Asymmetric Thought

Often associated to the live performance of some tracks and the multichannel listening of other recorded ones, the guitarist Davide Ficco and METS designed a double CD + DVD Asymmetric Thought, realized at METS as part of the European project EASTN-DC and published by the Japanese label Da Vinci Classics.

 Asymmetric Thought explores many of the possible relationships between classical guitar and electronic music, through 18 original compositions by Italian authors of different generations and stylistic background, composed between 1973 and 2020 and mostly dedicated to Davide Ficco.

The technical realization of the album took place in the METS studios, with the contribution of faculty and students as part of the teaching activities.In the two CDs the compositions are presented in stereo, while with the DVD-Video it is possible to listen to them in a multichannel version, each combined with an image of Pier Giuseppe Imberti's sculptures, photographed by Sergio Bertani.

Conceived by Cuneo EASTN-DC creative partner and guitarist Davide Ficco, the publication gathers original works of Italian contemporary composers mainly appositely commissioned for this project (Alessandro Sciaraffa, Angelo “Motor” Comino, Angelo Benedetti, Gianluca Verlingieri, Giorgio Li Calzi, Giorgio Sollazzi, Giorgio Zucco, Giuseppe Gavazza, Luigi Giachino, Marco Trivellato, Mirko Andreoli, Patrizio Barontini, Sergio Bertani, Simone Conforti, Stefano Giorgi, Valerio Sannicandro and Ficco itself).

Besides these new pieces, the album also includes an historical work of the repertoire for guitar and electronics: Azio Corghi’s Consonancias y Redobles (1973-’74), featuring the first world recording of the new version of its electronic part (realized by composer Gianluca Verlingieri, who digitally restored, re-elaborated and re-spatialized in quadraphony the original analog tape, thought lost and recently found by Corghi in its studio archive).

Electronics is approached very differently by each composer involved in the album, including a strong link with one of the EASTN-DC partners’ technology: the GENESIS software environment for musical creation by means of mass-interaction physics network modeling (ACROE Grenoble), used by Giuseppe Gavazza in his composition.

This publication is and will be a seminal reference for contemporary guitar as well for electro-acoustic repertoire; a work started at the same time as EASTN-DC, that touched several topics also in consideration it’s been realized side by side with artistic (concerts) and pedagogical (workshops, masterclasses) activities.

Some example of these topics are:

• the relation acoustic/electronic instrument;
• the relation Liveness/Reactivation (refer to Philip Auslander definitions and texts) or the “problem” of live performance versus digital archive/performance;
• the question of formats in distribution and, maybe more interesting, in composition: new pieces, as well as those re-composed, propose a challenge to composers facing the possibility of having different formats (stereo, surround, multichannel, compressed/not compressed) in live performance and in digital diffusion;
• the theme of pedagogy of new music involving not traditional language, writing, instrumental techniques, new technologies and the digital world, network and the web.
• the links with the research topic elettronica portativa
• the links with the research topic extended guitar: https://eastndc.eu/library/the-extended-guitar/