Breathing paces: starting a musical composition about paces, beats and breaths, for string quintet and electronics.

Application summary

Today, my musical research is about walking and composing. More specifically: it's about paces, beats and breaths. When I lived in Chile I walked creating unlikely paths: following rivers from the source to the mouth, crossing forests without marked paths, following homeless dogs in town, zigzaging on the streets, etc. In addition, I composed music and some collective or individual performances in urban or natural land. Now, since few years, I live in Italy, and I try to walk-compose. Immersed in this experience, I arrived to pay specific attention to three aspects of my body involved in the process of walking: paces, beats, breaths. Three phenomena that arise in form of sound, gesture and mechanism. From that suggestion a question come out: how to compose a music in which the rhythm is comparable to the variable speed of paces, beats and breaths of a human being walking? Radicalizing: How to create a music in which the rhythm is just the walking trace made by paces, beats and breaths, a regular pulsation with light contractions and expansions but without divisions? I have created three possible musical answers to these questions: “Passi” for Bb clarinet (2017), “Via” for orchestra (2018), “Orma” for seven players (2019). For the Saari Residence program, I would like to start the composition of the fourth and final work of this artistic research, for string quintet and electronics, that will be commissioned by Ensemble Pu Joa, of Paraguay, to be performed in 2024 in three steps: 1. walking near Saari houses recording the sound of the breaths, paces and landscape all the weeks during the two months of residency; 2. elaborating these sound recordings in an audio track; 3. composing the first five minutes of a work for string quintet and electronics.