string quartet & live electronics, 20 min.
Composed in 2023 while I was a Master’s student in France, fear in the dark was my first string quartet, and my first electroacoustic composition to recur exclusively to live processing for the electronic part. It is also a fairly long piece — the current version running for approximately 20 minutes. This piece marked a turning point in my artistic research, as it symbolized and synthesized all of my main preoccupations at the time: a structuralist approach to musical form and material, the possibility of maintaining an expressive balance despite the aforementioned structuralism, the integration of live electronics in my creative process as a symbiotic extension of the instruments (rather than treated as an additional, independent instrument or part), the use of microtonality (derived here from a spectralist approach to sound) as a fundamental ingredient of my musical language, and, last but not least, the use of the Antescofo~ programming language in Max/MSP to control the live processing and spatialization.
On a formal level, the piece presents itself as a regular alternation of homophonic and heterophonic sections. The duration of which was decided early in the compositional process, somewhat arbitrarily. The gradual spectral progression that constitutes the harmonic material of the whole piece was likewise predetermined. Harmonic fragments follow a non-linear — in fact, almost brownian — progression that goes from unisone to extreme distortion and saturation (spectral expansion). The result is that both harmony and melodic figures are microtonally rich. The harmonic progression is then superimposed to the structure and accompanied by a gradual increase in dynamics. The electronics consist of a varying reverb obtained by cross-fading between several “room” presets, that is then fed into a bank of ring modulators set to individual parameters and eventually (partially) controlled by amplitude following. Dynamic spatialization is obtained though curve and loop functions defined in Antescofo~.
« L’ espace était fermé.
À present
l’espace est ouvert, mais le temps
s’est presque fermé. »
(Yuri Manin)
Recorded live from the first performance on June 13th, 2023 at the “Cité de la Musique et de la Danse” in Strasbourg (France).
Étienne Bideau, Yona Hémery (violins), Maud Alloy (viola), Inès Soubeste (cello).
Lorenzo Paniconi, live electronics
Guido Pedicone, live sound engineer
Recording: Giovanni Montiani, Ganghyuk Lee, Lorenzo Paniconi
Mixing and mastering: Lorenzo Paniconi
