ECHO RESONANCE & MEMORY premiere performance - NAPOLI

The sound for ECHO RESONANCE & MEMORY is inspired by Jannis Kounellis’ work at La Marrana Arte Ambientale (La Spezia), an installation made up of large church bells that appear to be spiraling out from the earth’s core. I was struck by the intensity by which this arrangement of bells, a chorus of silent tongues, caused sound to resonate in my mind. The work that I have created for ER&M uses computer processed voice and recordings of Kounellis’ bells, and invites us to reconsider how our memory records and abstracts sonic events. This is the first work in which I have collaborated with the choreographer/dancer from the formulation of concept, to the staging of the work and live performance. It is fitting that the premiere takes place on Monte Vesuvio, a sometimes-silent tongue, and like church bell, is the source of a hallmark sound in local history.

--- Italian press release ---

ECHO RESONANCE & MEMORY

di e con NEIL LEONARD & GABRIELLA RICCIO
performance multimediale danza musica immagini
prima assoluta

domenica 25 maggio 2008 ore 21.30
teatro IL TORCHIO spazio per le arti di Somma Vesuviana – Napoli
via colonnello Aliperta – Parco degli Aromi

ECHO RESONANCE & MEMORY performance site-specific multimediale (musica danza immagini) nasce dall'incontro di Gabriella Riccio artista-coreografa napoletana di formazione e percorso europeo - una delle figure più interessanti nel panorama cittadino della giovane coreografia d'autore e della nuova danza di ricerca della regione Campania - e Neil Leonard - sound artist, compositore e sassofonista di Boston, professore di musica elettronica al Berklee College of Music, curatore di GASP sonic art series a Boston, direttore di festival di musica elettronica di respiro internazionale. Neil Leonard si esibisce tra gli altri alla 49a edizione della Biennale di Venezia, all'Auditorium di Roma, al MOMA di NY, alla Carnegie Hall. E' attualmente in tourné in Europa per collaborazioni con il Conservaotrio Pollini di Padova e la Folkswangschule di Essen.
E' proprio Neil Leonard che apprezzando il lavoro di Gabriella Riccio ha lanciato l'idea per una collaborazione che vede la luce proprio nei prossimi giorni con un debutto nel suggestivo teatro Il Torchio spazio per le arti di Somma Vesuviana.

GR: Il tema è emerso dai primi suoni proposti da Neil, suoni arcaici, ancestrali, metallici. Materia, appunto. Ed evocazione/memoria. Abbiamo iniziato a parlare di eco e di risonanza del suono e l'impianto del suono è diventato ragione fondamentale per la ricerca e l'indagine sul corpo e sul movimento. Indagare le possibilità coreografico-compositive per i concetti di eco e risonanza con un uso dell'immagine ripetuta moltiplicata e riprodotta del corpo, per andare oltre ed arrivare ad un corpo/movimento visionario. Offrire allo sguardo/corpo suggestioni che possano risuonare questa volta in senso poetico con lo spettatore. La possibilità di lavorare in composizione istantanea sia con il corpo, sia con il suono, sia con l'impianto visivo (disegno luci di Fernado Siciliano, camera mobile di Alia Scalvini e missaggio video di Alessandro De Vita) offrono una rara possibilità di indagine dello scarto tra evento e reazione della mente, intelletto vs istinto, dentro vs fuori, luce vs buio, tra sacro e profano, perché il corpo ed in particolare il corpo-danzato resta sempre ed inevitabilmente materia della terra, ma che da questa materia può come corpo-poetico lasciare apparire, trasformarsi, evocare.

NL: "I suoni per Echo Resonance & Memory sono ispirati ad un lavoro che Jannis Kounellis ha presentato a La Maranna Arte Ambientale di La Spezia, una istallazione realizzata con grandi campane che affiorano in una spirale dal centro della terra. Mi ha colpito allora l'intensità con la quale l'organizzazione di queste campane, come un coro di lingue silenti, potesse fare risuonare il suono nella mia mente. Il lavoro che ho creato usa voci elaborate elettronicamente e registrazioni di suoni che ho generato dall'installazione delle campane di Kounellis in modo da suggerire il primo apparire del suono come riportato dai miti dell'antichità. Il lavoro invita a riconsiderare come la nostra mente registra e trasforma il suono e la musica. Questo è il primo lavoro in cui ho collaborato con l'artista coreografa/danzatrice sin dalla formulazione del concetto fino alla messa in scena dell'opera nella formula della "live performance". Non è un caso credo che il lavoro debutti alle falde del Vesuvio, una lingua a volte silente e come le campane un segno sonico della storia locale.

ECHO RESONANCE & MEMORY

My first view of Mt. Vesuvius - site of the premiere performance.

Ariel shot from Google Earth - Somma Vesuviana us in the bottom left corner, just below the cloud.

