In order not to unnecessarily affect the perception of the audience, I will limit myself to two sentences describing the piece.
”smar“ is a polish word for grease (lubricant) – a thick substance similar to oil, used on machine parts for making them work smoothly.
The intended purpose of the piece is to explore capabilities of creating similar flow beetwen electronics, double bass and guitar parts.
Anna Sowa
Anna Sowa (*1987 in Limanowa, PL) is an experimental composer and artist working mainly with electronic music and performing arts fields. She is interested in the intersection of movement, gesture and theatricality in connection with electronic and instrumental music.
She graduated from Bacewicz Academy of Music in Lodz (PL) with a Master’s degree in eurhythmics (2011) and composition (2016), where she studied with Zygmunt Krauze. In 2014/15, as part of the Erasmus+ program, she studied composition and visualization with Dietrich Hahne at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. As a Chinese government scholarship recipient she studied at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music (CN) in 2017/18. In 2021 she graduated with distinction the “Specialized Master Performance / Composition” with Caspar Johannes Walter and Johannes Kreidler.
In 2021, Anna Sowa won the Fringe Competition of the Haydn Foundation. As part of the prize, her opera Silenzio/Silence will be premiered in March 2022 as part of the Festival Oper 2022 in Bolzano.
Among others, she received the Witold Lutosławski Scholarship 2019 (PL), donated by family members of the composer, and the Nicati-de Luze Scholarship 2020 and 2021 (CH).
The Cité des Saules (City of Willows) is a metaphor for departure. The entire pièce is conceived as a form of reciprocal genesis between inwardness and space. There is no motif, no outline, no figure derived from a background. All that matters is the spatialization process.
The piece comes down to a process of emergence with the only distinctive features being the degrees of depth and opening. Articulations are reduced to the strict minimum: interstices, active voids, coloured segments, luminous events, interplay of transparencies, dark rumblings. The work ends by turning in on itself, by being reabsorbed into its own background.
The piece’s construction is largely based on echo reinjection, very slight ring modulation and hints of chorus effects. Today, all of these methods are obsolete. I would like to thank today’s performers for agreeing to rethink the piece using entirely digital treatment, thus giving it a new life.
Hugues Dufourt
French composer and philosopher Hugues Dufourt (*1943 in Lyon) studied piano and composition at the Geneva Conservatory, achieved the Agrégé de philosophie in 1967, and then taught philosophy at the University of Lyon. In 1973, he joined the Centre Nationale des Recherches Supérieures (CNRS) as a scientist and joined forces with Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, and Michaël Lévinas to form the composers’ group “L’Itinéraire,” from whose sound research spectral music sprang.
In 1977 Dufourt founded the CRISS (Collectif de Recherche Instrumentale et de Synthèse Sonore), from 1982 he directed the information and documentation center “Recherche musicale”, a joint research project of the CNRS, the École Normale Supérieure and the IRCAM, and in the same association from 1989 the Doctorale Formation Musique et Musicologie du XXe siècle.
Hugue Dufourt’s music is based on an abundance of sound constellations and overtones and relies on the dialectic of timbre and time. He draws inspiration in part from the visual arts, essentially maintaining the role of color, medium and light Many of his larger works have been inspired by artists such as Brueghel, Giorgione, Rembrandt, Poussin, Guardi, Goya, Rothko and Pollock.
Hugues Dufourt has received numerous awards, including the Grand Prix de la Musique de chambre (SACEM) in 1975, the Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros in 1980, the Fondation Koussevitzky Prize in 1985, the Jury Prize of the Musique en cinéma Festival in 1987, the Prix des compositeurs de la SACEM in 1994, and the Prix du Président de la République pour l’ensemble de son œuvre, awarded by the Académie Charles Cros, in 2000.
My heart lives in my
chest. I know it’s there.
But now the rogue will often
disappear, and leave me
stranded in my scarecrow
mind. It’s so unkind.
What did I do to make her run
away? – I ask myself each
day. What did I do,
or what did I do not
or just in part, to make my
heart pack up and run
away?
The house inside my chest is
empty now – a vacant lot;
the weeds grow wild in there,
and still heart not come back.
