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Marko Ciciliani - piano, electronics
Josh Dillon - piano, electronics
From
Antiquity up through the Renaissance, there are reports of people
who
had the ability to retain unimaginable amounts of information.
These people
accomplished such feats of recollection by means of a particular
technique —
the ars memorativa — which worked in the following way. One
created a
personal, imaginary building, all of the different spatial
divisions of
which one came to know well. In order to remember a particular
subject, one
would place various virtual objects in the rooms of the building.
These
objects would symbolically represent information. To recall
something later,
one would imagine oneself walking through that particular part of
the
building which housed the objects pertaining to the subject at
hand and
would then "decode" them.
The idea of a fictitious building which, although uninhabited, is
still
‘imbued,’ serves as the inspiration for this piece and as a
metaphor for its
formal organization. The form consists of 126 sections that were
derived by
means of a magic square. The architectural metaphor lends itself
well to the
piece and its sections, in that although the physical
characteristics of
individual rooms may greatly differ, together the rooms form an
edifice.
A second aspect in the piece is derived from architecture, in that
the
acoustic characteristics of the hall in which this piece is
performed play
an important musical role, as do those of the piano and the
musician’s body.
These last two are also utilized as ‘architectural’ entities
unto
themselves. Furthermore, artificial and remote acoustics are
brought in by
means of electronics and soundscapes. Tullius Rooms is a diverse
musical
landscape of piano sound, electronic material, singing, whistling
and
percussive or ‘performance’ actions.
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