The algorithmic elephant

When following the graphic score of Pithoprakta by Xenakis along with the recording, we see the piece is based on mathematical structures that look organic, as if drawn by hand. This organic appearance is valuable in composition. If the strings entered in square orderly fashion, the score would show straight lines, leading to predictable music. Breaking these lines creates more organic shapes and a more organic listening experience. The score remains schematic but features structures as natural as a tree, not a refrigerator. Pithoprakta avoids ideal squared forms, making it more interesting to the ears...

The original analog score by Xenakis has both musical and visual value

 

Pithoprakta: graphical score by Pierre Carré

The music of Xenakisis both organized and visceral. Xenakis breaks the commonplace conception of Apollo as the opposite of Dionysus. The guts of Dionysus and the arrow of Apollo converse. The warmth of wine, the dance, the beast come together with the intellectual distance, the direction, and the predetermination of the archer. Gabriel Valverde, my composition teacher, used to say when talking about Xenakis: "An elephant has passed." An algorithmic elephant, I would say!

 

 

Pithoprakta, score excerpt

I am interested in the mathematical construction of organic forms. Nowadays there are many contemporary composers who work with mathematical forms derived from nature, with sonic results that are generally highly schematic: the translation of data into music seems to be done by pushing a button. Xenakis was overall a musician, deciding what the algorithm means in the realm of music, and filtering them with musical sense: an old school drawing the functions in graph paper. The mathematical sketches are also scores.
In Pithoprakta, the different scenes succeed each other in blocks, conforming the musical structure. These blocks are in dialogue with each other, like "blocks of concrete" or "blocks of gas" or "blocks of fluids".  In the manner of Stravinsky, Gubaidulina, Ustvolskaya, Nono in his string quartet, among others, the discourse in blocks attempts to disrupt centuries of a Western linear narrative discourse. An urgent matter in the mid-20th century. I listen to Pithoprakta with nostalgia, like someone watching a Tarkovsky film. A classic, that blurry dot back then in the 20th century. Good old times.
In my Música invisible for trombone, Water, played by Dalton Harris, I am using the rhythmical structure of water drops to create musical forms to shape musical forms that create a dialogue between determination and indeterminacy. I use the water itself within the pipe mechanism of the trombone: half brass instrumen, half kitchen sink, the trombone becomes a vessel for sounds, air, and water (listen with headphones please! The beginning is very soft).

The art of combining things

 para Gabriel Abellán

Today, I began my day by reading a post on Gabriel Abellán's blog (in Spanish), a blog devoted to physics and music from both a very smart and poetic perspective. In his latest post, Gabriel shares how a logic class, taught by an inspiring teacher, changed him forever. Emphatically, I remembered my father teaching me math when I was in kindergarten.

https://labellephysique.wordpress.com/2022/05/06/logica-y-norealidad/

Science and Science Fiction

From my last visit to Argentina (I live in Amsterdam), I brought a suitcase full of books: 23 kg of precious books. I "stole" from the family bookshelf the science fiction collection that belonged to my father. I also brought a very inexpensive (but super heavy!) collection of science books that I bought on Calle Corrientes, a street in Buenos Aires well known for its amazing bookshops.

The two piles of books talk to each other, with the "real science" pile being the crazier one (verdad, Gabriel?).

I am sure that the pioneers of relativity theory, with their wild imagination, deeply pleased Asimov and Bradbury. Wells traveling through time and Philip Dick with his multiple worlds speak the same language as the realities glimpsed by quantum physicists. In the realm of music, Stockhausen comes to mind too… maybe it is true that he comes from Sirius.

The people from these two piles of books have in common the ability to see a world beyond everyday facts. They saw it, they believed in it, and they pursued it. Each pile requires a different tool: some build new realities with a calculator, others with a typewriter. Just nuances.

It is easy to associate the capacity for dreaming about new realities with artists, which is something scientists also do. They have to. It is easy to associate the idea of science changing the world (think about the discovery of electricity or the splitting of the atom), but it is something that artists also do. Art and science have been intertwined since the beginning of time, feeding each other and sharing their imaginary worlds.