Soon the foundations will be swept
away, and underneath the chest’s vast
empty skies, only the cries that
echo from afar, of some strange
flapping bird, no longer navigating by a
star.
Dorothy Molloy
Clara Iannotta (*1983 in Rom) is an Italian composer and curator based in Berlin.
Her music is commissioned and performed by renowned ensembles, soloists, and orchestras, including Quatuor Diotima, Ensemble Intercontemporain, JACK, Klangforum Wien, Neue Vocalsolisten, Münchener Kammerorchester, Nikel, and WDR Sinfonieorchester. Iannotta has been a fellow of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD in 2013, Villa Médicis (Académie de France à Rome) in 2018–19, and the recipient of several prizes including the Composers’ Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung and the Hindemith-Preis 2018, Una Vita nella Musica Giovani 2019, Premio Abbiati 2021, Bestenliste der deutschen Schallplattenkritik (German Record Critics’ Award) for her portrait albums A Failed Entertainment, Earthing, and Moult. Since 2014, Iannotta has been the artistic director of the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, and from 2022 she is the co-artistic director of the festival Klangspuren Schwaz. Her music is published by Edition Peters.
This is a joint work on a proposal by Uli Fussenegger, developed from sounds he managed to obtain by playing only with the wood of the bow of his double bass. He invited me to listen to these superb, amplified sounds, I found them very surprising, it seemed to me to find there something archaic. As a result, we agreed on the project to create a piece for live double bass and tape made with this pre-recorded material, without any electronic processing.
As time went by, the project constantly continued to grow secretly between the two of us. Then one day Uli started sending me recordings – which later became a habit – a tape that appeared to me as some kind of organic flow. I listened to it several times and I started writing the double bass part. I regularly sent page by page to Uli to try to see how the materials responded. From a distance, one by one, we modified recordings and scores to arrive, step by step, at this concert version.
I have the feeling that I wrote something like a graffiti on the sounds Uli created, a kind of wall that makes me think a lot about prehistory, an ancient fresco.
I also have the feeling that we wrote this piece together and from a distance, as we did a long time ago in the correspondence of the 18th century.
Georges Aperghis
Georges Aperghis was born in Athens in 1945. In 1963 he moved to Paris. From 1971 he wrote major compositions, including two operas. From 1976, he realized a wide variety of theater works with his group ATEM for over twenty years. Georges Aperghis works interdisciplinary with the connection of different genres and art forms, thereby together with the renowned ensembles for contemporary music and many Solist:innen, frequently also under inclusion of technology and electronics. Georges Aperghis has received numerous awards, including the Prix SACEM, the Grand Prize of the City of Paris, the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize, the Golden Lion of the Biennale di Venezia and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 2021.
A holding pattern is a circular loop flown by an aircraft while waiting for clearance to land. Here it is a work entirely made from loops, often aimless — like tops spinning in place, waiting for a decisive push. An electronic tool, called the “Loopsculptor“, layers the live sound, not creating precise echoes, but reshaping these phrases with constantly shifting dimensions.
Holding Patterns was commissioned by Yaron Deutsch and Uli Fussenegger, with the expressed desire that the piece should allow the performers to branch off into an improvisation. The form of the piece circles back on itself before taking this foray, then returns for a composed coda.
Christopher Trapani
Christopher Trapani (*1980 in New Orleans, Louisiana) is an American/Italian composer. He is currently living between Palermo and Los Angeles, where he teaches at the USC Thornton School of Music.
Christopher is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow and a former winner of the Rome Prize (2016-17) and the Gaudeamus Prize (2007). He has held fellowships at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation.
Waterlines, his debut portrait CD, featuring performances by Talea Ensemble, JACK Quartet, and others, was released on New Focus Recordings in 2018. A second recording of Waterlines by ICTUS was released in 2020.
Projects for the 2021-22 season include commissions from Klangforum Wien and Ensemble Modern, a new work for the Grossman Ensemble at the University of Chicago (Fromm Foundation Commission), and a new song cycle for a consortium of sopranos, commissioned in conjunction with the 2020 Barlow Prize.
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