Portraits of Fictional Spaces
[ Clarinet, Clarinet/Bass Clarinet, Trumpet ] +
[ 2 Violins, Viola da Gamba (period ensemble) ] +
[ Electric Guitar, Synthesiser, Percussion ]
resonances
i
sinfonia
nobody lit the lamps
ii
Portraits of Fictional Spaces is about contrasts and the theatricalisation of spatiality in sound. It is a work that patches together sounds of materials and musical traditions 500 years apart onto a series of portraits. These portraits contain musicians frolicking in a Renaissance style while others swathe the space with
antithetical counterpoint. Imagine a ruin coming in contact with modern-day materials and equipment, with artificial illumination and synthetic textures. Imagine volumes of sound intervening on the meticulous and tightly-knit polyphonic lines. In these portraits, the trio of period instruments takes on the role of a ruin and the contemporary ensemble delivers the sense of fictional spatiality.
As the work unfolds, the roles of the two ensembles interchange and become blurred, leaving the listener to question what is the new and what is the old? What is the space? What is the sound source?
Program notes by Anna Litvinenko
Paschali Laudes
Choir + 36 stylophones
Guzmán’s fascination with the concept of architectural intervention on cultural heritage and ruins led him to play with this idea in the context of music using the “Victimae Paschali Laudes” plain chant and the medieval “Tournei Mass” as the source for musical intervention.
The Guidonian hand was part of musical education for centuries, and it was especially useful for singers when reading and improvising counterpoint. Notes were assigned to specifics points in the hand and finger joints, and with the thumb, singers would point to those points while singing the corresponding notes. Amused by this concept, Guzmán imagined a situation
where this Guidonian technique would forge a sound of its own. In his Paschali Laudes he replaces the hand with a stylophone. While singing his Agnus Dei, each chorister points to the written pitches on the electronic instrument with a stylus, creating a curious blend of sounds.
He also gives a special flare to his work by instructing his singers to keep the stylus on the stylophone when changing notes, resulting in a wide range of glissandi that produce a prominent and bewildering layer of ornamentation.
Strands of Polyphony #2
It was not too long ago that Guzmán Calzada Llorente encountered a striking image in the church of the Spanish village of Pastrana: a collage of 16th century music assembled together to cover the bellows of the church’s organ. This sight sparked the inspiration for what has become a performance for Festival Dag in de Branding concert in The Hague’s Waalsekerk: Strands of Polyphony # 2.
In this work, Calzada Llorente brings together what seems to be two disparate worlds of sound and musical tradition: a recorder consort and fixed media on a quartet of speakers. His fascination with the concept of architectural intervention on cultural heritage and ruins led him to play with the idea in the context of music, using strips of mismatched sixteenth-century repertoire as the source for musical intervention. The recorder consort Delle Donne follows Cazada Llorente’s mapped-out trajectory in the Waalse Kerk, while Lucie Nezri’s electronic orchestration of his score is played by the fixed electronic quartet. The two sound worlds eventually become interwoven, creating a peculiar symbiosis that leaves the audience questioning what is the old and what is the new.
Strands of Polyphony #2 Guzmán Calzada Llorente
Waalse Kerk, The Hague (NL) - 17-06-23 @Dag in de Branding Festival Delle Donne Consort recorder ensemble Lucie Nezri collaboration electronics Peter Leung collaboration stage direction
Commissioned by Festival Dag in de Branding
Strands of Polyphony #3
2 Violins, Viola da Gamba (period ensemble) +
3 channels electronics
It was not too long ago that Guzmán Calzada Llorente encountered a striking image in the church of the Spanish village of Pastrana: a collage of 16th century music assembled together to cover the bellows of the church’s organ. This sight sparked the inspiration for what has become a performance for Festival Dag in de Branding concert in The Hague’s Waalsekerk: Strands of Polyphony # 2.