The Architecture of Cloth 

I also brought from Argentina in that same suitcase a pile of sewing patterns that belonged to my mum, and previously to my grandmother: a collection of Burda magazines. My grandma, Beba, taught me to sew when I was very young. From an early age, I could make clothes for my dolls and for myself by following the instructions in these patterns. La abuelita Beba let me use her Singer sewing machine, operated with a pedal, which, at that time, was just at the tips of my small feet. I didn't care much about the dolls; I was more interested in crafting these intricate mini designs with sleeves, zippers, and pleats. Believe me, it's still not easy. I was also amazed by the mechanism of the sewing machine. I still am.

I write my scores, with instructions sometimes in several languages, just like in Burda magazine!

Varèse said that music is organized sound.
I say that music is the art of combining… a lot of things.

Gespleten piano (2010) - detail of score @2024 cecilia arditto delsoglio

Boxes

 

My recent piece, "Boxes," belongs to a collection of pieces under the name “Acoustics of Everyday,” focused on explicit issues related to classical acoustics: resonance boxes, strings, mutes, filters, microtonality, and other subjects to come.

I had a wonderful adventure with Ensemble Modelo62, which included three concerts, a recording session, and shared rehearsal time. In all those instances, I could deepen my questions about this new chapter in my music.

"Boxes" is mainly focused on the subject of space. Different resonance boxes are in dialogue with each other, and also with the big box around them, which is the room itself.

In a series of concentric layers, my first concern about space starts with the very architecture of the piece.

How?

• Composing different spaces within the piece by grouping instruments by color and/or behavior (orchestration).
• Establishing the role of the instruments (solo, tutti, ensemble).
• Composing their interaction in a combo of music and space (soloist, duplications, hoquetus, etc.).
• "Boxes" asks what is sounding, when, and where at the same time.

• Establishing musical behavior in terms of time and also space: repeated notes "freeze time", while endlessly looping scales "move time in circles"; repeated notes played by one instrument "freeze space," while the hoquetus form "opens it up".

• Posing the question of what sounds inside or outside the boxes.

• The physical handles and metal components of the stage boxes reacted to certain frequencies from the guitar amps which were located inside... so, the boxes themselves sang on stage, becoming more than just resonance containers but producing sound!

 Music, as a holistic unity, brings together different purposes, perspectives, and a multiplicity of diverse energies into one and only one perceptual experience, melting the experience into one single logic.

Space is experienced as an unconscious unity rather than as a collection of recognizably separable processes.
Spaces speak, are you listening? B. Blesser and L.R. Salter

Post-concert questions.

• How concrete is the space of the piece in terms of composition? And how is the dialogue with the architectonic space of the concert hall?
• How aware are the listeners of space? Is it possible to design a space that is moving instead of sound events traveling in it? Therefore: how to differentiate the movement of the events rather than the movement of the space itself?
• How much should be seen? The visual aspect of a concert is always very influential. In previous works, I used the visual aspects of a concert as part of the music (music to see). But in Boxes, on the other hand, I was longing for a concert hall in the shadows.

To be continued.

The cheese grater's five seconds of fame

A cheese grater is being played with a toothbrush. After a while, we completely forget the cheese grater and focus solely on the sound: the continuous fricative noise is colored by mini sparks of high frequencies, short and loud. With the time, the sound progressively becomes a bunch of confused energy not attached to a specific physical body: it seems that by the act of endurance, the sonic outcome is different from the sounds produced by the same object when in the kitchen. The grater-thing with its metallic perimeter, like a lost map, noe embraces new sounds floating in the sea of abstraction. Deep listening is in conflict with what the eyes and/or the ears have to offer: is it really a cheese grater or a camouflaged synthesizer? It is known that synthesizers can efficiently produce a broad variety of sounds, and perhaps, following the same logic, they might also change the way they look.

 “not what it sounds, the car, the instrument, the voice,
but what sounds as sonic materiality and sense”
S. Voegelin

The grater brings an aesthetical conflict on stage
when not performing “spaguetti” but the most beautiful sounds ever.

