projects

Xylocopa Violacea
Drammaturgia for solo viola and live electronics (2007)
Production: Festival Ultrashall, Berlin/ Tesla, Berlin/ Experimentalstudio für akustische Kunst e.V., Freiburg/ Elektronisches Studio der Technischen Universität, Berlin/ Italian Institut of Culture, Berlin
First performance: 20-1-2007, Festival Ultrashall/Tesla, Berlin
Barbara Maurer (viola), Rainhold Braig (live), Claudia Doderer (light and stage design)

Publisher: Edizioni Rai Trade
Duration: 45 mins.

The performance includes: “Studi profondi” for solo viola, “Last Desire Cadenza” for viola and live electronics, “Il sonno di Atys” for viola and live electronics
Xylocopa Violacea, the Violet Carpenter Bee, is a big solitary insect of the family of Apidae, shiny black with violet reflexes, working all its life in wood in order to build a nest. This natural form of obsession is analyzed through a performance for solo viola. I have collected different pieces for solo viola and viola and live electronics, written with the same idea of focusing on the complex timber of this instrument.
All the pieces within this performance retain the sense of something like a musica reservata, because they were composed as analytical etudes of projects that I later developed in other areas of my work. At the same time they are experiments in narration, with a heterogeneous collection of operations on pre-existing musical materials, from quotation to re-elaboration: a kind of intimate theatre of sound, sculpted for the complex sonority of this instrument.
The live electronics is conceived in order to explore the viola itself, travelling inside the body of the instrument in the impossible and obsessive search for an ideal internal point of hearing. The program creates a counterpoint prolongation of the viola polyphonies and a flexible acoustical space, increasing and decreasing as it follows the instrumental source. Infinitesimal fragments from the viola performance are extracted and captured in order to create a permanent and all-pervasive continuum.

Photos (by Andrea Stappert) and musical excerpts from the first performance