Projects

Amplified piano / Amplified pianist

Johann Vacher

The appearance of microphones and loudspeakers allowed composers to explore new musical territories. Until then, grinding noises coming from mechanic of piano or sounds emitted by the pianist were only perceived as disturbing the performance. With the development of amplification, those noises have become sounds that composers could use in a musical discourse. 

New pianistic techniques have appeared: inner and outer parts of the instrument are investigated with the hand or with various accessories, while, in turn, properties of these accessories are revealed through their use inside the piano. The pianist himself becomes a study object: he is asked to make amplified finger snaps or tongue clicks, he has to speak, to sing or to whistle in a kind of choreographed show. 

Live electronics have brought new steps of amplification, increasing virtuosity, filtering resonance, working on acoustic diffusion. The pianist can then interact and play along with live electronics, expanding the possibilities.

This research will be done from the performers’ perspective, but in collaboration with different composers for experimenting new amplified piano / pianist music.

Paraphrase

Filipa Botelho

Paraphrase - Experimental organism on the body of the musician, its qualities and contexts takes the body of the musician as subject and proposes an exercise that departs from the repertoire for solo clarinet containing movements beyond the ones commonly considered as part of the music-making body and continues proposing an experimentation based on an acoustic feedback set-up where movement, sound and space have a different relation among them in what the instrument of composition is concerned.

Besides that, it proposes a shared experimentation with the same set-up between musicians and dancers to enlarge the method of comparison.

Hyperimpressions

Heloisa Amaral

The relationship between performer and musical work has shifted focus in the last fifty years. 

Romanticizing Brahms

Anna Scott

Though they are generally regarded as invaluable traces of late-Romantic style, early twentieth-century recordings make for uncomfortable bedfellows with modern norms for the performance of certain nineteenth-century repertoires and the canonic identities protected by those norms. Nowhere is this truer than in Brahmsian spheres, where the version of Johannes Brahms communicated by the recordings of the Schumann-Brahms circle of pianists stands in stark contrast to constructions of his 'Classical' identity and its underlying aesthetic ideology of control.