Eduardo Moguillansky – lamento (Bemessung # 4)

Daniel Allas – A fragment from “This sounds cerebral in the midst of a bloodletting…”: on the violence of Human taxonomy, data collection, & the Filipino-American War of 1899. [world premiere]

Alyssa Aska – Event Horizon [world premiere]

Hanna Hartman – Blackout

Clara Iannotta – Eclipse Plumage

Since its founding, ensemble mosaik has been experimenting and researching in close collaboration with composers: in addition to the development of specific preparations and unusual playing techniques, electroacoustic and digital enhancements are also tested in particular in order to specifically influence the sound structures and sound spectra of traditional instruments.  

Since 2015, ensemble mosaik has organized the annual workshop festival UpToThree for this cooperative artistic research work, which enables experiments in rehearsal work and presentation, and stimulates public discourse.  

 Eduardo Moguillansky constructs specific instruments for almost all of his compositions. In Lamento (Bemessung#4), sine tones are played on two turntables, the frequencies of which are influenced in a very differentiated way by the application of weights. In addition, amplified tuning forks are used, whose vibrations are transposed by a computer program developed for this purpose. Together with clarinets and flute sounds, a delicate mesh of different beatings is formed.  

For her composition Blackout, Hanna Harman uses very dense miking to transform almost inaudible sounds and noises into a spatial dimension. The prepared clarinet, cello and piano sounds are sonically oriented to rustling paper cubes and crackling Velcro objects that Hartman built for the purpose. Texts act as score instructions, definitions from different seismic intensity scales, such as Richter magnitude, JMA, Mercalli scales.  

Clara Iannotta constructs differentiated sound surfaces by enriching specifically prepared instrumental sounds with noises and spatializes them in the sound body ensemble. The interior of the grand piano is played, among other things, with her “anti-machine”, which, like e-Bows, can excite and regulate the piano strings into selected clusters by means of magnetic fields.  

A fragment from(…) – This piece is an excerpt from a piece entitled “ ‘This sounds cerebral in the midst of a bloodletting…’: on the violence of Human taxonomy, data collection, & the Filipino-American War of 1899”. What follows is the program note for the full-length work: 
This piece arose from reading:
about how and why I am racialized,
about the limits of historical data collection,
& about a war that was/is hidden from me and my family.
And as some reading can be, this piece is a meditation:
on the violence in the word “human”,
on what data could make this destructive reality visible,
& on America’s right to exist.

Event Horizon – 1. A notional boundary around a black hole beyond which no light or other radiation can escape.
1.1. A point of no return.  

Blackout – “Difficult to keep standing. Unanchored furniture moves or falls. Impossible to open the door. Lightposts swing. Electric poles falling down, causing fires. Houses collapse. Gas, water and electricity are interrupted. Small to medium cracks appear in the ground. Larger landslides take place.”
– Hanna Hartman 

Eclipse Plumage was written for and first performed by Daniel Walden and Ensemble Oerknal in September 4, 2019 during the Gaudeamus Muziekweek. It’s my first piece using the Antimachine, an instrument created in collaboration with Jan Bernstein and Mickey van Olst, that generates magnetic fields around the strings of the piano (or any instrument with metal string) — in the last 5′ minutes of the piece you can really listen to the machine, as there’s no electronics, just piano and a few percussion instruments.  

This concert is made possible through the friendly support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, Goethe Institut, the region of Västra Götaland and the municipality of Svenljunga.

Photo © ensemble mosaik

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