Vienna

Todor Todoroff

Dédales [Mazes] is freely inspired by music composed for Les familiers du labyrinthe (2005) [Regulars of the Labyrinth], choreographed by Michèle Noiret for the Paris Opera.

Significant structural changes have been made to the original work and new elements have been integrated. Every now and again, the piece sets up the notion of a strange, undefinable presence by means of ‘coloured silences’; sonic chiaroscuro-like moments which open a door to the unknown. At times, very distinct and rhythmic sonic structures cause the hostile, mechanical and unpredictable universe of the labyrinth to materialize, in whose machinery the performers’ bodies are lost and found again. Emphasis is placed now on its inescapable permanence, now on its kinetic vivacity.

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Le Murmure du Bombus (The Bombus' Whisper), 2022, 8’ 17’’ Thibault Madeline

Le Murmure du Bombus (The Bombus' Whisper) has its origin in an obsession for an unavoidable, recurring subject: the fly, which is, at the same time, a symbol of a peaceful nature, evoking decomposition, irritation, or even an invading swarm. The fly is so present in our environment that it frequently lands on the microphone with agility and accidentally becomes part of the sound composition.

We hear the fly before we see it. The buzzing is known to harass our ears : that of a nocturnal mosquito, a chain saw working early in the morning, or a high speed dirt bike. But, paradoxically, the buzz can be conceived as a purely harmonic phenomenon. If we ignore the source of the sound, we will be surprised by the inherent musicality of this usually annoying buzzing. This is what Le Murmure du Bombus tries to demonstrate by effectuating a transition from an anecdotal soundscape into a turbulent drone music.

In 2021, Le Murmure du Bombus wins 4th place in the Iannis Xenakis International Electronic Music Competition.

^{(Produced with the help of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation)}


Le Sphinx et Pol, 2023, 08’ 33’’ / stereo, 48Khz 24bit
Charo Calvo

The sonic response of a modular synthesizer to small variations on electric voltage is so mysterious to me, as that a of a balloon singing while forced to exhale the air by squeezing the opening. I have been working with those two sound devices to try to crack the enigma without success, but in the meantime, I produced this piece. It also draws on elements of the Pol Bury monotype digital sur canvas after Ingres’painting ‘Oedipe explique l’énigme du sphinx’ and of the work of Turkish choreographer Bahar Temiz with whom I have collaborated especially for the dance performance Punkt (2023) which speaks of various notions of perspective and depth, also reminding me of certain issues in Bury's work.


déploration sur la disparition d'un musicien (Lament on the Death of a Musician) , 2013, 10’ 32’’
Jean-Louis Poliart

Realized in the Studio "Akousma",  Academy of Music of Soignies, Belgium, and in the composer's studio / created on March 27 2013
Senghor (Brussels)

A term rarely used now, the lament is a genre used in vocal polyphony in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.It celebrates the death of a musician.

However, along with the lament aspect, this piece proposes, above all, a sonic story. This "cinema for the ear" expresses a particularly painful trajectory towards the unique certainty of the human being; the process of the destruction of the body until its liberation. All that remains afterwards is the wind. The sound timbres pertaining to the human voice refer to the genre of early music. The sounds generally unfold in a disorderly effervescence of micro variations as an expression of the fragility of life.

A long crescendo, engendered by a dramatic silence, leads to a first climax.  A second crescendo, which is a variation of the first, leads to the overall climax of the piece and foreshadows, during its development, the final lament. Afterwards, the music expresses the painful breathing, death and lamentation in sequences that become longer and longer and more and more serene.  Coming, as a coda, are sentiments of liberation and oblivion.

The piece ends in a long silence, as a counterpart to the silence in the beginning. It tells the experience of the composer in front of a very painful death.

^{This work was composed with the help of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, Directorate of Culture, Department of Music.}


Tant de souvenirs... (So many memories...) / 2022, 05’ 45″

Roeland Luyten

17.06.2023

Rupture d’équilibre / 1997, 10’ 17″Todor Todoroff

A virtual pendulum, simulated on a computer by a damped harmonic oscillator, crosses zones whose boundaries are defined interactively by the user. Each zone is programmed to trigger a sonic event which is variable in intensity, timbre and / or frequency, depending on the speed of the pendulum when it enters the zone.

