FLOATING SOUND GALLERY

Vienna

Horacio Vaggione

Horacio Vaggione has been integrating computers to his approach to composition since the 1970s. His body of work includes electroacoustic pieces, mixed pieces, and instrumental music.
Born in 1943 in Argentina, Vaggione has been residing in France since 1978. He studied piano with Ornella Ballestreri and composition at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina, 1959-62) and in Buenos Aires (Argentina) with Juan Carlos Paz. He holds a PhD in musicology from Université Paris 8 (France, 1983), where he worked under Daniel Charles.

Horacio Vaggione cofounded the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba’s Centro de música experimental (CME) in 1965. A year later, on a Fulbright fellowship, he was introduced to the computer as a music tool by Lejaren Hiller and Herbert Brün at University of Illinois (Urbana, Illinois, USA). In 1969-73, he joined Luis de Pablo in the electroacoustic music studio Alea in Madrid (Spain), after which he worked in various French studios — GRM, IRCAM, IMEB — and in several European and North-American universities. He was artist-in-residence in Berlin (Germany) in 1987-88 on a fellowship from DAAD.

Horacio Vaggione won awards in numerous international competitions, including NEWCOMP (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 1983); the ICMA Award (1992), the Euphonie d’or (Bourges, France, 1996), the Ton Bruynèl Award (The Netherlands, 2010), and the Giga-Hertz-Preis 2012 (Karlsruhe, Germany).

Starting in 1989, Horacio Vaggione worked at the Music Department of Université Paris 8 (France) as a professor, PhD research director, and director of the Centre de recherche informatique et création musicale (CICM). He became Professor Emeritus in 2012.
[English translation: François Couture, ix-17]

Préludes Suspendus III (2009) 10’ 10’’ (Stereo)
performed at Circuit Fantôme Season 4 Episode 2

Préludes Suspendus III (2009) is an acousmaticc composition based on a small collection of sounds (instrumental and natural). These sounds were processed by digital means (analysis and resynthesis) using mainly granular techniques as well as convolution and micromontage. Thus the primary sounds developped into many classes of derivates, some of which retain certain original morphological and energetic features, and others constitute radical mutations. Overall, the work plays essentially with contrasts between textures composed of multiple strata, as an expression of a concern with a detailed articulation of sound objects at different time scales.
Preludes Suspendus III was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture. The premiere took place at the Synthèse Festival, Bourges, in June 2009.

PianoHertz (2012) 18' 8 tracks
performed at Circuit Fantôme Season 4 Episode 2

I made PianoHertz from a collection of short sounds that I played myself on an acoustic piano. I recorded these sounds with the intention to extend them digitally to foster the birth of multiple classes, some retaining morphological and dynamic traits of the original sounds while others represent radical mutations. So what I have created here is an “acousmatic consort” of 46 real tracks, where piano sounds outgrow their usual acoustic behaviour, projected over their own causes, remote from their natural radiation. The goal here is not to imitate/degrade a noble acoustic instrument, but to bring a positive ontological change (toward electroacoustics). PianoHertz was realized in 2012 in the studios of the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (ZKM) in Germany and premiered on November 24, 2012, as part of the festival Imatronic Extended 2012 at ZKM's Kubus. The piece was commissioned by the ZKM.

Mécanique des fluides (2015) 20’10" 8 tracks
performed at Circuit Fantôme Season 4 Episode 2

The title of this piece can be understood in a poetic, or a metaphoric manner, or, more scientifically, alluding to a certain description of the physical world. The distinction that I often do between “laminar” and “turbulent” sounds is rooted in a physical description (from the dynamics of fluids). However, this description is not taken here as an external formal recipe: not wanting to reduce the musical practice to any kind of scientism, not negating its expressive and singular character, my concern is to bring forth some composed morphologies, manifested in the layers of a polyphonic activity. Mécanique des Fluides was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, and realized at the Ina-GRM Studios in Paris. The first performance was done at the Auditorium Saint- Germain, Paris, in January 2015.

Nodal (1997) 10’57"

based on snare drum sounds (rubs, bounces, multiphonics) recorded by Miquel Bernat, benefited from a panoply of software tools, as did Arenas (2007) and Nodal (1997), which use a wide variety of sound sources, subjected to digital morphological transformations (granulation, segmentation, convolution, microtemporal decorrelation, etc.)