 

 

La râpe à fromage doit être frottée avec un baguette de Triangle/
The cheese grater should be rubbed with a Triangle mallet
M. Ravel , L'Enfant et les Sortiléges

About notation 3

 

Casi cerca (2004)- score fragment

I like to think of written music as an entity that originates itself every time it is invoked. Unlike other arts, where the physical object is always present, live music exists only when it is played (and in the context of this article, read from a musical score).

Music uses a foreign language to express itself, not through sound waves but through graphical signs. This indirect mechanism gives music an ambiguous condition in both its sound and discourse. Ambiguity brings both fragility and strength simultaneously.

The history of Western music has always danced alongside the development of musical notation, each feeding the other in an indivisible relationship. Musical notation serves not only as a tool to preserve sound waves in the correct order, but as a way of thinking and creating music. Much of the written music we know today would have been impossible to conceive without the practice of recording ideas on paper. Music notation is both a recording and a generative activity at the same time.

Music scores are meticulous, specific, and obsessive with details. The wonderful paradox is that this precision is expressed in a live performance. Written music finds its full expression in the present moment: fresh and fragile. This imperfect-perfect, defined-undefined, precise-imprecise double-sided coin is the fascinating arena that gives music its abstract condition.

Out Loud is back

Out loud is music with the shape of a strainer where most of the sounds are missing. The pre-omposed piece is filtered so only the leftovers of the piece remain: the unwanted, the de-classed sounds.

The ensemble plays tacet: only gestures without sound.

The music vanishes and we can only hear/see what remains: breathing, movements, mistaken notes, eye contact.

To be played in silent mode... a couple of accidental sounds are welcome!

And the no-piece becomes a piece! Hard to escape the void.

The music is defined for what it is hidden instead of for what it shows, in a post-Cage experiment the piece asks to remember the forgotten sounds in the own mind.

The ensemble conforms a half circle on stage with eye contact.

I wrote a silent piece with a lot of notes.
The musicians and the audience are present, occupying the hall, facing a full nothingness. The audience and the musicians, nevertheless, are holding to the concert rituals with the hope of recovering some sense.

Tired of following instructions…
Tired of solfège…
Tired of abstraction...
even not the intention, the resulting piece is quite humoristic.

 

Diagram of the choreography of the whole piece: the musicians are asked to build a piece around the piece. In this version, the trombone, at the very end, plays the only real note of the piece.

The first version of this piece was written for Aleph Ensemble, France, in 2013 for violin, violoncello, piano and percussion. It lasts only one minute! Even Out loud is a piece basically to be seen, I've got an audio recording of the concert that I find very interesting.  The recording of a silent piece is acknowledging all the sounds around the piece, so it is possible to hear everything except for what is written in the score.

Listening to the audio follows somehow the same logic of building sense for what is around instead of for what is shown. Listen to Out loud maximum volume!

https://soundcloud.com/ceciliaarditto/cecilia-arditto-out-loud

I am working now on a second version, a bit longer (3 minutes!) for the New Mexico Ensemble, for violin, violoncello, percussion plus accordion and trombone.

Neon

        

            I like to think that the ones who died want to communicate with us via lights, radios and electrical machines, being these objects sympathetic sensors able to catch “one more talk” with the invisible ones. Where is the threshold of what is alive and what is not, has always been a colorful conversation with thousands of nuances since the beginning of… of...?

          In this project, named “Afterlife” I want to add some drops to that confusion, creating a new group of music pieces. Every piece consists on a dialogue with the afterworld between two “creatures”: one is clearly a musician playing a traditional music instrument (thank God!), the contre-partenaire remains a bit more unclear to me (me being the composer I don´t expect you to have a clear idea either). 

          Afterlife is a beautiful word because it expresses life (or its absence) in the realm of time. The question “where are we going” is answered “later”. The metaphysical land is located in a time dimension, resembling music. 

"Music is made of time and expresses itself via frequencies". 

