The fourth Prix Palma Ars Acustica, an international competition organized by the EURORADIO Ars Acustica group to promote and honour outstanding productions of authors in the world of Ars Acustica and radio art, took place in Berlin. Italian composer Alessandro Bosetti is the winner of this year’s Palma Ars Acustica for ‘The Notebooks’ produced by Czech Radio.
Kunstradio also presents "Black Bat (Turgor)" by Hanna Hartman produced by Deutschlandradio Kultur and Schlossmediale Werdenberg and "Shots were Fired" by Bernard Clarke produced by RTE lyric fm, both pieces also have been entered for the Prix Palma Ars Acustica 2015.
with Alexandre Babel, percussion and Theo Nabicht, contrabass clarinet
Pressure is a force exerted against something which resists or opposes that force. Working against that force requires power; the load on an engine resists the turning of the engine, therefore requires power to overcome it – hence the reason for pressures in the cylinders.
Having developed her very own language, the Swedish sound artist and composer Hanna Hartman creates compositions that are exclusively made up from authentic sounds which she has recorded around the world. Sounds are taken out of their original context and thus perceived in their purity. Hanna Hartman seeks to reveal hidden correspondences between the most diverse auditive impressions and in new constellations she creates extraordinary worlds of sound.
In the archive of the Janáček memorial in Brno, lays a somehow odd treasure: a series of very tiny notebooks where composer Leoš Janáček used to annotate scraps of spoken language he would hear during his daily life in musical notation.
Each one of those speech-melodies, as we call them today, taken roughly from 1904 till 1928, is a small sound photograph of a mundane and ephemeral situation, a fragment that let us blink into an acoustic reality long gone.
Janáček practice and obsession reminds of the contemporary habit of taking field recordings with portable devices but it was made with pen and paper much before those devices had become available.
Contemporary italian composer Alessandro Bosetti has been a practitioner of the "music of speech" himself and in his work on the notebooks he has tried to bring back to life what he has imagined to be the surrounding situation for those Janáček’s annotations using his voice and creating several electroacoustic tableaux in the setting of the different rooms of Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat.
Consciuous of having stumbled upon a listening treasure and a great poetic gesture he listen to the world (and let us listened to the world) through the ears of Leoš Janáček. Bosetti reconstructs an imaginary reality around those magical and mysterious traces tracing back a tradition of 'musique anecdotique' starting with the Brno composer and continuing with 'musique concrète' composers as Pierre Schaeffer and Luc Ferrari.
shots were fired is a deeply personal response to a tragedy and farce played out in a Paris dripping with blood and a media whipping up a frenzy; to and of the forgotten victims in France and around the world; and of and to the so-called world leaders who seized on this outrage for a media opportunity, a 'selfie'.
Western societies are not the havens of rationalism that they often proclaim themselves to be. The West is a polychromatic space, in which both freedom of thought and tightly regulated speech exist, and in which disavowals of deadly violence happen at the same time as clandestine torture.
And yet, at moments when Western societies consider themselves under attack, the discourse is quickly dominated by an ahistorical fantasy of long-suffering fortitude in the face of provocation. Yet European and American history are so strongly marked by efforts to control speech that the persecution of rebellious thought stands as a bedrock of these societies.
Witch burnings, heresy trials, and the untiring work of the Inquisition shaped Europe, and these ideas extended into American history as well and took on American modes, from the breaking of slaves to the genocide of American Indians to censuring of critics of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'.
Like everybody else I was appalled and deeply shocked by the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris in January of this year. The subsequent rampage and hysteria brought even more pain and distress upon France and especially victims of these crimes being mourned –worldwide- these ordinary human beings, beloved by their families and precious to their friends.
The satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo has often aimed choice barbs at Muslims and taken a particular joy in flouting the Islamic ban on depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s also regularly mocked political targets, as well as Christian and Jewish tropes. The magazine depicted the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost in a sexual threesome. Like England’s Monty Python and America’s Frank Zappa, Charlie Hebdo has an enduring willingness to offend everyone.
Alas, the opportunity for so-called world leaders to seize upon the media attention and proclaim themselves great humanitarians was sickening making a complete mockery of @jesuischarlie
Who can forget the spectacle of “big” political names from all around the world holding hands in 'solidarity' with the victims of the Paris killings, from Cameron to Lavrov, from Netanyahu to Abbas: if there was ever an image of absolute hypocritical falsity, this was it.
Worse the spectacle was literally staged: the pictures shown in the media gave the impression that the line of political leaders was at the front of a large crowd walking along an avenue. But another photo was taken of the entire scene from above, clearly showing that behind the politicians there were only a hundred or so people and a lot of empty space, patrolled by police, behind and around them.
shots were fired draws on speech samples (Irish Radio news channels) and granular synthesis techniques (shredding printer machine sounds, computer keyboards, old internet dial-up connections, typewriters, telephone answering machine noises) for a 'media-music'. Location recordings from Paris and Libya are also utilized.
(Bernard Clarke)
Links:
EBU Ars Acustica
Art’s Birthday
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