Various Artists - Agostino di Scipio: Works for Strings & Live Electronics (2019)

The six works featured here are a selection of Agostino Di Scipio’s music for strings and live electronics. Their textural materials emerge from a carefully designed encounter (or clash?) between different technologies – from the mechanics of traditional lutherie to real-time computer processing, or analogue devices of different sorts (microphones and speakers arranged in well-studied spatial and functional relationships to the instruments and to the performance space). Di Scipio explores extended instrumental techniques – both familiar and specially-researched ones – to capture the tactile energy of tiny gestures and their powder-like sonic residues. Yet, for him, instruments are not just there to create sounds; they can also exert control over the computer transformation of those sounds, so that the player’s gesture ultimately influences or even drives the digital processing operations. The output in turn affects the instrumental gesture. A logic of feedback animates both the details and the multi-layered structure of the music.

The concert space also plays an active part in the performance of Di Scipio’s works, as its acoustics and ambient noise are smoothly integrated into the musical fabric as a source of both expressive and structural developments. The performance becomes a web of interactions and interferences specific to the given environment, thus defining a kind of ‘ecosystem’. Di Scipio himself speaks of an ‘ecosystem’, not as a metaphor, but as an operational notion. His musical world may well evoke a range of sound images, naturalistic or not, but ultimately it presents itself to us as a dynamic reality, bound to change with the changing situation in which performers and listeners meet. This is a genuine form of ‘chamber music’, but it reveals that the ‘chamber’ today is a hybrid, thoroughly technologized environment …