In this work, Calzada Llorente brings together what seems to be two disparate worlds of sound and musical tradition: a recorder consort and fixed media on a quartet of speakers. His fascination with the concept of architectural intervention on cultural heritage and ruins led him to play with the idea in the context of music, using strips of mismatched sixteenth-century repertoire as the source for musical intervention. The recorder consort Delle Donne follows Cazada Llorente’s mapped-out trajectory in the Waalse Kerk, while Lucie Nezri’s electronic orchestration of his score is played by the fixed electronic quartet. The two sound worlds eventually become interwoven, creating a peculiar symbiosis that leaves the audience questioning what is the old and what is the new.
Strands of Polyphony #2 Guzmán Calzada Llorente
Waalse Kerk, The Hague (NL) - 17-06-23 @Dag in de Branding Festival Delle Donne Consort recorder ensemble Lucie Nezri collaboration electronics Peter Leung collaboration stage direction
Commissioned by Festival Dag in de Branding
Pensé en no verme, y temblé
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Inspired by Vladimir Guicheff’s piece ‘pense en no verme’; ‘pense en no verme, y temblé’ gestures towards the connection between visual reflection and echo. At the same time, the sound installation explores the spectral qualities of the tam-tam (as it has a main role in Guicheff’s composition) by reacting in real-time with live synthesis based on the aforementioned sound qualities. Made out of 38 platonic solids of twelve pentagonal faces, the five sound sculptures are inspired by the 5 performers' spots and the reflection-echo behavior proposed by Guicheff in his piece.
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Reception Bells
Reception Bells is a piece for five reception bells and live electronics. The set up consists of two performers reading the same text—which is handed out among the audience—, five reception bells—differently tuned from each other—and live electronics.
The starting point for Reception Bells is a text which is read silently by two performers on stage behind a table. Each performer plays a certain bell every time they come across a specific vowel phoneme, the bells are recorded and their signal is analysed in a SuperCollider patch.
Once a performer plays a specific bell, the fundamental fre- quency of this bell will be applied to a sawtooth synthesizer. Subsequently, this sound will be convolved with the ‘impulse response’ made out of the performer’s pre-recorded phoneme associated with this specific bell and finally sent to one louds- peaker.
Finally, there are five loudspeakers extracted from 1990s’ tele- visions, with the five different outcoming signals (one for each bell).
11 Piezas para cuarteto de saxofones
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1 pieces for saxophone quartet originally conceived as an electroacustic piece, finds its place in the saxophones after a large process. Each piece is related to a painting or photogra- phy which portrays an intense moment of uruguayan history.
Collaboration between School of Music of the University (Uru- guay) and Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln with the FUKIO Ensamble.
Coordination: Vladimir Guicheff
11 piezas para cuarteto de saxofones
1 el dirigible graf zeppelin sobre montevideo/the graf zeppelin
2 acto de resistencia al golpe de estado del presidente gabriel terra, previo a su suicidio/president gabriel terra resistence to the coup, before committing suicide (1933)
3 interludio I/interlude I
4 máximo santos recibiendo atención medica luego del atenta- do en el teatro cibils/máximo santos receiving medical attention
after the attack in the cibils theater (1886)
5 vista aérea del hundimiento del acorazado graf spee en aguas del río de la plata/ aerial view of the sinking of the batt- leship graf spee in the waters of the río de la plata (1939)
6 manifestación en apoyo al presidente juan idiarte borda/rally in support of president juan idiarte borda (1897)
7 interludio II/interlude II
8 el asesinato de venancio flores/the murder of venancio flores
(1868)
9 presidente johnson asistiendo a la cumbre de jefes de estado americanos en punta del este/president johnson attending the summit of american heads of state in punta del este (1967)
10 interludio III/interlude III
11 fusilamiento de luna y bejarano en la cárcel de miguelete/ fusillade of luna and bejarano in the miguelete jail (1892) signals (one for each bell).
Pieza Invernal
with 7 hermanos
“Pieza Invernal” (“Winter Piece”) is the result of a collective composition process
undertaken by group of sound artists and musicians named “7 Hermanos” (Sofía Scheps,
Guzmán Calzada, Lucía Chamorro and Marcelo Rilla).
