19/12/2012

h.20 Auditorium San Fedele

Apocalypse Project

Jonathan Harvey (1939)
Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980)

Giorgio Bianchi – Omar Dodaro – Alessandro Laraspata
Πάτμος3 – Patmos3 (2012)
acousmatica composition (12’) Commissione di Gioventù Musicale d’Italia  – world premiere

Acousmatic interpretation: Giovanni Cospito

The title of the composition for magnetic tape by Jonathan Harvey, Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, is inspired by the Latin inscription engraved in one of the bells of the Cathedral of Winchester, translatable in Italian as follows: I count the hours that flee, I cry the dead and I call the live to prayer. In this work commissioned by IRCAM of Paris and created by Harvey in 1980, death is symbolized by the grave and impressive sound of the bell, while the song of a child – Harvey recorded the voice of his son – emanates the sound of life. Harvey imagines that the walls of the concert hall can resonate like the inside of the bell within which the child’s soul hovers freely. “Πάτμος3 – Patmos3” is an acousmatic composition conceived and produced in “six hands” by Giorgio Bianchi, Omar Dodaro and Alessandro Laraspata, three young composers students of Maestro Giovanni Cospito of the Department of Music and New Technologies of the Milan Conservatory. Patmos is the Aegean island where the evangelist John had visions of him and wrote the Apocalypse. The composition follows a collective creation methodology similar to that experimented in 2004 by Christian Fennesz, Mika Vainio and Christian Zanesi at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris: sharing of motivations, expressive imagery and experiential fusion starting from the research of sound materials and elaboration processes aimed at the coherence of the resulting formal construction. Within the framework of the APOCALYPSE PROJECT, the three young composers have deliberately integrated within their collective compositional project – also in the form of interpolation – parts of the musical works of Jonathan Harvey and Olivier Messiaen scheduled for this evening: “nodal points, processes, stratifications , complexity and chaos that are pacified and that, gradually, reveal their nature to the listening “.