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As the music community resumes its activities, Le Vivier, an organization specializing in new music, is planning a concert season involving no fewer than 18 performances and 65 works. Included in this vast program is a new series of events entitled Résonance croisée presented with the support and collaboration of the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC).
As the music community resumes its activities, Le Vivier, an organization specializing in new music, is planning a concert season involving no fewer than 18 performances and 65 works. Included in this vast program is a new series of events entitled Résonance croisée presented with the support and collaboration of the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC). This series, which brings together composers and performers from here and Europe, takes place in three stages: three concerts in October, five in April and five online masterclasses in which students from the Hochschule Dresden and the Pôle supérieur de Boulogne Billancourt and the Vivier InterUniversitaire.
The first concert in the series, Les espaces physiques, takes place on Oct. 7. Presented at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology (CIRMMT), this concert offers the Sixtrum ensemble in three works for augmented percussion by the brilliant Italian composer and mathematician Carmine Emanuele Cella.
An immersive experience
Comprising a triptych of works composed between 2017 and 2021, this evening’s program is the result of an ambitious research project jointly commissioned by IRCAM and the Percussions de Strasbourg in 2016 and aimed at redefining the paradigm governing listening and the interaction of electronic devices and instruments.
While these traditionally take the form of a network of musicians and sound-diffusing speakers, Cella brings the two together by integrating electronics into the instruments and arranging them around the audience. Using an ingenious system of sensors and transducers managed by algorithms, the composer creates a new instrument, the Xulon, to modify the sound according to the interaction of the performers. This expansion of the role of instruments increases the feeling of immersion and the immediacy of the relationship with the audience, the latter being placed at the heart of the “instrumentarium.”
Inside-out
Beyond the new sonic horizons that come with the Xulon, it is truly the actions of musicians and instrumental technique that are upset, to the point where Cella affirms the need to reinvent the concept of praxis. This new instrument – the codes and capabilities of which must be learned – also modifies the writing process, which Cella describes as collective. With Inside-out (2017), the first piece to be heard on Oct. 7, Cella collaborates closely with the performers, the latter participating both in taming the Xulon and in the composition process by proposing new approaches. The result is striking: the percussion sometimes producing dark, ethereal textures, sometimes powerful explosions. The second piece on the program, Kore (2019), further pushes the possibilities of the Xulon; the triptych imagined by the composer then ends with a premiere featuring a duet, thus creating a contrast with the scale of the general installation.
Sixtrum presents Les espaces physique on Oct. 7. www.levivier.ca
This page is also available in / Cette page est également disponible en:
Francais (French)
