All these sound gestures, that expand the sound material of the violin piece, foresee the combination of two different mediators/activators: the piezo and the performer's hand, or the piezo and the bow. Again, all sounds produced with piezo have been organized in rhythmical events, taking into account the definition of their dynamics, and the richness of their spectra. As well as in Prossimo, also in Prossimo II and Prossimo III, all instrumental sounds are posed in a continuous dialogue with the electronic part, which is made by processes on the same instrumental sounds.In Sistema di Prossimità the electronic part is much lighter, since most of the dialogues happens between the three string instruments. For the composition of the trio, I relied strongly on some counterpoint techniques as well as on some strategies of subtraction/addition (as partly explained in ch.3.5) through which different combinations, concatenations, or stratifications of one or more sonic gestures contribute to the creation of different relationships, while hierarchies between different elements vary continuously.
The whole cycle of Sistema di Prossimità insists on a stethoscopic use of the piezos. In fact, most of the sound gestures performed with the piezo on the strings visually resemble the movements of a stethoscope on the body of the instrument. Acoustically, such a stethoscopic use of piezos tends to highlight the materiality of the instrumental sound and an unusual proxemics of sounds. I have therefore felt the need to approach the sound material from a different perspective. During the compositional process, considering the faculty of the piezo of working as a framing device helped me in understanding the similarities and the differences between the sound material. As discussed in ch.2.1, the mediation of the piezo facilitates the building of a private auditory space, enhancing my own practice of listening. Consequently, I started to be more and more conscious of the importance of storing and cataloguing sound material that has been framed through the piezo, in order to create a direct point of access to the explored and collected material, supporting the process of building a stronger memory of all used sounds.
>> go to 4.4 Hidden traces
After the composition of Prossimo, I decided to go deeper into the exploration of the possibility of using piezo microphones with stringed instruments. I, therefore, decided to create a cycle starting from Prossimo, which works as the generative piece. Since the latterwas composed in collaboration with the violin player Lorenzo Derinni and the electronic performer Davide Gagliardi, both part of the same ensemble, I decided to proceed with the collaboration with Schallfeld, working on the new pieces together with the cellist Myriam García Fidalgo and the double bass player Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka.
The cycle has been named Sistema di Prossimità, and it includes:
- Prossimo, for violin and electronics
- Prossimo II, for double bass and electronics
- Prossimo III, for cello and electronics
- Sistema di Prossimità, for violin, cello, double bass and electronics.
Ideally, the four pieces should be played one after each other, seamlessly. Otherwise, they can also be played separately. The whole cycle was premiered on December 17th, 2018, at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp (BE) during the festival Experiments are More Refreshing than New Socks. The technical setup is similar for each piece of the cycle. Each string instrument is provided with two piezo microphones and a condenser one. One piezo has to be fixed on the soundboard, and the other is given to the player, with the possibility to connect it to a volume pedal, so that each performer could independently control the volume of the piezo by its own.
The last piece of the cycle Sistema di Prossimità is literally the sum of the previous three solo works: it was created by the superimposition of the three solo pieces. Starting from the violin piece, I worked simultaneously on the piece for double bass, for cello and on the one for trio. For the composition of these works I rely strongly on the use of a very simple tool: a timeline. As mentioned in ch.3.4, timelines are often part of my compositional practice; when I write drafts on paper I use them to better visualize the disposition and the evolution of events in time, as well as to get a better understanding of the balance between different elements within different sections, the relevance given to certain elements and their hierarchical relationships within each section. So, basically, I proceeded by copying Prossimo under a timeline, then I disposed under it other five empty musical staffs (from the top to the bottom): one for the violin as part of the trio, one for the cello as solo, one for the cello as part of the trio, one for the double bass as solo, one for the double bass as part of the trio. In order to provide a certain coherence to the sound material shared between the three string instruments, the sound gestures used for the cello and for the double-bass are derived from the ones of the violin, even if there are a few additions, due to new explorations done on these two instruments. The additions consist of the following sound gestures:
1. The double bass player is asked to hold the piezo stable in an indicated position with the left hand, while with the right hand he/she taps the string repeatedly, touching the fingerboard (4.3.1)
2. Both in the double bass part and in the cello part the gesture of the glissando with the piezo is elaborated through the addition of the bow: while the left hand makes the glissando with the piezo flat on the string, the right hand bows the contiguous open string (ex.4.3.2a/4.3.2b).
3. Similarly, in the cello part, the scraped sound is modified assigning the piezo to the left hand, while the right hand plays the bow on the contiguous open string (ex.4.3.3).
4. Both the piezo and the bow are used on the same string in alternation or combination: the flat piezo (left hand) does short glissandos, while the bow (right hand) does a vertical movement from the bridge to the fingerboard or vice versa (ex.4.3.4).
5. The right hand plays a double stop with the bow: one string is open, the contiguous one is “tuned” by the piezo, which makes some glissando movements along the string (ex.4.3.5).
6. The right hand plays with legno on the same string where the piezo has been placed at a high point between the bridge and the fingerboard. The resulting sound should be very airy (ex.4.3.6).
7. The right hand taps repeatedly with legno on the string where the piezo has been placed at a high point between the bridge and the fingerboard (ex.4.3.7).