The composer plays this virtual instrument with potentiometers. He modifies in real-time the mass, the stiffness constant, and the damping factor, and may also add various external disturbances. All of these forces interact and continuously modify the aspect, the speed and the amplitude of the movement, either generating pseudo-repetitive sequences or disrupting the equilibrium.

There is a sombre atmosphere, populated with little, organic-like virtual beings which resist the swinging motion and disrupt its regularity. This matter offers itself up for periodic transformation and distortion, colours are revealed and recombine, chimeras emerge from the nothingness and invite us to follow their hypnotic oscillation…

Disappearance, appearance, proliferation. Moans can be heard… are they calls? Responses? Is collapse inevitable? Is there something which could slow it down or stop it? Accident or destiny, uncertainty reigns as absolute master. There is no point in resisting…

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The stones can speak, 2018, 9’ 26’’ / acousmatic music – stereo

This piece has been composed with sounds recorded at the VICC (Visby International Centre for Composers) in 2017 and commissioned by Dante Tanzi to participate to the  CD obsAUDIOR5  Awakenings. The piece refers to the legend of the Dame Blanche of Tonneville in Normandy. It is said that the ghost of a young woman dressed all white appears sometimes in the area of Tonneville to mislead travellers…
I also thank Sten Melin and Jesper Elen of the VICC for their warm welcome in Visby.

“On Sundays, hidden by the shadow of the Moon,
She perpetuates a ritual that never comes to an end…
Again and again… she wakes up without a body
And warn all creatures that time will come…
We wish soon, they respond
And she replies later,
But as time goes by, they are all gone…”


Solo Feu / 2001, 04’ 36″Todor Todoroff

Solo feu [Fire Solo] primarily combines a variety of transformations of sounds of fire. This piece is an excerpt which has been reworked from music composed for In Between (2000), by choreographer Michèle Noiret.

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SPORES / 2017, 09’ 16’’ - 9mm

Water, 8’ 53″ / 2020

“Water belongs to a series of musical pieces I composed using software, which can be downloaded for free (Audacity). All these compositions had as a starting point a chosen sound material in which I committed myself to using only that material for the whole composition. The sound material I worked with for Water is almost exclusively a recording of the sounds of water from our kitchen tap.

Like the others of this series of pieces, Water is a playful quest in a garden of possibilities offered by electronics. It is a medium, which I (re)discovered not very long ago and whose often self-created richness of sound continues to amaze and delight me."


Fragment of a life, 6’ 46″ / 2021 Dimitri Coppe

Fragment of a life is composed as an instrumental solo. The sound palette is deliberately reduced to Freezing, a historic GRM-Tools treatment from the '90s, which sounds more mineral than crystalline.

A sound fragment is set in rotation and shaped by a fall. The speed slows, the envelope expands, revealing the impurity of the fibers. Speed slows further, the hiccup becomes a pulsation. Nearing a standstill, weepers appear.

Fragment of a life is a stereo reduction of 8 spatialized channels on a very small, colorful set-up : a 4 channels/8 speakers totem and 4 horns arranged solely facing the audience.

Fragment of a life is dedicated to a long-suffering companion who recently passed away, and a tribute to the instrument that freezes time.


Réminiscences / 2003, 16’ 08″ Todor Todoroff

Traces, transformations, fluctuations, rhythms and spatial architectures are the essential elements of this composition. Different sonic materials are analysed according to psycho-acoustical criteria and processed using transpositions and sequential shifts, time quantisation and distortion and application of various selection criteria. This creates a transfigured reality through digital synthesis and the live instruments. This reality explores various sonic universes whilst keeping traces of some of the energetic and morphological characteristics of the original sound sources. For example, the particular rhythm and prosody of a voice will be transposed into instrumental phrases. A granulation algorithm controlled in real time by the Theremin player manipulates another voice and submits it to temporal, timbral and spatial changes. This voice is heard again reciting the verses of the Danish poet J. P. Jacobsen “Evig og uden forandring”. The phenomena of instability and balance running through the entire score are closely linked with the analysis methods. This can be heard in the strings, the Theremin, and the keyboard parts. In a paradoxical way, these unstable elements when juxtaposed, repeated, permuted and transformed, create rhythms that are emphasized by the percussion. Various techniques of sound-projection place the listener in virtual architectures that are alternatively smooth and metric, static and dynamic.

