014. Producted by Fondazione ITeatri Reggio Emilia, Società dei Concerti Barattelli L'Aquila.

The stage is set with a journalist, an ensemble and a throng of voices and faces: Italians that bring shames about their ever-recurrent tragedies, screaming words of hatred filled with emotions. It’s the voice of indignation the media bring everyday to Italian homes: a force as well as a weakness arising from pleas, illiterate tirades of extrovert tongues. How close are we to such voices?

It’s a hard-to-describe phenomenon wavering between genuine witnesses and misleading stances. How to investigate these voices, attenuating the muddling buzz that surround them? How to fetch a meaning while avoiding easy judgments? By a proper translation.
Fabio Cifariello Ciardi has collected and classified hundreds of video interviews according to the age, gender and regionality of the participants and the reasons for their hardship. That is, he tried to bring order from disorder at first. Secondly, he channeled such a flood of words by transcribing the intonation, the rhythm and the dynamic of each spoken-voice. Thirdly, he orchestrated the data for an ensemble of seven musicians playing acoustic as well as odd sounding objects. Finally, he integrated the original voices into a multilayered sonic texture articulated through arias, recitatives, strettas an other forms inspired by the Italian Opera.
The result is a constant struggle between spoken-voices and speaking-instruments that capture and amplify the emotional intensity of the speaker while withdrawing speaker’s words. Cifariello Ciardi aim to shed a ‘musical light’ on supra-segmental phonological information supremacy over semantics bonding together voices, instrumental and concrete sounds in an audiovisual contemporary “Passion” about the most up-to-date social and cultural typicalities of Italian people.
(Roberto Fabbi)

"Voci vicine" is not a self-righteous opera, nor purely informative, nor political. It’s a contemporary work that engage at first and leave us with food for though then as we leave the hall.
(Mauro Mariani, Giornale della Musica, 12/11/2014)

Background checks for spoken voice, video and orchestra (excerpts)

check the video on youtu.be/69Zug1uOdzM

Orchestra Haydn di Bolzano e Trento
Marco Angius, conductor

On January 5, 2016, President Obama marked his final year in office with a last-ditch call for US gun control, following a mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in which 20 of the 26 victims were children.
Obama certainly had notes, but didn't seem to look at them and he didn't used the teleprompter either. The resulting speech as been described by the Washington Post as "amazingly emotional".
"Background checks" aims at projecting into the orchestra the energy of Obama prosody, pauses and visual expressions. It's a tribute to his thought on US gun safety laws and to the many innocent victims of misused weapons.

"Background checks" has been commissioned by the Bolzano and Trento Haydn Fondazione upon the proposal of the Artistic Director, Daniele Spini, for the 60th anniversary of the Haydn Orchestra.
The full video of the piece (25:30) is available upon request.

Audio recording and projection, Alessandro Battisti - www.litterini.it
Video footage, Simone Lorengo - www.insidestudioservice.it
Audio/video postproduction, Edison Studio - www.edisonstudio.it

Cupio Dissolvi for 8 double basses
Ensemble Ludus Gravis

Cupio dissolvi is based on the instrumental transcription of the inflections and the rhythms of Martin Luther King’s speech “I have a dream.” The Sonic traces of the speech dissolve into and emerge from sour gestures and unstable textures that continuously pass across the ensemble.
The tense clash between the passionate nature of Luther King’s voice and the bulkiness of the double basses is a personal reflection on the precious dream of equal dignity tackled by the puzzlements and fears of our present.

Live recording
Naples, 8/10/2017 - Domus Ars
Associazione Scarlatti - Scarlatti Contemporanea

Tortuga for voice and piano

on a text by Lidia Riviello.
Akiko Kozato, voice
Adele D'Aronzo, piano
Live recording at Festival RISUONANZE - incontri di nuove musiche

“Tortuga” borns as a “cult object” of and for a musical score that it takes root itself as a rhythmic, nagging fetish which causes and generates a childish noise (that typical sound of toys when they are “mounted”). The toy (“Tortugas”) becomes a script's “shifting” and “being thrown about”, just in the material meaning, like for an object we're used to operate, shake, use, in and out the packaging.
User informations and precautions are needed to “touch it” and make it move and it is vulnerable like all “entertainment” toys. Here we go with a idea for a meeting with the compositional project: the item in question, a common toy/animal, in reality slow and “foreseeable” that moves itself in the water, becomes a torn and chaotic “torture” for two stunned entities as well as are the eternal current digital lovers, ever “on line” which challenge one each other to own the object, the communication tangibility. So the two of them open a duel where the element of pathology reaches the top of the poetic, of non-coinciding communication. There is an island “Tortuga”/ space of language and senses (the island), where the tension and fatigue from Tortuga's game (parody of the Whatsapp mood obsession, too) will be transferred, maybe to reveal or extinguish a loving rituality, interrupted and estranged by the opacity of technological occurrences: tools and pains of the changed and still mauled sentimental condition.

Riforma for 9 instr., pre-rec. voices and electr.

On the 12 of February 2015, during the late-night session on the reform of the Senate, the Italian Chamber of Deputies has turned into a “theatre of fights” far beyond ordinary rules of engagement and “screams and chaos causing the session to be suspended several times”. “Riforma” (reform) is based on the precise course of those events. Most instrumental parts have been derived from the transcription of the rhythms and the inflections of the deputies voices. Sometime the original voices emerge in the electronic part, some other time they are almost masked by their own instrumental transcription. Finally, the composer's focus is not the political meaning of the words, but rather the musical dimensions emerging from energy and the expressiveness behind the rhetoric of the debate. “Riforma” is a music exploration of the phonological styles of Italian political eloquence.

