music installation

akkord I

freelance design consultation

piano, flute, eclectronics & sculptural articulation by zosha di castri

comissionned for cluster new music and integrated arts festival, winnipeg, mb, by electric noise at the wag, march 9th, 2012

Zosha Di Castri, Program Note:

“Akkord I is the first part of a cycle of pieces that I plan on developing for musicians and electronics, with the theatrical incorporation of sculptural installations. I was interested in making visible the connection between musicians, while also exploring the tension that exists in such intimate collaborations (note “accord”, in french, means a treaty or agreement between two or more parties)...Dramaturgically I envisioned this process initially as a struggle - the sculpture creates a chimeric creature, a fierce two-headed entity, in which both sides resist cooperation. The electronics and live-processing involve distorted grungy sounds, howls, roars, and bellows. Eventually though, this gives way to moments of clarity, a different sense of space, opening corridors of communication where movement is free and flowing. The closed form of the sculpture suggests a hidden inner landscape, a world that only the performers know, and that the electronics perhaps hint at. Finally, while writing this piece, a quote by Italo Calvino from his If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller informed certain aspects of my compositional approach: He writes:

‘it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time?’

Originally commissioned by Electric Noise, 2012. Many thanks to Kathleen Mulder and David Adamcyk for their generous help and support in building the sculpture, and to Carly Rouault who helped render the design. Infinite gratitude to my wonderful New York collaborators Margaret Lancaster and Taka Kigawa for their hard work and open minds, and to Jess Smith, our director with a vision.”