After recording vocal tracks with Dagon Lorai and Alessia De Capua, residents of Somma Vesuviana. Alessia's voice is amazing and it was a real pleasure to work with these musicians from Somma Vesuviana, a small town near the summit of the volcano.

Rehearsing with Gabriella Riccio, Alia Scalvino and Alessandro De Vita at Il Torchio, Somma Vesuviana.

SECOND PERFORMANCE IN THE WORKS - MORE INFO TBA THIS WEEK!

Concert at Discoteca Di Stato - Sguardi Sonori 2008

In addition to concert, there will be a conference in the afternoon at 16.00 at the Center for American Studies in Via Caetani 32, Roma.

Turn up the Volume: The Audio Archive and Ways of Listening
Sguardi Sonori presentation at Discoteca di Stato and the Center for American Studies
Rome, Italy
June 27, 2008

By Neil Leonard

This year’s edition of Sguardi Sonori is hosted, in part, by Discoteca di Stato (DDS), an extensive archive and study center dedicated to the preservation of sonic memory. The archive houses tens of thousands of hours of sound from around the world, with an emphasis on the unique sonic culture of Italy, including music, political speeches, and ambient sound of social events.
In this venue, Scanner (Robin Rimbaud), Kim Cascone, and I will present a concert of live electronics works. The personal collections of sounds we each work and tour with mirror DDS’s comprehensive collection. In our case, however, the collections are not the final product or center of discourse, but rather, raw material that we process to generate new works.

I was introduced to Scanner’s early work by my students at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the early 1990’s. They were fascinated by Scanner’s inventive recycling of disposable sounds from police scanners, which he collected for his early compositions – and from which he adopted his stage name, Scanner. His use of the disembodied voices and electronic noises, produced by scanning devices, did much to focus our critical discussion on the writings of Luigi Russolo and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and on the work of Marcel Duchamp, whose readymade sculptures of the early 20th century strongly suggested that sonic equivalents were just a matter of time.

Mining the airwaves, Scanner built an important body of work that changed to reflect the character of each location in which he eavesdropped. While John Cage explored similar ideas of appropriated broadcast and sound maps in his Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) for 12 radios, digital technology handed Scanner the means to create real-time sound-maps that include the most private transmissions.

Like Scanner, Cascone has spent years constructing a sonic archive that fuels his current performances. Cascone’s work draws on a vast collection of sounds he created with hardware and software synthesizers. He builds home-brew software to navigate this repository in concert. After recycling and mixing these sounds algorithmically, to create a meta-soundscape, Cascone remixes them again on stage.

Cascone’s work epitomizes the extent to which new technologies are continually reshaping the ways we listen to, and work with, audio. In his recent Spectral Space, for example, Cascone uses indeterminacy to mimic the media overload that surrounds us. The work examines our ability to assimilate and decode this dense, omnipresent chorus of disembodied sound that has nothing to say, and yet, dominates our cultural soundscape. The result is a non-narrative performance in which Cascone finds “tangles of sounds that glint, shimmer, collide and implode within the fabric of noise.”

My own sonic archive has a distinct component of field recordings I collected while I was living in Italy for much of 2006. The sounds range from recordings of ancient Lazio ritual, that Dr. Massimo Pistacchi, Director of DDS, generously shared with me to recordings I made of Joseph Kournelli’s installation (located at La Marrana, the private estate for environmental art in La Spezia) to my recordings of Padovan a cappella groups -- comprised of workers from the open marketplace whose voices are quickly being replaced by the homogenous din of broadcast media. With the aid of computer processing, I have extracted, exaggerated and juxtaposed aspects of these keynote sounds to create a personal sonic statement.

My recent Italian commissions provided opportunities to leverage these sounds in three large scale works, including a permanent installation on the top of a mountain overlooking the Ligurian Sea, in a surround audio installation in the remains of the Templar church, Chiesa San Galgano, and most recently, as part of a 400-meter installation in the porticos of Padova’s historic district. These works explore the colliding sonic identities of new and old worlds and the relationship of the visitor to local histories.
Our short residency at Discoteca di Stato and the Center for American Studies provides several ways to reconsider the audio archive as an essential resource for 21st century art and examine how technological is changing the way we listen to and create sound works.

Neil Leonard
Boston
Director, Sonic Arts @ GASP
Professor, Berklee College of Music
May 2008

uscir ad ascoltar le stelle…

Photos of Rondò da Passeggio can be found here:

Nicola Bernardi's photos of Rondo da Passegio

Commission from Mimi Rabson

Violinist Mimi Rabson commissions Neil Leonard, JoAnne Brackeen, Stephen Webber, Winston Maccow, Norm Zocher, Victor Mendoza to create new works for solo violin. More details coming soon!