          In “Afterlife” a microphone amplifies the non-audible sounds (interesting paradox) bringing unexpected frequencies to life (I am starting to feel a bit nervous!). This project establishes different conversations between entities who breath on a different decibel scale: the neon-light is talking to a live trumpet, one to one (*). Amplifying the light tube brings not only more intensity but new musical materials to be digested by our mics and minds.  The light is not only singing but sparkling joy.

          Afterlife is a spiritual license for what, for music lovers, is the “under-sound”: like buried diamonds, the forgotten frequencies are found in the zone of the unreachable buffers. In the threshold of our beliefs, our ears open up to the concept of “beyond audible”, troubling our understanding but not the pleasure of perceiving them. 

 “Talking frequencies, talking light, talking silence”.

Hilde Bouchez - The wild thing

But…

           …unraveling the mystery, I hope not to disappoint you by saying that the invisible ones could not only be my ancestors from the XIX century or Hildegaard von Bingen who wants to give me some musical tips. With a mic as antenna I am waking up the soul of my electrical devices! Lamps, ventilators, radios and screens not only talk to me but also sing. Undoubtedly, the still life was not so still! Under an animistic perspective, the objects, places, and creatures, all possess a distinct spiritual essence, like my old blender! 

Let this project be a tribute to those objects, the buzzing, humming, whirring, hissing creatures that, raising from the cemetery of the obsolete, are having an afterlife in my music. I hope a better one, ha ha!

Music is in the air...

I make music with whatever I find around me. If I lived in the Pole, I would make music with ice; if I played guitar, I would make music for my guitar. Whatever the conditions, the latitudes, the financial possibilities, there is always music to be made. 

When art is in dialogue with their context, with the possibilities of realization, with the real questions of a community, it is powerful, meaningful, and beautiful. Otherwise, the music reflects other realities, echoes different historical times, other people's concerns, or small career issues. 

Music that doesn't belong to us, belongs to someone else; and it is usually conservative, even if it claims otherwise.

Flash light

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast.
Walter Benjamin “On the concept of history”

I picture time passing like a bad contact switch, which turns, randomly, the light on and off. We are immersed in this intermittent room where the chairs, the stage and the musical instruments appear and disappear in flashes of sense; the complete picture of a continuous hypothetical space is only in our minds; the real space is in fact fragmented.
Time is a bunch of threads all tied up together. Our precarious perception tools wrap the emptiness around with more hope than certainties. Most of the time, time is just about random jumps on a continuous waiting state, that we, composers, attempt to fill with notes.

 

Unresolved spells

“I find a resemblance with everyday life, where we are living our unresolved spells in canon with our fantasies, slightly late, slightly early". C.A.D.

Last Saturday my piece La Magia was played in Berlin by Barbara Kysela (harp) and Anja Füsti (percussion). La Magia is a particular piece made of sounds, gestures, images in "tableaux style" and invisible connections between things. The rehearsal process was incredibly creative. It felt like throwing an unpredictable ball that the ensemble caught in the air.
The concert itself didn’t go very well. We couldn’t find the energy or focus we certainly experienced during the rehearsals. We were kind of "out of phase, slightly late, slightly early." In my experience, this kind of music, so fragile, needs a couple of shots before being "there" with some kind of entity. Everything is very subtle, in the border of being something else, or just being nothing. When it works, it is very strong. When it doesn’t, it is painful. It seems that there is nothing in between. It takes time for me (the composer) to find the space in my mind to understand what I am doing.
Not all my productions are like this. I have a couple of pieces like La Magia that are almost theoretical experiments, where my uncertainties are bigger, and the research in undefined processes is riskier. I am thinking also about Around music.
After a couple of concerts (or a couple of years), the music takes shape, and I am able to put all these experiences on solid ground. Certainty is also a good thing: swinging back and forth from "terra incognita."
It was a very long week in Berlin, including rehearsals, a lecture I gave at the UdK, and multiple conversations with the ensemble and colleagues. I was thinking all the time, like a mantra, about composing a music in the middle of things.
I crashed in Abel Paul’s place, who extremely kindly hosted me during the whole week, sharing not only all my extended luggage full of umbrellas, ping pong balls, and props for the piece but being the perfect friend to discuss all these shared concerns. He also had an amazing piece played at the concert, that for some reason, probably similar to mine, couldn't find the right energy.

