et ego for guitar and electronics, is one of the first pieces that I wrote using piezoelectric microphones. This work was commissioned by the guitarist Pierpaolo Dinapoli. Originating from Venosa, a small village in the Italian southern region of Basilicata, his project was about inviting young composers to write pieces for guitar, pieces that refer to Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, one of the major composers of the late Italian Renaissance. et ego was composed between fall 2016 and spring 2017, and it was premiered in Venosa, on September 5th, 2017.
At the time of starting its composition, I had just finished Tenebrae, a project by the ensemble Blutwurst, that I've been part of since 2011. Tenebraeis a collection of five pieces based on some fragments taken from the vocal work Tenebrae factae sunt, part of Responsoria et alia ad Officium Hebdomandae Sanctae spectantia, composed in 1611 by Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa. The original material is submitted to a process of time stretching that modifies the relations between the melodic lines. In some of the pieces another change occurs, in an almost spontaneous way, through an analog manipulation of the sound on magnetic tapes, where instrumental excerpts produced by the musicians of the ensemble are recorded. The low quality of the tape recording gives a distinctive grain feature to the sound, distorting it and emphasising its transformation.
For et ego, I decided to work in a similar way, choosing a small fragment from the famous Tristis est anima mea, from the Tenebrae Responsoria. Here the harmony changes with a peculiar chromaticism, and my first idea was to stretch this moment in time, in order to change its harmonic perception. Since the guitar cannot produce a really long and sustained sound, I relied on the electronics to freeze a few sounds, in order to create a slowly changing texture through their overlapping. At the same time, I started experimenting with two piezo microphones, placed on the soundboard of the guitar to amplify the instrument, allowing for the production of very subtle sounds both on the strings and on the soundboard. I then realized the possibilities opened up by this hyper-amplification, and I started experimenting, treating the guitar mostly as a percussive instrument, producing sounds by hitting, scraping, striking all of its surfaces, from the fingerboard to the soundboard, including the piezos. The hyper-amplification introduced by the use of piezos allowed me the possibility of adopting certain gestures, almost inaudible on an unamplified instrument. And, of course, as already discussed in ch.2.3, in becoming part of the instrumental system, the piezos introduced a big change in the usual sensory feedback relationship with the performer. Embracing her own instrument, the guitarist is facing the introduction of the piezos not only when she has to produce sound directly on their surfaces, but at any time: the whole body of the guitar is hyper-amplified by the piezos attached to it, so even the most delicate contact becomes relevant. After selecting a few gestures as part of the sound material I would have worked with, I have started to record this percussive material and play it back, also changing the rate of reproduction. I then realized how imperfect and noisy these recordings could be. I intuitively perceived them as damaged and ruined by time, and this perception reminded me of the distortion introduced by analog manipulation of the sound on magnetic tapes happening in Tenebrae. I, therefore, decided to work on different levels using piezos both to amplify sound and to produce sound (when percussive actions are done directly on their surface) and to record in real-time all the material that is then processed by the electronics. Since all input sounds are recorded through the piezos, what has to be processed already begins with a specific colour, given by the piezos. Moreover, the sound of the two piezos fixed on the soundboard of the guitar can be processed through two different filters (a lowpass filter and a bandpass filter) in order to differentiate their colour. The performance of the piece foresees a stereo amplification, through which the percussive actions produced with the piezos are panned respectively on the right and on the left, according to the piezos' position. Et ego starts with a slow percussive pattern made by tapping with fingers on piezos. A first rhythmic fragment is recorded and played back at different rates. The same procedure is applied to some other sound gestures so that all the electronic part is generated from the guitar's sounds. The first part of the piece is developed through an accumulation of gestures, repeated both acoustically and electronically. Each recorded sound is processed following some fixed parameters, such as rate of their reading, and some variable parameters, such as the volume, and the equalization of the piezo microphones. The electronic performer is asked to interpret and somehow phrase the events of the cue list, which are always in dialogue with the acoustic instrument. The phrasing of the delay lines and of the freezes is very important. After the first part, the freezes take more space, and gradually the piece is slowed down to the moment when it holds on to the harmony of Gesualdo, which becomes recognizable, although transfigured. The whole piece is structured as a slow and gradual transition from a first percussive and pitchless section to a richer harmonic texture. The use of piezos allowed for including otherwise inaudible sound gestures, enriching the vocabulary of the guitar, introducing at the same time a significant shift in the auditory perception of the guitar sounds, also through their use in the electronic part.
The performance of et ego might be followed by another piece – et ego - tape version – that is directly derived from it. Using a few recordings of frozen sounds that constitute the last part of the piece, I realized a fixed-media of approximately 15 minutes. The piece develops a texture of highly reverberated frozen sounds that have to be played back through one or two transducers laid on the soundboard of the guitar (a transducer works in the opposite way to a piezoelectric microphone: it transduces the electrical signal into a mechanical one, sending physical vibrations to the resonant body to which it is placed). So, the whole body of the guitar - the soundboard and the strings - becomes the resonant space through which the piece is propagated. In this way, the piece acquires a different colour each time, thanks to the specific resonance qualities of the instrument used. et ego - tape version was premiered at the Turner Contemporary, in Margate (UK) on June 2nd, 2018, during the Oscillate Festival.
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