Projects

Composing with contact-piezo microphones

Daniela Fantechi

My research concerns the composition of instrumental music implemented with a specific use of contact-piezo microphones. Piezo microphones are low cost and low fidelity microphones that can be easily used to disclose and amplify sounds coming from instruments. The development of a peculiar use of this technology will be oriented to emphasize concrete aspects of instrumental sound and to work on the coexistence of traditional and unconventional sounds. The low-fidelity quality of these microphones will allow to highlight interesting aspects of proximity of sounds. The consequent and peculiar attention to the details of sound will lead to a closer way of listening. The choice of the piezo microphones represents also an unconventional approach to the electronics: the composer can easily build his/her own piezo microphones, according to the specific needs of each piece.

Fantasy in the fingers

Adrien Pièce

The Italian school of the first half of the seventeenth century offers one of the most virtuosic and innovative repertoires for organ and harpsichord.  Besides well-known printed compositions, approximately eighty manuscripts, mostly of Roman provenance and containing music of Girolamo Frescobaldi and his pupils, are dispersed throughout European libraries. Composers’ sketches, accurate copies, and didactic material represent precious testimonies of the daily practice of the time and allow a re-examination of the nature of a musical object as a work in progress between orality and literacy.

In this study, selected sources will be used as the basis for composing and reconstructing fluent improvisational practice in this style. This will necessitate an investigation of keyboard idioms, compositional processes, counterpoint alla mente and alla cartella techniques as well as the history of music teaching practices. Elements of rhetoric, poetics and philosophy will also be considered, which will provide an understanding of the social and aesthetic roles of music in the early modern age. In order to discern which concepts can be transposed into today’s context, sources will be selected and approached critically.

Furthermore, a focus on the processes of oral music transmission and a comparative approach with other musical traditions in and beyond Europe could provide further research directions.

Saxophone Without Mouthpiece

Don-Paul Kahl

Composers have recently integrated techniques proper to saxophone without mouthpiece attached to the neckpiece within their works. This doctoral project sheds light on the artistic possibilities, performance practice, and notational issues of these techniques.

Materialization of fixed media music

Siamak Anvari

This research essentially concentrates on the realization of fixed media electroacoustic music into aural reality, dealing with issues such as performance, interpretation, reproduction and correlation between compositional aesthetics and the performance situation. Consequently, the critical parameters (artistic and technical) of bringing a piece of fixed media music into sonic reality will be investigated.