Abstract:

This work in sounds and voices is an attempt at "deconstructing" a poem by Edoardo Sanguineti, titled Sequentia, which was in turn inspired by and dedicated to Luciano Berio's virtuosic solo instrument works globally called Sequenze. The attempt was to destroy the musicality of Sanguineti's poetry on its own ground, namely on the ground of the purely sonorous (or purely "musical") appeal of his words, and to let a different meaning emerge from the very same words we read in the original Sanguineti. This experiment "in words" (we also hear a voice whispering "parole!", i.e. "words" in Italian, a quote from Berio's electroacoustic historical "Visage", from the '60ies), extends to an experiment with the sound of the paper sheets upon which words are usually printed: the sound of skimming through books and magazine, ripping off the pages, etc., are granulated, stretched, heavily transformed in various ways, up to the point w here they become similar to voices whispering the Sanguineti's lines. There are 10 lines in all, each of which is introduced by a voice enumerating the 10 sections in the piece (after the 3rd section, however, the speaker gets rather confused and jumps ahead to the 6th, then gets back from the 8th to the 4th, and so on, until finally she tries to utter "ten" and "eleven" at once...).

Thanks are due to Eva Martelli for lending her voice.

The work was produced by the composer programming the Kyma computer music workstation at Laboratorio Musica e S onologia, L'Aquila.