… “where we are living our unresolved spells in canon with our fantasies.”

For the moment I don’t need to feel safe and run away … I feel like running in, more and more inside… finding this thin string that is my own voice and pulling and pulling it with the hope to catch the golden fish sometime in the future. There is still more to compromise, more to do, more to improve, more questions to make. I am trying to write music that doesn’t exist... yet.

3. The score as the world.

Conference about my music at the University of Berlin, May 27th, 2010. Part 3/3

Music scores bring together diverse elements into a unique storyboard. Lights, movements, objects, visuals, and space design. By the fact of being written down on a music score, they are under the light of a musical logic. A musical score is not only a method of registration of actions and sounds, but it is mainly a big grid from where to conceive and appreciate certain ideas. It is not only about writing musical sounds but about organizing musical thoughts, even if they don´t sound.

Music notation is the best tool to write down events into a timeline. Sounds are fragile and very abstract, so it is necessary to use a very efficient tool to make them exist. Notation makes fragility strong, using a precise graphic vocabulary to talk consistently about abstract things. I find this particular relationship between the fragility of the materials combined with solid structures, the foundation of all my music.

Even having the perfect score and the perfect performer, controlling the way water falls, a snare drum echoes, a radio speaks, the way a cello bow bounces it is never going to be completely predictable. There will be inevitably some deviation. We know that musical notation is about what is written, but I think that is also about what cannot be expressed, a margin of unexpectedness. This margin of error is also the margin for freedom. Music is what is written in combination with what is being played. Notation doesn't describe, notation doesn´t command. Notation invokes.
Musical scores analyzed, classify and organize events in a timeline. The paradox of this enormous laborious activity is that the outcome is always a fresh live event, produced in the same instant of the performance. 

The scores […] are sometimes an essential tool for composition. There are things that no composer would have been able to do all of a sudden, without looking at the paper, step by step, what is happening between the different things that he or she comes up with. This may be one of the most important things which distinguish Western music from other cultures. Leo Masliah

 

2. The big guitar.

Conference about my music at the University of Berlin, May 27th, 2010. Part 2/3

An often-cited definition of music, coined by Edgard Varèse, is that “music is organized sound." In my perspective, music not only deals with the organization of sound but also lights, colors, objects, words, movements, and the space around. Music is everywhere, music can be anything. Music is something that can be heard, but mainly can be thought. The world had been always there, but it is this particular angle on its perception which makes it musical. And music is therefore everywhere, inside and outside: the world itself becomes a big guitar.
The percussionists were the first in extending the instrumental setup a step beyond because it is idiomatic for them to play row materials and objects. And then, came the others.

I was progressively extending the habitat of chamber music to other experiences that are not necessarily based on sound but can be perceived as music. We know that music is something that can be heard but also can be seen and thought. Music is a way of understanding the world. And sometimes it sounds.
The music in this extended land is equally made of lights, gestures, movement. Image, texts, graphisms. Theater, jokes, anecdotes, and the vast space around. Because I am academic, my glasses have staves.

