Pesaro: UNESCO Creative City of Music ISAC-2023.
Da Wednesday 7th to Friday 9th June, Pesaro UNESCO Creative City of Music welcomes ISAC-2023 – International Sonosfera® Ambisonics Competition "Eugenio Giordani" -, the first edition of the international three-dimensional electroacoustic composition competition for the Sonosfera® technological space created by David Monacchi. The M° Eugenio Giordani – professor of the Rossini Conservatory who passed away in 2020 to whom the project is dedicated – is the one who directed the historic School of Electronic Music of the Rossini Conservatory for 40 years. ISAC-2023 is promoted by Municipality of Pesaro/Department of Beauty, produced by'nonprofit organization Fragments of Extinction in collaboration with the Pescheria Foundation – Visual Arts Center and the Rossini Conservatory, and is officially part of the events towards Pesaro Italian Capital of Culture 2024.
They were present at the press conference: Daniele Vimini, deputy mayor and councilor for Beauty of the Municipality of Pesaro, David Monacchi professor of the Rossini Conservatory, creator of ISAC-2023, the Maestro Fabio Masini director of the Rossini Conservatory, Natasha Barrett president of the ISAC-2023 International Jury.
It's an award we care a lot about – that's how he began Daniele Vimini -, an initiative that testifies to the strong bond between the Municipality and the Conservatory and has behind it the very long work that led to the creation of the Sonosfera® and even before that to the Ambisonic Hall of the Conservatory, therefore a fifty-year history that brings with it the names by Eugenio Giordani and David Monacchi. It seemed natural to us to develop a moment in which the world could work on the composition of electronic music for the Sonosfera®, a special place also created for a dimension of ad hoc music production. And the international component is fundamental: precisely for this reason the announcement was also vigorously spread in all the UNESCO creative cities of music, a network of which Pesaro is part. The third element that provides the coordinates of ISAC-2023 is the fact that the compositions developed for the competition become part of the Sonosfera® library, thus providing it with new unique contents, potential new programs to offer to the public. The award will be biennial but will certainly also return in 2024 in the year of Capital to consolidate processes that are now part of the DNA of Pesaro2024.
Il Maestro Fabio Masini has framed the figure of Maestro Giordani: today is the moment in which we see the fruits of 40 years of sowing his important work. All the current electronic music teachers at the Conservatory were students of Giordani, a figure who was capable of thinking of 'new' music such as electronic music, but with great classical roots. Thanks to this, our Conservatory has become a point of reference at a national level and beyond. Electronic music at the Pesaro Conservatory has already celebrated 50 years and 40 have been under the aegis of Giordani. The competition represents the way to give official recognition to Giordani's work, for which I thank David Monacchi for his determination in carrying forward this project.
Continue David Monacchi: the competition starts from an idea by Eugenio Giordani which was born from the desire to set in motion an international competition for young people in electroacoustic musical composition for the Sonosfera®. At its core, the intuition that Pesaro is in fact one of the few cities in the world to have two spaces for three-dimensional listening to sound: SPACE - thanks to which in the 70s people came to Pesaro to talk about electronic music Conservatory – and then the evolution with the Sonosfera® which is a real public space in the city. And these two structures make it possible to implement three-dimensional electroacoustic compositional thinking and benefit from this linguistic innovation. Hence the idea of launching a competition of this kind, at an international level, therefore widespread in the main world networks and which involves all the people with whom Eugenio has worked, thus allowing the project requirements to be maintained, with a strong adherence to his thoughts.
Natasha Barrett he underlined how the world lacks places to compose this kind of music and where to enjoy it and it is exciting that here in Pesaro there are two of these structures with extraordinary functionality. ISAC-2023 was also the way for me to discover what is happening in the world in frontier musical creation. It's a great honor to be here.
Previewed in'October 2022, the ISAC-2023 competition has actually generated a “review of 3D acousmatic concerts in Sonosfera®”,'truly unique initiative. From the Greek akusmatikoi, 'acousmatic' indicates l'listening to sound free from its physical causes, as was the voice of Pythagoras who spoke to his disciples without being seen. The music – whether concrete, electronic or digital – does not include live performers and is listened to without obvious sound sources. The sound creation that the composer implements is strongly anchored to the internal relationships between the sounds in a complex timbral system, which the public listens to with their eyes closed, being able to enter, through the three-dimensional qualities of the Sonosfera® space, into a true soundscape of the'imagination. "Cinema for the'ear", one could define it, because virtual reality is entirely created by sound'inside the sphere generates a very powerful sensorial and cognitive experience.
The first event of what is a festival of frontier concerts in experimental music is for Wednesday June 7 at 14.30 pm at the LEMS of the Rossini Conservatory with the Masterclass I by Natasha Barrett, undisputed master of electroacoustic composition in three-dimensional space and president of the ISAC-2023 International Jury. Thursday 8 after Barrett's Masterclass II, at 18pm in Sonosfera® – with a repeat at 21pm - il concert by Natasha Barrett, followed at 19pm by'performance of the most significant compositions produced in the decade 2013-2023 in the Degree Course in Electronic Music at SPACE (the first spherical laboratory for 3D sound in Italy). Friday 9 at 18pm in the City Council room the Awards ceremony ISAC-2023 and at 19pm in Sonosfera® the concert of the 5 winners of the competition for which 3 performances are scheduled at 20pm, 21pm and 22pm. At 16pm and 20pm the remaining 5 compositions arriving in the short-list can also be listened to. Free entry, reservations required (0721 387541).
In recent years, the leap forward in software for manipulating the spatial components of sound has not been followed by the construction of designated places for'three-dimensional public listening. Pesaro, Italian Capital of Culture 2024, has two of these spaces: lo SPACE. (Soundscape Projection Ambisonics Control Engine) at the Rossini Conservatory e Sonosfera® the theater for the'deep listening to ecosystems and music at Palazzo Mosca. Due to its architectural and electroacoustic characteristics, Sonosfera® is in fact a perfect tool for'musical linguistic innovation: here is the space - like the'pitch and duration of sounds - it can become a compositional parameter without limitations of direction, size, distance and perspective of the sounds, extending the music into the'entire spherical domain around listeners via 45 active speakers; the result is a shared virtual reality, very different from 'solitude' generated by VR viewers where the sound in headphones almost never achieves a satisfactory sensorial result. In perfect harmony with the values of Pesaro2024, ISAC-2023 wants to recall the'international attention and orient creativity on these new possibilities of compositional thinking and its use, detaching itself from commercial approaches on the 3D effect sound of consumer devices. The objective is to give substance to the artistic, cultural and scientific innovation approaches typical of academic research music, with roots in the history of music 'cultured' practiced by research groups in universities and conservatories around the world.
An unexpected number of people responded to the competition call 77 candidates (for a total of around 100 compositions) from 26 countries around the world, selected for the'high artistic and technical quality necessary for "resonate" a complex and technologically unique space in the world like Sonosfera®. Two juries: the first national one composed of teachers from Italian Conservatories, all former students of the historic School of Electronic Music of the Rossini Conservatory, the second international one with prestigious collaborations of'Stanford University, Vancouver and Oslo. The 3 winners will receive respectively 2.500 euros for the first prize, 1.000 for the second and 500 for the third place.
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