Universidade Federal do Acre

Ntrallazzu: a series of live-score pieces on creative interaction and public surveillance

Ntralllazzu is the title of a series of works based on interactive live scores that reflects on the multifaceted philosophical concepts of liveness and interaction both from a creative point of view and in more critical terms. The work is a 5-minute piece based on a projected score that interacts in real time with the material played by the performer(s). While one of the performers plays, the sound is fed to and processed by patching software, and generates both electronic sounds and a score, which is to generally to be performed by a second player. In purely creative terms, the work dialogues with the multiple modes of liveness examined by John Croft (2007), considers the creative potential embedded in fundamental constraints such as MIDI delay (cf. Risset and Van Duyne, 1996), and explores the implications of what Federico Reuben has described as “interpassive music” (2010). From a more critical point of view, the work intends to explore the implications of liveness in terms of possibilities of audience surveillance on the gestures of the performers that are not generally predicated within the concert hall situation and in the context of the standard composer-performer(s)-  audience pyramid: in this sense, the main theoretical reference is the work of Joseph Pugliese (2014). The title Ntrallazzu is a Sicilian term borrowed from the practice of smuggling locally produced state rationed crops in World War II Sicily, as practice of resistance criminalised by the Italian authorities, that was aimed at contrasting indigence in the island. By establishing micro- patterns of interaction between themselves and with the live electronics, the performers symbolically reproduce the secret exchanges that disobeyed a violent regime of biopolitical state control on the lives and means of subsistence of the islanders. Considering the common repartition of roles on which Euro-centred “art music” is predicated, in this paper we offer multiple perspectives on the work, both from the point of view of the composer (Marcello Messina) and that of the performer (Leonardo Vieira Feichas).

Keywords: Composition; liveness; interaction.

Biographies

Marcello Messina is a Sicilian composer and academic based in Rio Branco, Acre, Brazil. He holds a PhD in composition from the University of Leeds (UK), and is currently Professor Colaborador at the Universidade Federal do Acre under the PNPD/CAPES post-doctoral scheme. He was also awarded an Endeavour Research Fellowship at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.. Events include the BALANCE-UNBALANCE 2018, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (2011), the Interactive Keyboard Symposium (2012), the University of Leeds nternational Concert Series (2012-13), the Festival Internacional Compositores de Hoje (2013), the York Spring Festival of New Music (2013), the 20th Century British Poets in Music Festival (2013), Today’s Music Festival (2014), the Di_stanze Community Festival of Sound Arts (2014), Ritrovarsi (2014-15), SIMA (2015), Balance-Unbalance (2016), etc. His music is published by the University of York Music Press (UYMP), MAP Editions, Da Vinci Edition and Huddersfield Contemporary Records. Leonardo Feichas currently PhD candidate in Musical Arts – Performance of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. In 2009 he graduated in violin (bachelors degree) at the State University of Campinas UNICAMP. In 2011 he joined the master’s degree in performance at the same university, completed in 2013. He has participated in several orchestras in the state of São Paulo and several festivals in Brazil and abroad. As professor of the superior teaching he teaches violin lessons and chamber music at the Universidade Federal do Acre (UFAC – effective professor). As a violinist he has an intense activity as an orchestral musician, a solo violinist and chamber musician in instrumental formations. He has performed recitals, lectures and academic presentations at various National and International events such as ANPPOM (Brazil), ABRAPEM (Brazil), ISME (Lima-Peru); ISME (Glasgow-Scotland); ESCOM (Manchester -U.K), Symposium on Latin American Music (University of Arizona -UA); Balance Conference Balance of music at the University of Caldas (Manizales – Colombia); Symposium on Violin Studies by Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School (New York – USA); Dartington International Summer School (U.K), International Symposium of Music in the Amazon (SIMA – Brasil) among others.

Leonardo Feichas currently PhD candidate in Musical Arts – Performance of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. In 2009 he graduated in violin (bachelors degree) at the State University of Campinas UNICAMP. In 2011 he joined the master’s degree in performance at the same university, completed in 2013. He has participated in several orchestras in the state of São Paulo and several festivals in Brazil and abroad. As professor of the superior teaching he teaches violin lessons and chamber music at the Universidade Federal do Acre (UFAC – effective professor). As a violinist he has an intense activity as an orchestral musician, a solo violinist and chamber musician in instrumental formations. He has performed recitals, lectures and academic presentations at various National and International events such as ANPPOM (Brazil), ABRAPEM (Brazil), ISME (Lima-Peru); ISME (Glasgow-Scotland); ESCOM (Manchester -U.K), Symposium on Latin American Music (University of Arizona -UA); Balance Conference Balance of music at the University of Caldas (Manizales – Colombia); Symposium on Violin Studies by Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School (New York – USA); Dartington International Summer School (U.K), International Symposium of Music in the Amazon (SIMA – Brasil) among others.