Human Machine – Lugano, Wien, Budapest
February 16, 2017 – 10:30PM
Festival Oggimusica, Lugano, CH
October 19, 2017
CAFe – Contemporary Art Festival, Budapest, HUN
October 20, 2017
Yamaha Concert Hall, Vienna, AUT
PROGRAM
Mateo Sepúlveda
Ríos Le bruit des feuilles (2017) for ensemble and disklavier (première)
György Ligeti
Piano Etude no. 14a (1993) for disklavier
Conlon Nancarrow
Piano Study no. 21 (1961) for disklavier
Klaus Huber
Sechs Miniaturen (1963) for clarinet, violin and cello
Denis Schuler
L’autre rivage (2017) for disklavier (première)
Sándor Veress
Sonata for oboe, clarinet and bassoon (1931)
Alfredo De Vecchis
Prelude, Aria, Kanon (2015) for disklavier (première)
Alessio Elia
Traces from Nowhere (2017) for disklavier and ensemble (première)
Impronta ensemble
Andreas Luca Beraldo, conductor
One of the features of the late twentieth century music was the gradual mechanization of music, showing in a more and more explicit way the ouster of human components, such as the emotions or the oscillation of tempo and dynamics in the performances.
This has also affected the interpreters who were asked to turn their expressivity into a more precise and uniformed (even flattened) execution. Great example of this type of music are the studies for player piano by Conlon Nancarrow in which the human performer is replaced by a mechanical piano which hammers were driven by perforated rollers, or certain piano studies by Ligeti, designed for pianists in flesh and blood but with a strong mechanical component, works that often, given the impracticality of the performance, were entrusted to the execution of playerpiano or a disklavier.
The project “Human machine” aims to bring back music to the expressive dimension of the human being, to find in the “inaccuracy” of the human performance not an aspect of imprecision, but elegance, because beauty is made of asymmetries, little nuances that make things familiar to us.
Taking these ideas in mind we decided to do the reverse operation to “mechanize”, that is to “humanize” what, by its nature, is born mechanic. The central figure of the project is the disklavier, a mechanical piano driven by a midi controller.
We have developed a software, through which the disklavier sets its parameters in such a way to be in accordance with the human performance of the ensemble.
A machine becomes in that way a real component of the ensemble, and in this way it is easier for us to share a certain familiarity with it, understand it and love it because it closest to us.