Universidade de Aveiro

Sound as matter

Basing himself in the evolution of notation throughout history, Boulez mentions in the 50s-60s that there is a hierarchy of musical parameters regarding their capability to create a compositional dialectic: “pitch and duration seem to me to form the basis of a compositional dialectic, while intensity and timbre belong to secondary categories”; Although this hierarchy manifests itself in a significant amount of the compositional production of the following decades, one year after Penser la musique aujourd’hui was written, Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I seriously enables oneself to question this position. In the same period, Boulez mentions the intention “to bring everything into question again, make a clean sweep of one’s heritage and start all over again from scratch”. Terms such as harmony/counterpoint/polyphony, intrinsically tied to the hierarchical division of sound in parameters, can still be found all over Boulez’s writings, as well as in Schoenberg’s or even Rameau’s, thus continuing to be the walls/borders that shape the world inside of which Boulez (and many of the composers of the subsequent decades) want to “make a clean sweep of one’s heritage and start all over again from scratch”. Thus, a possible reaction to the first point would be not to divide sound in parameters, making sound the starting point– the basis of a compositional dialectic. As to the second point, the elimination of these terms, as one’s walls/borders, creates the necessity to find new ways to organize and dispose sound in time, i.e. to generate a compositional dialectic.
As a result, this paper proposes to deal with the following problems: 1)How to have access to what would become one’s starting point and matter– sound? 2)How to organize/dispose sound in time? Specifically, how can one use this matter enabling it to sustain and be the basis of a compositional dialectic?

1. If sound becomes one’s matter and starting point, one needs before anything else to establish contact with it. In the context of instrumental music, that implies establishing contact as extensively as possible with its source– the instrument(s).
2. Having the intention of abandoning the mentioned concepts has a starting point, after interacting with the instrument, one is left with just a comprehensive catalogue of collected matter/sound, thus still remaining the necessity to find a compositional dialectic based in the collected matter.

Despite the large (and growing) amount of literature about extended techniques produced over the last decades, a significant amount of the produced compositional production resorts to the resources given by the instruments (and this literature) as an ornament to a compositional dialectic supported by the same pillars defended by Boulez– parametric division of sound and subsequent concepts.
Based on previously conducted investigation and compositional work, this paper proposes new ways of reaching a compositional dialectic based on viewing sound as matter and on an interaction with the instrument that, not only seeks to extensively collect the material that it provides, but also seeks an understanding of the obtained matter in the context of the instrument’sphysical/acoustical behaviour.

Biography

Pedro Berardinelli attended the University of Aveiro, where he completed a Bachelor (pre-Bologna) and Master in Composition, having received a merit scholarship for exceptional academic performance. He attended several seminars held by Emmanuel Nunes, having later on some private orientation with the composer, in the last years of his life. In 2015 he finished with the highest grade his second Master in Composition at the Centro Katarina Gurska (Madrid), having Alberto Posadas and José Luis Torá as tutors. In the context of is final project he wrote a solo bassoon work for Lorelei Dowling. He was selected for the Academy of the Festival Musica (Strasbourg-2016), where he worked with Quatuor Diotima. He attended several courses/seminars/classes with Rebecca Saunders, Mark Andre, Philippe Manoury, Chaya Czernowin, Stefano Gervasoni, among others. In 2017 he finished with distinction the Post-graduation in composition at the Kunstuniversität Graz, having studied with Clemens Gadenstätter and Beat Furrer.