Details of HOLOFONIA v1.1
Contact the composer (joanbir@hotmail.com) to acquire it. Duration: ca. 12:30. Experimental Contemporary Music. Live Electronics (MAX).
Level: VERY HIGH. Range (written): A2 – F6 (or as treble as possible)
Technical skills: Some very fast excerpts. Demanding rhythmic. Wide range of dynamics and timbres. Diversity of articulations. Slaps. Tongue Rams. Trumpet sounds. Wide intervals. Nodal sounds: note, air and smorzando. Air sounds and transitions. Kiss sounds. Vowels and consonants sounds. Glissandi and portamenti. Different kind of key sounds. Teeth on reed. Extreme altissimo register. Flatters. Multiphonics. Trills and tremolos. Oscillacions of sounds. Quarter of tones.
Performance skills: Playing with lot of intensity and decision. Several changes of presets of the live electronics. To be able to the saxophone with and without the mouthpiece. Two micros are needed: a DPA and a contact one.
Joan Bagés i Rubí
JOAN BAGÉS i RUBI is a sound artist from Flix, born in Lleida in 1977. His sound work focuses on instrumental music, electroacoustic music, sound installations and interactive music systems.
Far from treating these creative areas as independent areas, his work traces a continuum based on the creation of networks among these disciplines. What unifies his creative work is the permanent research into that he calls the “Spectrum-morphological composition by different layers in a framework of holophonic creation”.
At the same time, he draws graphic notation systems derived from conventional notation, works with Interactive Music Systems and has developed the concept of “Sound Score”.
Read more on his website.
My idea was to explore the concept of holophonia, as a global sound formed by several morphological layers. From the heterogeneity we can have the perception of something that works as a whole. Several sound morphologies are explored in the various sections where saxophone and electronics work as a single hyper-instrument.
I would like that the listener perceive a rich, dense, complex sound which allows him to come on in, to find out through the paths, to cross corners of the sound in order to make him discover new relationships among the layers. A sound that lets the listener enter inside the material as an a sound microscope.
Joan Bagés i Rubi, 2018
Something else about HOLOFONIA v1.1
You can listen to this work in my new album MADE IN BCN.
As Joan Bagés i Rubí said above, this work (as his other pieces I have played) is complex, dense and full of timbre details which invite us to listen to (and play) it several times in order to understand this rich sound universe and enjoy.
In an instrumental point of view, HOLOFONIA v1.1 this piece is really a challenge because the performer has to play it at the limits of the physical possibilities of the baritone saxophone by producing different sorts of simultaneous sounds (e.g. nodal sounds, a blend of treble harmonic with air sound and smorzatto), non usual sounds (sustained sounds of kisses, changes of vowels and consonants, etc.), lots of practice in playing the instrument without mouthpiece (about a 60% of the work is written to be played without it), different sounds in polyrhythms, etc.
The work on the electronics is also demanding because the saxophone player has to be very attentive to the copious changes of presets (a total of 116!). I recommend to play this piece with a good sound artist who performs really well the electronics part so it is very dynamic, organic and needs the contribution of a good musician, as like a good pianist do on our classical repertoire. Maybe this new kind of duo, acoustic instrument and electronics, will be the basic chamber music formation in the next future…
There is also another reduced version of this work titled HOLOFONIA v1.2, about 8 minutes long, which has the same elements that v1.1. I was pleased to premiere both versions with duo with the own composer.
If you want to work on or know more about HOLOFONIA v1.1, don’t hesitate to contact me.
