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This paper aims to explore Marco Stroppa's compositional workshop through the emblematic workTraiettoriato demonstrate how an underlying trend of spectral thought was present in the composer's mind during the gestation of the work but did not determine his aesthetic orientation. From the study of common filiations and difference between Marco Strop...
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Context 1
... must note that the analysis of Traiettoria uncovers two matrix chords: the first appears in Deviata 34 and the second appears for the first time in Dialoghi. The first chord was not formed by converting the spectrum of a piano sound into notes; it was built 'manually' 35 by selecting the intervals to keep any tonal connotations to a minimum (such as a major fifth, minor third, etc.) (Figure 1). After experimenting on the piano, the composer quickly jotted down on sheet music both the piano part and the synthesised part. ...
Context 2
... Constrati logbook contains the word 'organism' and sketches of the MIO. 72 First, at the beginning of the logbook, 73 Stroppa defined the distinguishing characteristics of six sound types (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) called MIE. These six elements were reordered and became six organisms A, B, C, D, E, X 74 (the first is from Deviata and the last from Dialoghi), which constitute the piano solo in Contrasti. ...
Context 3
... A fission phenomenon occurs when the similarity index is low: the two sounds are discriminated. For instance the MIO C quoted above (in Figure 5) and extensively used in Contrasti in fact derives from a fission phenomenon that was applied to a chord during the composition of the piano part of Dialoghi ( Figure 10). The identity of this organism is founded on a process that moves from a homogeneous chord to its fission into two distinct sound entities. ...
Citations
... The piano was conceived as a tool that allowed the composer to explore the microscopic dimensions of sound (the disposition of partials, dynamic profiles, etc.) and produce sounds with broader spectral characteristics than piano sounds. Stroppa translated this idea by working on piano resonances, using the instrument (with trills, tremolos or pedaling) but also using sound synthesis (with a very detailed conception of the physical characteristics of sound) and composition techniques borrowed from electroacoustics (Tiffon and Sprenger-Ohana, 2011). For example, in the first part of Traiettoria ... deviata, the computer deals with creating an ambiguous substrate in which the chord can be transformed into a timbre and vice versa. ...
... Additive synthesis and frequency modulation were used in the realization, producing hundreds of short sound events, which were then edited and mixed with ICMS system. These time-segment electroacoustic techniques, used as a model for composition, were of great importance to Stroppa (Tiffon and Sprenger-Ohana, 2011). The ICMS system was very useful to test the fusion of sounds in a quick and interactive way; to check if the result was perfect or to shift the sounds slightly by a few msec, until the blending was adjusted in an ideal way, and all this with an extremely musical reasoning. ...
For the needs of music production and multimedia art, sound synthesis algorithms are needed which are versatile, responsive to user’s expectations, and having high audio quality. It is useful to organize our intuitive sound abstracts into models. A computational model can be used for representing and generating a whole class of sounds, depending on the internal structure of the model and on the choice of control parameters. We will review some of the most important computational models that are being used for sound synthesis in musical production from the viewpoint of the model structure. Moreover, the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale of Padova University has done research on synthesis models for a long time and the main achievements in both the scientific and musical fields will be presented.
This paper discusses a method for harmonic field analysis of serial and post-serial music. The method is informed by perception-oriented considerations and was specifically designed for an analysis of Pierre Boulez’s early serial music. It is therefore exemplified by his 1951 composition Polyphonie X . Harmonic field analysis can however be applied to any music where pitch registration plays an important role. Accordingly, I will provide a brief overview of harmonic relations in two more recent compositions by Marco Stroppa and Yukiko Watanabe, demonstrating that harmonic fields have been used by composers to mediate between the generative layers of pitch organization and the sounding surface.
Traiettoria for piano and electronic sounds (1982-1988), by Marco Stroppa, is one of the key works of mixed genre in the period of the 1980s; it is to be considered on a par with Karlheinz Stockhausen's famous mixed genre Kontakte of 1959. Traiettoria, however, is the work of a very young composer. In the early 1980s, at least at the beginning of the project, Stroppa's style was by no means fixed. It was during the elaboration of his first important work that his compositional workshop was firmly established. The compositional procedures employed in Traiettoria then became the composer's normal language. Following step-by-step the progress of the creation of the three movements which constitute his masterpiece, we can observe the evolution of his compositional techniques and processes: the learning phase (both musical and scientific) that was part and parcel of his first creative intuitions, and the final months of the composition, during which Stroppa became lucidly self-conscious of his compositional process. Furthermore, the analysis of the genetic construction of Traiettoria and of various educational and "self-reflexive" documents of Stroppa himself including his academic transcripts, to which may be added observations on the transfer of compositional procedures into his most recent works (using contemporary software), would appear to be essential not only for the comprehension of the work itsef, but also for the comprehension of the nature of the composer's wider compositional laboratory.
cote interne IRCAM: Donin12d
