Free improvisation, new technologies and aesthetics of sonority

Abstract

This project aims to continue my research that has been funded by FAPESP since 2007. In my first project I dealt with the relationships between improvisation and contemporary compositional thought. Later, I joined the team of the thematic project entitled Mobile as the researcher responsible for the subject of improvisation. In my second individual project, still in progress, I continue to research on improvisation and its connections with other areas of knowledge. In the project presented here, I want to deepen my research with regard to relations between free improvisation and the idea of sonority. I start from aesthetic considerations noting that, during the XX and XXI centuries there was a reorganization of the traditional elements of music and the establishment of a new focus on the qualities of the sound itself, with the consequent emergence of new forms of formal development and organization of the music flow. This fact, observed in its germinal form in the work of Debussy, was consolidated with the advent of concrete and electronic music and the works of composers such as Varèse, Scelsi, Ligeti, Grisey and Lachenmann and led to the formulation in the field of musicology, of an aesthetics of sonority. The very idea of free improvisation arises in this aesthetic context since it is only possible with the overcoming of language in an environment in which the material of music is to be the molecular essence of music: the sound and its energetic qualities. In this context, I intend to investigate the role played by new technologies by examining the forms of relationships between musicians and computers in improvisational performances. Furthermore, I intend to investigate to what extent the practice of free improvisation can contribute to a kind of "rehabilitation" of listening and the expansion of the technical possibilities of the instrumentalists. (AU)