Quatuor Tana / Neue Vocalsolisten

Raphaël Cendo, born in 1975, is the founder of a new aesthetic movement, “Saturationism”, which has revolutionized the way of conceiving and composing music and attracted many young composers. Cendo will present the Italian premiere of Delocazione, a piece composed in 2017 to a mosaic of texts by Claude Royet-Journoud, Georges Didi-Huberman, Rainer-Marie Rilke, and Georges Bataille, with the French quartet Tana and the Neue Vocalsolisten, specialists in contemporary vocal music.

“At the origins of Delocazione, there are visions that have never ceased to obsess me over the years: destruction, smoke, dust. A world of ruin and the reign of ash. These images and intuitions have translated musically into the search for total disorientation (of movement, timbre and form). The third Quartet, for vocal quartet and string quartet, develops other aspects of my composition. By virtue of a mostly minimal, biting and razor-sharp syntax, the materials harnessed here create the form of the instant, a snapshot of timbre and gesture, the vision of a musical moment constantly renewed and secretly connected through time by the search for persistent silence, to the point of giddiness. While this is certainly a ritual (of fire and disappearance), Delocazione is also a choreography of gestures and movements that combine the mysteries of the poetry of Claude Royet-Journod and Rainer Maria Rilke with the thinking of Georges Didi-Huberman and Claudio Parmiggiani. The essential point of Delocazione is the human and philosophical shock of the events in August 1945 at Hiroshima, placed in perspective by the stories of the city’s inhabitants. These labyrinths of texts create a strange osmosis that oscillates between concrete description and absolute and total mystery, between explicit representation and counter-madrigalism, with the addition of a tangle of meaning”.
 Raphaël Cendo

The Silver Lion to Raphaël Cendo is an award to a new voice considered from the perspective of its originality. He is the founder, with Franck Bedrossian, of a movement in music that might well be described as a powerful aesthetic trend, defined as “Saturation”: at its core lies the concept of excess and hence the need to transcend the limits of pure sound and absolute control in the processes of both composition and performance. His theoretical writings and his scores contain revolutionary stances that cast the acoustic and perceptive aspects of music in a new light, a dimension in which sound is transformed from objective element into subjective reaction that returns to the original text in an uninterrupted transitional process. The relationship between composition and improvisation is also reformulated in the light of the analytical potential of the subject, as recent psychoacoustics have studied and re-defined it.
Ivan Fedele