Commissioned by: Musiques Nouvelles / Art Zoyd
String instruments: Musiques Nouvelles (4 Violins, 2 Violas, 2 Cellos, 1 double bass)
Electronic instruments: Art Zoyd (Theremin, MIDI Keyboard and MIDI percussions)
Voice: Birgitte Odgaard Nielsen
MAX/MSP virtual instruments: ARTeM (1 computer for the Theremin, 1 for the transformations and 1 for the spatialisation)
Musical assistant at Art Zoyd: Carl Faia
Mixing: ARTeM

Live premiere: Brussels, 30/11/03
Premiere of the octophonic tape version: Bourges, 11/06/05
Instrumental version edited on: EXP-01 In-possible Records (2005)
Tape version edited on : CYP4650 Cyprès (2012) « Musiques Nouvelles | 50th anniversary edition »


Solar Winds / 2012, 09’ 35″ / Octophonic acousmatic work
 
The idea to present Solar Winds near the end of 2012 sprang from a desire to honor the astronomers of the ancient Mayan culture and their worship of the Sun at a time that marks the completion of one Mesoamerican Long Count calendar and the beginning of another.

Solar Winds incorporates acoustic translations of electromagnetic phenomena that are produced by the Earth as well as other astronomical phenomena, and constitutes an imaginary celestial aural journey from the perspective of the listener who is Earth.

Solar Winds was realized in 2012 at the Métamorphoses d’Orphée studio of Musiques & Recherches in Ohain (Belgium) and was premiered on October 27, 2012 during the 8th festival Visiones Sonoras organized by the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras (CMMAS) in the Auditorio de la Unidad Académica Cultural of the UNAM Campus Morelia (Mexico). The piece was commissioned by Musiques & Recherches.

Solar Winds was composed with support from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles (Direction générale de la culture, Service de la musique). Thanks to David Baltuch, Alexis Boilley, Rodrigo Sigal, and Annette Vande Gorne.

The diptych Solar Winds…and Beyondwas awarded First Prize in the Musica Nova 2015 International Competition of Electroacoustic Music (Prague, Czech Republic).


Kinetic Reflections / 2023, 08’ 20″ Todor Todoroff

Pol Bury's kinetic sculptures are fascinating. Driven by motors, almost invisibly using wires or, as if by magic, using magnets, they come to life and invite the viewer to devote time to explore them. Their slow movements take us into a suspended, almost meditative time-space. Close observation gradually alters the perception of movement and speed. Hypnotic internal rhythms arise; imaginary landscapes emerge, evolve, tip and jostle. Reflections on the polished metal surfaces multiply the points of view like so many dream-like echoes. Is it an illusion of reality or the reality of dreams?

These images and rhythms are echoed in "Kinetic reflections": hypnotic repetitions, gravity and lightness, rollings and flyings, mechanics and mystery, themes and variations, transformations, transitions and ruptures challenge the imagination of the spectator/listener.

Composed in 2023 at ARTeM studio, revisiting multiphonic recordings of experimental improvisation sessions for cello, voice and interactive digital transformations with Sigrid Vandenbogaerde.

Premiered at the Reflets Sonores Festival, in Fauquez, Belgium, on June 9 2023.


Requiem for a City / 2015-17, 15’ 00″Todor Todoroff

After the attack at the Musée juif de Belgique (Jewish Museum of Belgium) on May 24, 2014, I was profoundly shocked by monstrous increase in barbarity which followed with attacks by Islamic extremists in Paris from January 7-9, 2015 against Charlie Hebdo, the police and the Hyper Casher supermarket, as well as the unspeakable horror of November 13, 2015 — the worst massacre in France since the Second World War.

I was particularly shaken because I was in Paris for an artistic residency during both waves of attacks. Driving home from Paris the night of November 14, I felt the need to respond. I wanted to pay tribute to the hundreds of innocent victims, traumatised witnesses and devastated families. This piece makes use of a wide variety of sounds: field recordings, playing techniques specific to the viola, granulated excerpts of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, modular analog synthesis and sounds extracted from radio and television news coverage following the November 13 attacks.

With these latter sources, I chose to focus primarily on what the victims and their loved ones had to say because, while this work may be a cry of revolt, it is most of all a tribute to the victims who were given far too little attention in the media hype following the attacks.

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