For voice, electronics. A commission of 2014 Janáček Festival and Radioateliér of Czech Radio

In the archive of the Janacek memorial in Brno, lies a somehow odd treasure: a series of very tiny notebooks where composer Leoš Janáček used to annotate scraps of spoken language he would hear during his daily life in musical notation.

Each one of those speech-melodies, as we call them today, taken roughly from 1904 till 1928, is a small sound photograph of a mundane and ephemeral situation, a fragment that let us blink into an acoustic reality long gone.

Janáček practice and obsession reminds of the contemporary habit of taking field recordings with portable devices but it was made with pen and paper much before those devices had become available.

Conscious of having stumbled upon a listening treasure as well a great poetic gesture composer Alessandro Bosetti has tried to bring back to life what he has imagined to be the surrounding situation for those Janáček’s annotations using his voice and creating several electroacoustic tableaux.

Bosetti reconstructs an imaginary reality around those magical and mysterious traces tracing back a tradition of “musique anecdotique” starting with the Brno composer and continuing with “musique concrète” composers as  Pierre Schaeffer and Luc Ferrari. The Notebooks was awarded the Prix Palma Ars Acustica 2015.

Alessandro Bosetti is a composer, performer and sound artist whose works delve on musicality of spoken language, utilizing misunderstandings, translations and interviews as compositional tools. His works for voice and electronics blur the line between electro acoustic composition, aural writing and performance. www.melgun.net

Tuesday, January 26, 2016,
8 PM,
Coudraystraße 13 A Room 011

This evening is part of „Radiophonic Archives„, a colloquium in the SINERGIA research project “Radiophonic Cultures – Sonic Environments and Archives in Hybrid Media Systems“.

Project partners:

Prof. Dr. Ute Holl Department of Media Studies, University of Basel,
Prof. Dr. Matthias Schmidt Department of Musicology, University of Basel,
Prof. Erik Oña Director of the Electronic Studio, Music Academy in Basel / FHNW,
Prof. Dr . Bernhard Siegert History and Theory of Cultural Techniques at the Faculty of Media, Bauhaus-University Weimar, Director of the International Research Institute for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy (IKKM) and
Prof. Nathalie Singer Chair for Experimental Radio, Faculty of Media, Bauhaus-University Weimar.