In this new session of El Sindicato de Altavoces we will present new works by Estefanía Aimar, Andrés Lewin-Richter, Medín Peirón, Gil Dori, Guillermo Eisner, and Nikos Stavropoulos, winner of the Destellos 2020 Festival.

Programme

Estefanía Aimar. Requiem Aeternam (2022)

Gil Dori. Proportarum (2015)

Guillermo Eisner. Esculturas temporales (2022)

Andrés Lewin-Richter. Homenaje a Bruno Maderna (2022)

Medín Peirón. Exercisme òrfic (2022)

Nikos Stavropoulos. Claustro (2020)

Notes and bios

(All liner notes have been written by their respective authors)

Estefanía Aimar. Requiem Aeternam (2022)

Conceptual piece produced as a tribute to the fallen, the innocent and those who still resist on this planet. Eternal repetition, where every second a bit of our humanity, humility and commitment is lost. Simulated noise. Memory recognises the historical memento. Loss of the essential, return to silence. Octophonic, electroacoustic and experimental composition. Sound collage made through artistic appropriation of the discourse of Charly Chaplin's The Great Dictator, combined with the sonorities of the Nord G2 synthesizer.

Estefanía Aimar is a multidisciplinary artist dedicated to the study of soundscape and acoustic ecology, electroacoustic-experimental composition, multifocal systems and currently, to the investigation of the simultaneity of the processes between space, movement, sound and image through technology and the body. Her works have been presented in concerts, radio programmes, festivals, museums, art and music fairs in Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, United States, Canada, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Holland and China, among other countries.

Gil Dori. Proportarum (2015)

Proportarum is governed by the proportions of our solar system. Each level of the composition, from the large sections to the tiny parameters in the audio processing, represents different planetary proportions. All sounds are found in the NASA sound archive.

Gil Dori is a composer and co-founder of the EyeHarp Association, a social startup with the goal of developing accessible digital instruments.

Guillermo Eisner. Esculturas temporales (2022)

The work is arranged as a continuum of sound fragments that seek to construct different ways of sculpting time; different gestures; different paths of accumulation and distension of energies. Temporary Sculptures, composed exclusively from double bass samples, takes sound as a mouldable material, and proposes to sculpt on it as if we could grasp it, take it, feel it with our hands. In short, it is a vain attempt to make tangible an ephemeral material such as sound, of which we can only observe the temporal and spatial experience that its fleeting presence leaves us with.

Guillermo Eisner (Montevideo, 1980) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sound at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile. With a PhD in Music from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, he studied music and composition in Chile, Spain, Portugal, and Mexico. He has developed acoustic and electroacoustic concert music, participating in festivals in South America, North America and Europe. Along with this, he has developed his creative work in the field of performing and audiovisual arts, composing the music and sound design for theatre, dance and video works.

Andrés Lewin-Richter. Homenaje a Bruno Maderna (2022)

As 2020 marks the centenary of the birth of Bruno Maderna, one of the greats of electroacoustic music, I decided to pay tribute to his work by recovering his piece "Invenzione su una voce", which I cut up along the piece, highlighting certain characteristics that reappear in other works by Maderna, in particular his "Hyperion" cycle.  It was Maderna's early use of mixed electroacoustics and in particular in radio cycles that won him the Premio Italia. The voice as used by Maderna enhances the laughter, the phonemes and suddenly a phrase escapes, it is almost certain that the voice is that of Cathy Berberian. My contribution highlights certain moments and includes similar ones along the way.

With a Fulbright scholarship, Andrés Lewin-Richter (1937) moved to Columbia University in New York where he studied and worked (1962/65), assisting Vladimir Ussachevsky, Mario Davidovsky and Edgar Varese at the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center, creating his first electronic compositions. With Mestres Quadreny he created the Barcelona Electronic Music Studio at his home in 1968. He created Phonos with J.M.Mestres Quadreny, Lluis Callejo, Rosa M.Quinto and Gabriel Brncic in 1975, of which he is currently secretary and executive director. His output is mainly electroacoustic, having composed many instrumental works on tape and music for ballet, theatre, film, and video.

Medín Peirón. Exercisme òrfic (2022)

The term "exercisme", proposed by the composer Bernard Parmegiani as the title of a series of works produced between 1985 and 1986, is an invented word that serves to elude, simultaneously, both the idea of "exercise" and the question of "exorcism". The "exercise" has been, in this case, to start composing, specifically for this concert, exclusively on the basis of the needs of perception, without any extra-musical element guiding the constructive process. Letting, at each moment, the sounds be the ones to suggest what the next step should be. Nor is there any lack of homage to the models of writing often explored by Parmegiani himself, who also often used sound as the only starting point when composing. As for the (orphic) "exorcism", it has been somewhat supervening. In the middle of the creative process, I realised that returning to the same concert hall where I presented, less than a year ago, "When Orpheus saved the Argonauts", was leading me to perform, unconsciously, a kind of "revision" of this piece. Exercisme òrfic, however, only shares a single sound with the previous one, three seconds long, and frankly banal. The essential link, therefore, is of a "spiritual" type, and has to do, above all, with the fact of sharing the myth of Orpheus as a source of inspiration. For Exercisme òrfic, by the way, the episode in which the son of Apollo travelled to hell is of special relevance, and hence the preponderance in the work of the "three-tone" interval, the so-called "diabolus in musica".

A classically trained musician, Medín Peirón completed his piano studies under the tutelage of Jean-Pierre Dupuy. As an electroacoustic composer, he trained at the Perpignan Conservatory with Denis Dufour and Jonathan Prager, the latter introducing him to the art of manual spatialisation of electroacoustic works. He is currently working on a doctorate, directed by Carmen Pardo, on the French school derived from musique concrète.

Nikos Stavropoulos. Claustro (2020)

Derived from the Latin, “claustrum,” meaning “shut-in” or “enclosure”. Claustro is the third composition in a series of works which explore aural micro-space. A sounding place of improved intelligibility through greater aural intimacy. The work is an invitation to come in and listen out for the thin line between philia and phobia that such places evoke. The discontinuous and non-homogenous nature of acoustic space inspires the arrangement of sound materials here. Recordings of original sound sources were conducted using a micro multichannel array designed and built in collaboration with Huw Mcgregor.

Nikos Stavropoulos (Athens, Greece, 1975) is a composer of predominantly acousmatic and mixed music. He read music at the University of Wales (Bangor, Wales, UK), where he studied composition with Andrew Lewis and completed a doctorate at the University of Sheffield (England, UK) under the supervision of Adrian Moore. His music is performed and broadcast regularly around the world and has been awarded internationally on several occasions. His practice is concerned with notions of tangibility and immersivity in acousmatic experiences and the articulation of acoustic space, in the pursuit of probable aural impossibilities. Since 2006, he has been a member of the Music, Sound & Performance Group at Leeds Beckett University (Leeds, England, UK), where he is a Reader in Composition and lectures on Electroacoustic Music. He is a founding member of the Echochroma New Music Research Group, a member of the British Electro Acoustic Network (BEAN) and the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers Association (HELMCA).

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