SEQUENZA UNO

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SEQUENZA UNO

Alessio Nanni

Performed live by New Music Enseble, in collaboration with New York University 2008

The composition project on ‘Sequenza Uno’ is extremely complex and extended. It comes from a long experimentation period about many different composing styles and techniques applied from many previous projects in a completely new and integrated way.

‘Sequenza Uno’ is a major composition project that absorbed all the knowledge developed at the White Noise Factory in the last few years about sound generators, compositing, audio design, editing, mastering, spectral manipulation and it concerns both the studio and live performing experience. Sequenza Uno uses a very limited elements group. The original cell is made by just five notes. After many different structural manipulations such inversion, time variations and dilatations, retrograde, the phrases turn into something more and more complex step by step, passing by a completely synthetic sound design to a human-voice sound design.

The game between this two different worlds is the main topic inside the composition. The synth starts to make its job, and after few bars a human voice starts to interact with it. Few steps after this meeting the voice and synth could be on the conflict point, but a third voice starts to game with the others in a unexpected way.

All the samples, generators, voice fragments are collected in a sort of vocabulary that built the language in Sequenza Uno, for both human and synth voices. Not less important the human samples are just few little fragment, manipulated in their spectrum to reach a wider color and dynamic range.

The sound space is designed using the ©WsS System for a clear and real sound spacing perception.

The second step in the project is the Sequenza Uno live performance.

In july 2008 the first official performance of Sequenza Uno for Tape, four flutes, tenor and steel drum has been realized in collaboration with the New York University and the New Music Ensemble of New York. The most important difference between the tape version and the live version of Sequenza Uno is about the opportunity for a live inserts between the rows of the composition it-self.

The performance is strongly related to the high flexibility of flutes and voice and to the interaction between the different new human elements, giving to the audience a reinforcing perception of the original style inspired to the Radio Drama of the early 20th century.