Riforma has been commissioned by Divertimento Ensemble with the support of the Ernst Von Siemens Music Foundation.
Premiere: 06/06/2016, Teatro Litta, Milan.
Divertimento Ensemble Sandro Gorli, cond.

Appunti per Amanti Simultanei for trombone, intonarumori and electroinics

for trombone, intonarumori and electronics (2009)
Michele Lomuto, trombone
Venice Teatro delle Tese 3/10/2009

“Amanti Simultanei” (Simultaneous Lovers) is a short Futurist novel recorded during 1938 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on a 78 RPM disk. The rhythms, the inflections, the unique energy of Marinetti voice' have been translated into music notation and represent the final destination of a journey of the trombone and the group of "Intonarumori" (a family musical instruments invented in 1913 by italian futurist painter and musical composer Luigi Russolo). The piece develops as a series of "notes" (Appunti) on how the soloist and the odd instruments by Russolo explore, stroke and flatter each others as mutual sonic lovers, till they reach the original voice of Marinetti, ...and the sadness of Berlusconi’s times.
In Amanti Simultanei II the intonarumori parts have been integrated into the electronics.
“Appunti per Amanti Simultanei I” has been commissioned in 2009 by La Biennale di Venezia and is dedicated to Michele Lomuto.

Claudia Giottoli, alto flute.
Derived from "Un po' per gioco un po' per non morire" on a poem by Pierluigi Berdondini for narrator and alto flute.

Tracce per brutti con buona memoria for tenor sax

David Brutti, tenor sax (2013)
Tracce is a collection of pieces for solo instruments (clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, double bass and voice) I wrote between 1991 and 2002. The aim of the collection was to explore different kinds of virtual polyphony through contrappositions, interpolations and superpositions of well known melodic excerpts of Western tradition with more semantically 'neutral' sonic materials.

Tracce per brutti con buona memoria for tenor sax derives from Tracce II for bassoon, thanks to the valuable contribution of David Brutti, which revised the score and the fingerings.

Excerpts used in Tracce per brutti con buona memoria are from the following sources:
- W. A. Mozart: K.550 Symphony, first theme of the first movement;
- W.A.Mozart: Nozze di Figaro opening theme of the overture;
- G.Rossini: Barbiere di Siviglia, first theme of the overture;
- G.Rossini: GazzaLadra, second and third themes of the overture;
- Anonymous (attributed to Haydn): S.Antonio Choral
from J. Brahms Variation on a Theme by Haydn.
- J. Strauss Sr: Radetsky march, first theme;
- A. C. Jobin: Corcovado;
- D. Ellington: Satin Doll

Fabio Cifariello Ciardi, 2013

Games for contrabass and electronics Corrado Canonici, contrabass

Games has been awared at Bourges IMEB competition 1998 and Berlin ICMC Selection 2000

 

Quartetto Paul Klee

Altri Passaggi
Mahammad Ghavi Helm, zarb & daf

I look for places inhabited by sounds and public: spaces with dinamic variables, sizes and shapes.
In Altri Passaggi, the creating force and "sorcerer" of the place is the large Daf at the center of the stage. Its actions are commented by two Zarbs on the two stage sides. The Daf skin could not be immediately awoken, a gradual initiatory rite would be needed.

“...the drum, mother of all the things”, “...its ‘word’ is the bridge between sky and earth”, “...it’s a mean of transportation and transmission” (Marius Schneider, Die Trommel, Königin der Musikinstrumente und Mutter aller Dinge, Rhytmus, XXXV, 1962, 2, pp.18-23).
The event is introduced and conluded by two sets of verses of the persian sufi poet Mowlana Jalaluddin Rûmi.

"Récite donc un poème en hommage à ceux qui sont présents ,
Toi au visage tel une bougie, viens ici parmi nous.
Illumine cette bougie, donne de l’âme à cette assemblée
Par ton visage tel une bougie et ton âme telle une coupe
Mène ta main vers cette coupe et rend nous tous ivres
Car ne sera heureux que celui qui pourra se dérober à son propre regard.
...

Oh habitante de mon cœur, où es-tu donc allée ?
Es-tu cachée dans la maison ou envolée dans les airs ?
Partie si tôt, toi la brise du matin ,
Comme un parfum de fleur, tu es partie avec la brise du matin".

Altri passaggi is a commission of IMEB and is dedicated to Mahammad Ghavi Helm.

Ankaa
for clarinet and orchestra.
Roberta Gottardi, clarinet
Orchestra Haydn/Haydn-Orchester
(2.2.2.2-2.2.1.0-2perc. arpa, pf – 10.8.6.5.4)
Karle Mark Chicon, conductor
Raitrade edition - Rome

Ankaa is about the metaphysical roots of falconry. In the very act of taming a wild bird, it’s not really important who’s the master and who is the sevant: both the human and the bird of prey have to cover a route towards the discipline of their wild and primitive instincts. It’s a path of knowledge and transformation. The Sufi poet Mowlana Jalaluddin Rûmi suggests that the Ankaa, the mythological phoenix of the Arab tradition, represents the last step towards the transcendence.
May the falcon share attributes of the phoenix?
The soloist moves into a sonic landscapes dominated by shared memories of physical phenomena: fluxes, attractions, penetrations and collisions.
Ankaa has been commissioned by Haydn Orchestra of Trento and Bolzano in 2006