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Cecilia Arditto:
My long-term project, Música invisible, starting on 2002, deeply explores acoustic rarities on solo instruments. It focuses principally on how these unusual sonorities transform our perception of music, creating extended listening techniques. I like to think about a composer as a luthier, who is reshaping the instrument from the inside out, not in a material way, but in the redesigning of its usage.

Música invisible for trombone is the first outcome of our long-term collaboration with trombonist Dalton Harris researching nonstop on alternative trombone techniques, with the aim to open different ways of listening. With the inspiration of Jim Fulkerson who generously lent us his studio, his instruments, and his ears, and Robert Bosch in an outstanding recording.

 

In The Life of a Light Bulb, diverse techniques are used to modify the trombone sound: water is introduced into its mechanics, radically modifying its sound. A simple button if used as an internal mouthpiece to create filtered air sounds; the use of phonemes explores the possibilities of the vocal cavity to altered the sound “as if speaking but without”

All these techniques play together in counterpoint with a flickering lamp in the dark, which becomes “a new player”, making chamber music also for the eyes. Synesthesia, confusions, music to see, and a lamp to hear—The Life of a Light Bulb aims to forge new connections between apparently disparate elements. Simple means and refined processes come together in a chamber music experi- ence where visuals, movements, and objects share equal importance.