1. Wood, stones and leaves.

Conference about my music at the University of Berlin, May 27th, 2010. Part 1/3

I will initiate this talk with some excerpts from an interview I had during the Aleph Ensemble Forum for Young Composers, in 2004 in France(1).
“First, there is the material condition of music, which is represented by the physical laws of sound. Sound constitutes a material like stone, grass, water, a material with its own weight, color, speed. […] I have always been struck by the sensuality of sound. […]
Another aspect of my work consists of classifying sounds by criteria such as weight or color. I find a relationship between the expansion of the temporal line and the materiality of the sound: the temporal line is like an extension, a dilation of the material in time. In this way, you obtain a relationship between form and material.”
It always fascinates me how to read the materials, how to deeply listen to them, understanding not only their wavelength but their intimate behavior, their inner truth. I think my ideas about music change throughout my life. But then I realize I have always had the same ideas. In fact, I recall similar ideas about things since I was eleven and I was not still a composer. I can remember the way I experienced the world.
...
When I was a kid, I used to go camping with my family during our summer holidays. Together with my sisters, we liked building houses in the woods. Our initial task was to sketch the various rooms on the ground, drawing their perimeters with a wooden stick. Those areas would be supplied with occasional furniture and proper decoration, everything made with pieces of wood, leaves, and stones. Our designs were complex, including different floors, stairs, and imaginary artifacts.
Seen from the outside, it may have looked like three little girls playing with stones and sticks, drawing lines on the dusty earth. But for us, our house was as hard as cement. We were carefully walking through the doors withdrawn on the floor and never through the walls; we were climbing imaginary stairs to finally enjoy invisible lunch on a table crowned with a flower pot.
Composing is the same thing: it is about determining the materials, organizing them according to their particular properties to build imaginary spaces.
Sound and form are intimately intertwined. The physicality of sound expands in space and time. Some materials are fast, others are heavy. And certain sounds possess a remarkable complex structure that can be perceived as a whole composition in themselves.The classical tradition routes sound to musical instruments. From a contemporary perspective, we know the piano artifact can be perceived as many different pianos depending on the way it is used. In my music, there are, of course, differences between sounds coming from objects or from musical instruments, but there is no hierarchy. The orchestration priorities are decided upon the sound qualities.

In 2002 I initiated a project under the name “Música invisible/invisible music” based on the exploration of new sounds and techniques for solo instruments (2). My research didn't focus only on the technical aspect. I strongly believe that extending the instrumental skills brings unavoidably new ways of listening. A melody in 1/32 tone in the flute not only deals with micro-tonality but also defines a new listening context; a trumpet player submerging the instrument into a tin of water not only brings distorted sounds but also changes the theatrical role of the player in a concert. The catalog of physical curiosities is subordinated to a particular way of conceiving certain musical instruments, working in the abstract zone where the sounds lose their bound with tradition and become out of the radar. They become Música invisible.
This metaphor invites us to place our focus in a slightly unusual angle, focusing on those frequencies that we ordinarily don't see. We know that music is always invisible. But this metaphor encourages us to perceive something that doesn't exist: a small displacement that places our conception at a slightly different angle.

 

(1) Link to full interview Aleph Ensemble Forum for Young Composers, 2004 France (PDF).

(2) Link to "Música invisible"

Música invisible en Amsterdam

19 Febrero 15.00
Musica invisible para flauta #1 & #2
Albert Manders- solo flute
Music of Cecilia Arditto, Ned McGowan, Wil Offermans, Debussy and others.
Lunchpauzeconcerten
Deelraadsgebouw Oud-Zuid Karel du Jardinstraat 65 Amsterdam
http://www.kijkan.nl/lunch

La magia (2005-rev.2010) program notes

This piece is located in the lab of two sorcerers. To the alchemy of element transmutation (water into air into grains into umbrellas into paper into a harp, etc) is added the alchemy of sound. The sorcerers -in this performance a man and a woman- live in two slightly out-of-phase dimensions. For that reason, they relate to each other in canon. We can think in one like the rhythmic resonance of the other, or like the other like an anticipation of the one. 
Because they are real magicians, when a spell really works, they minimize the incident and keep on going with their uncertain processes.

The magic is not about results, but about believing in miracles and in subtle relationships among things. If a trick works, the mystery is gone and the experience becomes mechanical. When that occurs, the magicians write down the result in a notebook and relegate the form to the scientists. 
I find in this attitude a resemblance with everyday life, where we are living our unresolved spells in canon with our fantasies, slightly late, slightly early.  

