Peer LANDA David SOLEY Michael EDWARDS Kui DONG Ludger BRUMMER Back to the Index

Marco TREVISANI Variazioni e Frammenti su Aura Marco Trevisani, was born in Verona, Italy in 1963, is a composer, an architect, and also a pianist. Visiting composer at CCRMA since 1992. Variazioni e Frammenti su Aura, 1995 (in memory of Bruno Maderna) is a composition for digital tape. The piece consists of variations and computer elaborations of Aura's fragments, a composition for large orchestra written by Bruno Maderna in 1970. The samples are excerpts from an analogue recording of a live performance conducted by the composer. The concepts of symmetry and specular structure, present also in Maderna's original score, are the centerpiece of this composition. Techniques of variation and sound fragmentation are employed in this piece. The computational sound process, moreover, allows for variation and fragmentation at the sound generation level. Fragments are short samples taken from the original recording and presented as they are, or with minimal changes. The fragments are pasted together as in an archaelogical reconstruction. This reconstruction, however, is only one of multiple possibilities and does not necessarily correspond with the original syntax of the piece. Deformation of space and time is the focus of the reconstruction. Variations, the basis of the syntactical macrocosmic structure of the piece, are also employed in the generation of each individual phoneme. This structure is applied to each element. All the variables introduced, both microstructural and macrostructural, contribute to the generation and modification of the sound structure as well as the score itself. Variations and fragments are merged by means of the process of convolution.