The City of Sounds
For a large ensemble
The city. Meeting place, escape and refuge. City as centre, division and the whole world. City as counterpoint of infinite social spaces. There is no “crescendo”, but continuity and suspension, a stream of information, the idea of a simple, primitive listening without asking why. Opening ourselves to the urban harmony, to the sound-map which originates from the stratification of events inside the community. City as addition and subtraction. As a concert. A feast.
Senza titolo (Parte I) (0’41”). A person walking in a street is whistling an old Polish melody.
Armonie Urbane (29’12”). A score for a mixed orchestra formed by a rock ensemble, a jazz group, classic instruments, voices, church bells. A piece inspired by the metropolis. The project, commissioned by “Il Teatro del Giglio” of Lucca for the 1st of may 1997, has been successively re-elaborated in studio. “Armonie Urbane” is a project in which everybody can play: professionals, students, “non-musicians”, without any age limitation, mixing into the same context, blues, rap, trash, counterpoint, improvisation, radio-art.
Megaphono (11’50”). A big empty square with columns and flights of steps, as in De Chirico’s pictures or in Greenaway’s scenographies. A lonely passerby seems to be running away. A strange unusual machine is moving slowly towards the middle of the space, disturbing the peace with a constant flow of noise, loops of sound garbage, electroacoustic informations. “Megaphono” is the composer’s personal visionary interpretation of the environment in which we are living today, an amplification of the world through the sounds of a broken record, a “Fellinian” trombone playing simple and grotesque melodies, violent loops of fragments, guitars avoiding heavy-metal riffs, small and big loudspeakers everywhere. All these materials are organized into a sort of big “Concertato”, a middle way among Russolo, Cage and Purcell. Conceived as a radio piece, as well as a live performance, “Megaphono” seems to lose itself into the “web” of DJ programs, radio waves, jingles, signals from abroad electroacoustic research, giving birth to a sort of hallucinated soundscape in the style of Orwell’s 1984.
Senza titolo (Parte II) (3’30”). The old Polish melody is sung by a female voice, and re-orchestrated for four celloes.
Faraffà (5’54”). A jazz piece in the style of the Sixties
Idea e musica: Stefano Giannotti
Eseguito da: Ensemble IL TEATRO DEL FARO, VAGA ORCHESTRA, SAXOPHONIA
Linda Matteucci, Linda Di Martella Orsi: flauti
Michelangelo Rinaldi: oboe
Giancarlo Rizzardi, Ilenia Dinucci, Ombretta Pacini, Giorgio Fabbri, Simone Stefani, Andrea Sodini, Emilio Cervelli, Massimo Cecchi, Daniele Simonetti, Pierpaolo Iacopi: sassofoni
Davide Guidi: trombone
Marco Fagioli: basso tuba
Lara Vecoli: violoncello
Pierluigi Papeschi, Laura Galli, Renato Ceccherelli, Fabiano Guidotti, Mirko Federighi: electric chitarre
Stefano Giannotti: chitarra elettrica, piano, fisarmonica, harmonium, harmonica, voce, direzione
Marco “Trash” Sabattini: chitarra elettrica, voce blues
Federico Resenauer: tastiera, voce rap
Daniele Gargini: basso elettrico
Alessandro Matteucci: batteria
Miroslaw Rajkowski: fonemi
Gabriela Lukomska, Giulia Rivieri, Franco Russo: voci su nastro
Leo Moll: tape loops
Marco Banti: Sound engineer
Prod. Stefano Giannotti, “Vaga Orchestra”, Leo Moll, SFB Hörspiel Abteilung, Martin Nimbach, Tullio Angelini
Dur: 51’07”