Jan van de Putte – I am her mouth

I went to listen “I am her mouth" by the Dutch Composer Jan van de Putte who lives in France. 
The opera begins with a very long solo from the mezzo-soprano, interacting with a basic scenography: a door, a rectangular arc with multiple functions, a piano, a glass of water and a bottle. Everything single object from stage becomes necessary in van de Putte language. The music starts “eating” the scenography elements to make them indispensable: the piano, the water… they all have their own density and behave musically. Also the lighting. 
The singer starts mumbling some notes and throwing out coins on the floor, dragging her feet (everything was very precise, I am sure written in the score) … her long way finishes in the piano … she plays a note, casually the same she is singing … ja ja ja! Great!
How much I wished in that moment to have written that music myself! I almost jump into stage for bowing at the end of the concert, so inside I was into this music (specially with the first part of the opera). How happy I was watching that combination of voice, piano, little coins, far away little lamp coming from a half open door…

The singer playing the piano says the word “piano”… there is a very complex combination of resources by means of simple elements … for some reason that putting all those things together was making me literally cry under a deep emotion, except when I had to stop crying for laughing of the jokes… to be a responsible audience is not easy!!!
I am doing something similar with my piece Gespleten piano ( I mean this complex combinatoryo of simple elements)… the only difference is that the piano piece is still in the score and the opera was going on on real time… just beautiful, reading my own mind on stage...


In one moment the mezzo starts naming the parts from her body: nose, eyes, mouth simultaneously pointing them… she seemed a person "out of herself" who is naming her own body members from an outside (her own mouth, her own voice) it remainded me that kind of logic that crazy people have. She is not only starts repeating the names but enunciating also the act of  repetition “I repeat: nose, eyes, etc, etc)
Latter she  names the musical actions from the performers putting herself with this act apart from the scene: bow up, bow down, pianissimo, pianississimo… etc…

She is being inside, outside the comedy of the concert. We, audience, are somewhere else... inside? with our own emotions? 
water, piano, voice…
I think in "c’est en pipe"… this is a concert, this is an audience …

This enunciation would sink us into a world of intellectual speculation if it wasn’t somehow joyful! I was laughing -with my mind- about something I didn’t know exactly what it was, but it was certainly funny… But we won’t want to explain the jokes… and I think Jan van de Putte neither.
More than Dostoyevsky the opera reminds me Lewis Carroll (the opera was in English, it helps to the association!) The text was literally playing with riddles, counting, and rhythmical repetitions
Ideas, ideas, ideas…  lot of them all the time...  mind puzzles, ear puzzles...  
Suddenly a new door opened in the opera form with the apparition of the musical instruments and the opera was set immediately into a different place. This new world of harmonies by the piano and string quartet was somehow more “operatic", and in certain way more predictable… Vibrato, certain vocal nostalgia post romantic… In that moment I abandoned myself to the flowing of music because the music was already “done”. Becoming a lazy audience is just round the corner. And then, all the sudden, the piece was gone.  
I wish the opera was longer (I mean really longer, 4 hours or more) but anyway, even in a small dose it was a deep emotion to listen to it.

Los músicos de "La arquitectura del aire"

Tatiana Koleva - percusión

click to enlarge

Arnold Marinissen - percusión

click to enlarge

Jan Hage - órgano

click to enlarge

La arquitectura del aire - program notes

Initially, I thought that “La arquitectura del aire” was about tension and the space between things. In other words, how emptiness can shape things from the outside in.
Three musicians are widely spread out over the hall, with the organ located on top, close to the ceiling. They communicate with each other by playing string telephones - when I was a child, I used to play with those telephones with my sisters.
The usage of the term architecture, in the title of my work, refers both to the architecture of sound and of the building.
My piece is also about air. The organ has one motor and pipes. The vibraphone has also one motor and pipes. The percussionists play a ventilator, a melodica, and an old radio: they manipulate air in different states and frequencies. The title refers to the air too.
This music also speaks about fragility. It is music made of air and threads, basically, made of nothing. It is a nothingness full of intensity, solid and ethereal at the same time. This is the way that sometimes I feel about myself, both very strong and very fragile. Probably some of this sneaked into my score.
But the truth is that I don’t know how to explain my music, or in fact, any music. However, the funny thing, is that I love to do it.