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SOON AVAILABLE MARIO BERTONCINI
CD box "Arpe Eolie" + book edition "Aeolian harps and other useless things" will be available soon.
[extract from the G.M.Borio introduction] Starting with his move to Berlin in 1973-74, Mario Bertoncini begins to devote himself to the construction of objects based upon the principle of aeolian sounds, which he he uses both individually or in groups of sound sculptures according the the requirements of his various projects. At the Berliner Festwochen of 1974, one of his most ambitious works received its premiere, Vele. In this particular version, there were two large aeolian harps: one installed in the open air on the rear esplanade of Berlin's Nationalgalerie, and the other harp, inside in the main hall of the gallery. The first harp, whose triangular shape resembles a wind-blown Roman galley sail, uses an iron frame approximately seven meter’s tall. One of its sides, bent according to a logarithmic curve, supports 1500 very thin strings within a basic tuning, so to speak, and it naturally seizes the impulses of the wind, without any intervention from a performer. The second harp instead, composed of a rectangular frame (200cm x 400cm), receives on its metal strings the labial impulses of three vocalists who react to the sounds produced by the outside wind according to a predetermined code. The wind – the only “aleatoric” factor in this performance – makes the strings vibrate; the resulting sounds are amplified through crystal microphones and diffused in the room through a quadraphonic system of speakers. In another work from the same year, Chanson pour instruments à vent, the performer acts with both his breath and with four nozzles of compressed air on an installation made of aeolian harps and “gongs”, thus varying ad libitum the intensity of the air blow. |
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