In “Pieza Invernal” we don’t start from sound as much as we aim to arrive at sound. We
want to rediscover it as a brother of heat. Thus, the performance space is prepared as a
technological scenery in which the mechanical components have ambiguous and mutating
structural functions.
In our attempt to recreate an elementary abstraction, we purposefully work with a certain
degree of ineffectiveness. The pendulum analogy is multiply re-constructed, but with
measured precariousness. Thus, a rather common acoustic demonstration leans out,
although it is often betrayed by the sensuality of the materials involved.
This is a configuration very prone to casual coincidences, where accidents may resemble
“good results”. We get to hear the voice of luck, whenever
Keyboard Tale
with Alexandru Pantazica and Manuel Vázquez
Keyboard tale is a project which involves music, digital literature and performance. It deals with the emergency of a performativity of silent reading—or subvocalization—and involves typing and music as part of the experience. In this manner, it fosters the awareness of compounded motor-skills (comprising reading, subvocalization, listening and typing) as a prominent behaviour present in everyday life. It aims to be not only a piece but also an environment for writers and musicians.
The proposed piece involves one reader-performer who types a provided text and listens to a live electronic piece simultaneously. Thus, the reader-performer constitutes the performer and audience at the same time. They are provided with a text divided in blocks which would be written with this structure in mind. Those blocks are generally sentence-length and should be typed by the reader-performer in order to advance to the next block within the piece. The webpage-based environment will upload with the first text-block and the instructions for the piece. As the reader-performer types the text, the pressing and releasing of the keys is used to control live electronics. Every letter key corresponds to a filtering algorithm which will be programmed based on the acoustic qualities of the correspondent phonemes.
Escenas Mínimas
with Sofía Scheps
Nesting in the thought of the sound living in space, and the spa- ce living in sound, weaving physical-acoustic, psychoacoustic, contextual and affective concepts, a site-specific piece is created, where the presence builds and modulates an acoustic space through the notions of path and proximity.
The piece is presented in the format of “Minimal Scenes”; three brief pieces that pose reflections around the presence and movement in space, as modulating tools of a re-constructed/amplified acoustic space.
“In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.”
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
(...)
(...) works with the interaction between sound and graphic dimension of the act of printing, and the role of characters as generators or as a consequence of music. There are two de- pendent objects, where each one is the score and the performance at the same time. On the one hand, the computer errors that result in the printing of certain graphic elements, are the score of music. Moreover, it is tempting to speculate about the graphic part by listening to the sounds that will be occuring in the printer. Therefore, the sound can be the score of the graphi- cal dimension of this work.
Nadie encendía las lámparas
Nadie encendía las lámparas #2 (2019) is an installation com- posed for the Symposium Transformations of the Audible at WEST, an art space in the former U.S. Embassy in The Hague (The Netherlands). The installation took place in a room where I set up two loudspeakers, a storage room of the art space which I used because I was interested in working with the acoustic properties of some objects I found there as well as the room itself.
The piece incorporates an audio programming patch which analyzes a musical recording—the audio source in this case— and plays sine-wave oscillators under certain circumstances. The patch analyzes in real time the fundamental frequency
of a certain audio source—a recording of a piece of music in this case—and uses this signal to trigger several sine-wave oscillators when the fundamental frequency of the audio sour- ce coincides with the resonant frequencies of the rooms. The sine-wave oscillators’ frequencies are extracted from the main resonances of the room. Each oscillator uses an envelope with a very soft attack and release, and sounds for around three seconds. The analyzed audio file is not played in the room, but only works as a signal for triggering sine-wave oscillators within the patch
Nadie encendía las lámparas #2 involved a process of experi- mentation with all the available objects in order to find interactions between them and the room’s resonant frequencies.
The objects inhabiting the room vibrate sympathetically with specific sine-waves, depending primarily on their frequency. On the one hand, the melody resulting from the sequence of sine-waves was split up between the objects, as if the hoquetus technique had been applied to them. On the other hand, such objects provide a wide variety of timbral qualities, which work as an orchestration of the sine-wave melody.