The innovation
More than sixty years after the creation of the age-defying masterpiece Le marteau sans maître, our novel sound wants to realign the roles of the instruments and redefine modern orchestration. With his work, Boulez directed the avant-garde music taste of his epoch toward an informed use of the timbral palette, juxtaposing purely melodic and purely percussive non-pitched instruments as contrasting elements. Thanks to the use of contact pickups, today every instrument can have an ambiguous, thus compelling nature: the pure percussive sounds generated on Mater can be filtered and transfigured into sustained pitched notes, while any soft noises produced by beating the bodies of the clarinet and the violin can be amplified, becoming percussive musical elements. At the same time, the Seaboard® can be seen as a sort of liquefied piano, where pitch and sustain are unlocked and controlled by the hands of the player.
The ability of each instrument to “invade” the role of each other and create an elastic mixture of timbres without losing their identity is the soul of the ensemble: an authentic property of resilience.
A new music laboratory
The Ensemble Resilience offers the composers an occasion to imagine a potentially limitless palette of sounds. Assisted by the sound designer in residence, they will be able to discuss and develop a new approach to their musical thinking, removing the boundaries of traditional orchestration without renouncing the allure of the sounds created by the musicians’ hands on stage. At the core of this formation lies the commissioning of works by emerging young composers and the exploration of the possibilities of an extended orchestration.
Bringing contemporary music to a broader audience
It is part of the ensemble’s commitment to follow the path initiated by Italian composer Fausto Romitelli: to connect followers of electronic music with avant-garde enthusiasts. The current new music panorama remains in many ways, highly compartmentalised. Despite the fact that popular electronic music and contemporary classical music use similar language and borrow techniques from each other, compositional figures and audiences of each style don’t necessarily experience the gamut of potential of the other. Avant-garde music in particular suffers from small audiences when it could attract electronic music lovers currently unaware of its development and rich potential.
We believe it is necessary to therefore rethink the location of classical concerts to give avant-garde and electronic music adequate exposure, while ridding them of previous associations that may be exclusive or divisive with audiences. In addition, the ensemble’s ability to design site-specific amplification can bring contemporary classical music to unusual locations typically linked to underground culture.