Instrumental sound carries with it the imprint of the gesture that generated it, and its communicative energy depends largely on the performer. The music of a traditional instrument evokes a physical human action, unlike electronic sound, which often thrives solely on its abstraction. Without action, the beauty of this music is lost. “Cadenza Esplosa” aims to be an electroacoustic work in which the creative element is not only the sound, but also the gesture that produced it.

“Cadenza Esplosa” and its subsequent elaboration, “Cadenza,” aim to be an electroacoustic work in which the gesture is as much a creative element as the sound produced.

This piece originates from the performance “Hey Dude, Let’s Stick Around a Bit Longer This Time,” based on a choreography by Francesco Scavetta. The main musical section was written for violinist Diego Conti, who plays an electric violin amplified by pickups and processed with various compression and distortion processors typically used for electric guitars. In this way, the extreme amplification achieved with the pickup transforms even the slightest vibration of the violin into clearly audible sounds, while the dynamic compression of the processors makes these sounds compatible with traditional violin techniques, which normally operate at an infinitely higher acoustic level.

The performer thus has a wide range of sounds at his disposal, which in this piece often tends toward a noisy character.

To create “Cadenza Esplosa,” recordings of seven different performances of the “Hey Dude…” performance were used. Since the violin score is not entirely predefined in terms of rhythm, the recordings are all different from each other, despite having the same formal structure. The sounds of each section were layered to obtain polyphonic and polyrhythmic material, and were considered the starting point for the new composition.

In a subsequent phase, the sounds were once again reworked and superimposed, while striving to maintain the recognizability of the violinist’s virtuosic gesture. Percussion and cello sounds have been added in some sections, blending seamlessly.

The final result of the various layers and successive processing is a purely sonic structure distributed throughout the space by a system with five diffusion points.

The intention guiding the entire work was to create a complex human-machine hybrid that amplifies the original instrumental gesture to bring the virtuoso performance to the extreme, amplified by the mechanical/digital machine and exploded into space in all its teeming details.