Casa Ricordi is glad to announce the new collaboration with Maurizio Azzan (1987), Italian composer and sound artist. His music has been performed in festivals and venues such as Biennale Musica di Venezia, Wiener Konzerthaus, ManiFeste and IRCAM Concert Season, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Wien Modern, impulsGraz, Milano Musica, MATA New York, Budapest Music Center, RomaeuropaFestival. Ensembles and soloists who have performed his works include Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Phace, Divertimento Ensemble, NieuwEnsemble Amsterdam, Ensemble Fractales, MdiEnsemble, Schallfeld Ensemble, Proton Bern.
Next projects include commissions from impulsfestival Graz (for KlangforumWien), from Ensemble Phace and Wiener Konzerthaus, from ensemble Collettivo_21 for the Biennale Zagreb.
Upcoming world premieres with Ricordi
28 March 2023 | Wasteland_notyet, for spatializedand amplified ensemble (2023)
Ensemble PhaceatWiener Konzerthaus, Berio-Saal, Wien (Austria)
20 April 2023 | Extended II, for cello, fourinstruments, resonators and live electronics (2023)
Ensemble Collettivo_21 at MBZ -Music Biennale Zagreb (Croatia)
3 August 2023 | Wasteland_beyond, for ensemble (2022)
Klangforum Wien at Impuls New Music Festival, Graz (Austria)
Composer's artistic statement
What fascinates me about sound is its instability, it shadowy zones, the blurry border between what we culturally consider noise and what we think of as music. I’m into dilating and reducing perceived space. Sometimes there’s fraying at the edges, where actual music meets up with sound installations, where stage and audience meet, in the space between in and out of character. Whenever possible, I try to create the conditions that allow immersive listening to modify our perception of time and space when it comes to listening. They should always be dynamic and unstable – just as much as the sounds I try to get out of instruments and electronics.
I dig the paradox of an apparently classical sway – practically a still life in motion – that generates an alienating acoustic result, while exploring the surfaces of instruments, as if we were trying to find our way in some all too foreign land. Oftentimes these surfaces are modified by preparations. They mostly appertain to familiar kinds of objects which, when applied, deform the appearances and sound qualities of the instruments involved, transforming them into the metaphor of a world brimming with our own, self-produced waste. On other occasions, the objects themselves take the place of musical instruments. Their peculiar musicality lies somewhere between the natural feeling of analog and the contrivance of electronics – the latter, by the way, being the expressive means that allows me to multiply the prospects for listening and corruption of instrumental sound. In this context, in my works vocals appear as an overlapping of multiple and fragmented character-voices, which are often the result of longtime collaborations with performers and poets from my generation.
The non-linear time of hypertexts and as seen in the work of filmmakers such as Gaspar Noé and David Lynch, along with the material essence of sculptures by Giuseppe Penone and narrative deconstructions by authors such as George Simon and Italo Calvino, have played a key role in developing my conception of forms and what they leave in their wakes. In my compositions, sound matter is always observed in terms of the way its energy varies with respect to a mobile perspective, moving in an irregular fashion within one of those continuums that Gérard Grisey referred to as the drawn-out timescape of whales and the speeded-up timescape of insects. A kind of imaginary proximity in comparison to the sound mass. Just one more virtual distance. Listen to hear interrelated events laid out in a nonconsequential format. Fragments of a multi-tiered narrative that can only unfold implicitly.
Maurizio Azzan
Listen to the composer's profile on Soundcloud
ph. Carolina Venetsanos