As part of the audio-visual project 'Remixing a Clockwork Orange', which was kicked off at the 2016 Darmstadt International Summer Courses, Schallfeld Ensemble will be performing the world premiere of Zeno Baldi’s Fondali, for 8 instruments and electronics, on March 19 in Graz, Austria.   

Here’s what composer Zeno Baldi had to say about the piece. 

Linked from the start to the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s 'A Clockwork Orange', this project, now in its second phase, explores the concepts of transcription and remixing, while broadening the scope through research into the relationships between tradition and technical innovation, between standards and new creations, between sound and moving images. 

Fondali takes its cue from the famed Overture in Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra, and makes a drastic departure through a host of manipulations and distortions so that the piece reemerges more or less explicitly after being hypothetically immersed among various fondali, or “seabeds” and underwater scenes, where one might plausibly come across shipwrecks and other vestiges of human activity, besides natural elements. At the same time, fondali may also refer to theatrical backdrops. In either case, the term is pluralized, denoting an array of situations.
 
In order to avoid mere quotation, or what’s worse, useless re-orchestrations, my aim was to retain the grotesque aspect of the scene in which the main character in 'A Clockwork Orange', Alex, beats the writer and rapes his wife, adding remixes and bits of Rossini’s Overture, selected and sampled from various versions and recordings from the past fifty years.   

Fondali was commissioned by Schallfeld Ensemble, with support from the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung.


More Zeno Baldi world premieres are slated for the coming months. They include a quartet for strings, commissioned by the De Sono Associazione per La Musica and Fondazione I Teatri Reggio Emilia, which was written for Quartetto Maurice (June16, in Reggio Emilia, Italy), and Décalage, commissioned by Ensemble Hopper (June 21, in Brussels).

Photo by Michele Degani