The performance is never the same. Le voci del mondo (2018) (The voices of the world) is the version expressly re-composed for the MANTIS System in Manchester’s Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall. Previously this piece (the same but always different) has been performed on 24 channels at Acousmonium (Miso Music, O’Culto de Ajuda, Lisbon, May 2015) and 24 channels at Sound dome (EASTN, #AST, Grenoble November 2015, Cité de La Musique, Romans-sur-Isère, October 2016). Working for my PhD on the subject of GENESIS (software of musical synthesis for physical modelling) as a tool for musical composition I have created many thousands of models capable to generate sounds. Every model has its own voice that can be a complex and richly articulated sound. Some of these sounds often appear to me like voices of strange animals, cryptic signal coming from this world or outer world, primaeval sounds from musical instruments.
For Le voci del mondo (2018) I have chosen 32 models capable to generate long sounds (minutes or hours) and I have assigned every voice to a single channel of the loudspeakers orchestra. I like to imagine that in every loudspeaker is hidden one of these uncommon sounding objects. Each sound in a box, like each animal in a cage. Playing at the mixer during the concert I shall give audio-life to one, some or all these voices scattered in space and I feel to stay immobile in the centre of an unreal singing forest or zoo.
I have taken the title and I took inspiration from the beautiful novel of Robert Schneider, “I suoni del mondo” (personal translation from Italian): "
The closer he came to the smooth rock, the more Elias felt restless. It seemed to him that the noise of the footsteps, the breath, the crackle of the frozen snow, the distant thuds of the wood, the water's murmur under the ice of the Emmer, that all around him had to grow and to melt into one grandiose sound. When he finally reached his cliff he felt a rumble like a thunder ready to burst out from his breast. And at that moment, as if having a premonition of his own future, he suddenly began to sing. Therefore the prodigy happened: that afternoon of his fifth year of life Elias heard the sound of the universe."
The original title of the novel, Schlafes Bruder, became Brother of sleep in English and Le voci del mondo in the Italian version. The English translation is more accurate, but I love the Italian one: less precise, but faithful to the spirit of the novel.
Certainly I would not have titled my composition Fratelli di sonno o Sonno fraterno.