ECHO RESONANCE & MEMORY

ECHO RESONANCE & MEMORY
performance multimediale
idea Gabriella Riccio e Neil Leonard
coreografia e danza Gabriella Riccio
musica originale dal vivo Neil Leonard
camera mobile Alia Scalvino
mix video Alexis - Alessandro De Vita
luci Fernando Siciliano



Il Torchio, Somma Vesuviana, Napoli
(on the active volcano Mt. Vesuvius)
May 25, 2008
http://www.myspace.com/il_torchio



ECHO RESONANCE & MEMORY has been selected for a repeat performance by
La Fondazione Campania dei Festival per il triennio a Napoli il NAPOLI TEATRO FESTIVAL ITALIA
June 28, 2008
www.teatrofestivalitalia.it

RONDÒ DA PASSEGGIO

RONDÒ DA PASSEGGIO
Giornata dell'Ascolto 2008
Padova, Via Roma, May 18th 2008, 10:00 AM – 08:00 PM

Would you like to taste music like an ice-cream to go? Or walk on a sunny afternoon without the usual annoying presence of daily chores? You may want to try the Rondò da Passeggio (Rondeau to Go), a musical form that can only be completely appreciated by walking under the beautiful porticoes of Padova, in via Roma, on Sunday May 18th, 2008. The second edition of the Giornata dell'Ascolto (the listening day), the entire day will dedicated to the activity of listening in all its forms.

The Rondò da Passeggio takes place in the context of a musical installation that will rebuild the classical form of a seven-part rondeau (a b a c a b a) in a central street of Padova, Via Roma. Along its 900 feet of porticoes, where no cars are allowed, seven distinct compositions, each lasting 10 hours (from 10:00 AM to 8:00 PM), will accompany walkers, strollers and joggers. Instead of the usual disturbing collection of sonic junk – dazed and confused – that emanates from pedestrian audio appliances that surround us, music will meet the city. Streets, squares, boulevards and buildings, a whole city will start whispering, playing and singing.

A “composition of compositions,” the Rondò da Passeggio is created by eight composers and installed by a horde of sound engineers. While each composition will be a distinct vision by a specific composer, the seven compositions will all be tied together by the formal scheme of the rondeau.

Rondò da Passeggio is a project commissioned by Prof. Sergio Durante (inventor of the Giornata dell'Ascolto) to the Conservatory “C.Pollini” of Padova and coordinated by Prof. Nicola Bernardini. The project involves numerous Conservatory teachers, composition students, electronic music students, and students from the Sound Engineering curriculum with the extraordinary participation of Neil Leonard and two of his students from Berklee College of Music, Boston.

Francesco Babolin, Anthony Baldino, Nicola Bernardini, Giovanni Bonato, Marco Braggion, Mirko Brigo, Gennaro Cantoro, Maura Capuzzo, Davide Ceccon, Andrea Cera, Raffaele Cipriano, Davide Corsato, Matteo Costa, Dario Dassenno, Pierluigi Duravia, Giacomo Frega, Gianni Giacomazzo, Francesco Guerra, Neil Leonard, Michele Marelli, Francesco Marescotti, Francesco Morosinotto, Marco Petrone, Matteo Pilotto, Spencer Putnam, Alberto Schiavo, Stefano Trento, Luca Uggias, Michele Vaccarotto, Andrea Versolatto, Riccardo Xotta. Rondò da Passeggio: 31 participants, 10 hours of music, 7 compositions, a single project.

Album Review @ Touching Extremes, May '08

VARIOUS ARTISTS - Nothing works as planned (Interval)

There is a good variety of styles and atmospheres in this double CD, which collects live performances of new music by American and Israeli composers (Ido Govrin, Amnon Wolman, Jonathan Chen, Neil Leonard, Kiki Keren-Huss, Beth Denisch, Arie Shapira, Keren Rosenbaum and Yossi Mar-Chaim). The pieces should represent different approaches to the phrase that gives the title to this set, but in truth it's rather perceivable as the effort of a community - led in this occasion by the American Composers Forum of New England - to find a common ground amidst variegated compositional methods and interpretations of contemporary visions, the whole presented in unconventional intimate settings. There's difference between the two discs in terms of aesthetic: the first contains works that could almost be placed into a quasi-newfangled electronica sector (Govrin's static minimalism, Chen's unfolding spirals of noise, Leonard's organic mysteriousness-cum-saxophone), while the second winks more to XX-century classic scores, with the majority of the situations involving acoustic instruments in pretty dissonant clothes and tendencies to non-serene disillusion (Mar-Chaim's piece for violin, contrabassoon and electronics, but also the disturbing "War" by Keren-Huss, which includes disquieting human voices expressing sufferance). The impression remains one of a reunion of people familiar with the reciprocal particularities, and the rarefied applause heard at the end of the performances gave me the idea of an audience formed by few knowledgeable aficionados. Interesting disc, in any case.