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WHY FRETS?
"WHY FRETS? - Requiem for the Electric Guitar" - a performance lecture "WHY FRETS? - Tombstone" - an interactive installation "WHY FRETS? - Downtown 1983" - an audiovisual performance composed in 2020-22 First performance: March 12, 2022, TimeCanvas, Antwerp Second performance: October 2022, Musikprotokoll Graz “In 1833, British professional weaver and amateur engineer Sieglinde Stern invented the first electro-magnetic pickup and as a result, the first electrically amplified stringed instrument. One hundred years later, this invention enabled the production of the first electric guitar, which became one of the most popular and most played instruments in the history of Western music. However, another 100 years later, no one plays this instrument anymore! What led to the rise and fall of the electric guitar? What is the nature of this instrument that had its origins in concepts of weaving and mutated back into a loom during its decline? And who was its inventor Sieglinde Stern, who was completely forgotten and is only remembered as Davis Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust?” Why Frets? by Marko Ciciliani is a series of three works – a multimedia performance, a performance lecture, and an installation – that illuminate different aspects of this fictional history of the electric guitar from varying angles. The story is based on speculative fabulation – a deliberate re-invention of the past. Rather than pursuing the idea of creating something new as an envisaging of the future, speculative fabulation and the rewriting of history proceeds from an examination of the conditions of how society and culture arrived at their present state. As an artistic practice of “arrière-art” – as opposed to “avant-art” –, rewriting the past offers a method of imagining what contemporary society might look like alternatively, and thus of creating a vision of a future. Or as Donna Haraway put it: "The open future rests on a new past" (1978). In this way, the four individual works Why Frets? – Requiem for the Electric Guitar, Why Frets? – Downtown 1983 and Why Frets? – Tombstone – complement each other in the sense of a transmedia storytelling. Each of the individual works is a self-contained work, but taken as a whole, the three artworks cast different spotlights on the electric guitar, focusing on aspects such as techno-cultural developments, inscriptions of gender, or social values. 
Why Frets? – Requiem for the Electric Guitar (2020-21, duration 30-40 minutes)
a performance-lecture for a reciting guitarist and fretless electric guitar Music and visuals: Marko Ciciliani Original Story: Marko Ciciliani Writers: Marko Ciciliani & Nicolas Trépanier FULL TEXT This work for a reciting solo-guitarist is presented as an amalgamation of a academic lecture, held by a historian in the year 2083, and a solo for a fretless electric guitar. It is supplemented by an interactive video, which starts out as a power-point-style presentation, but gradually gains more visual finesse and interactivity. In this performance-lecture, the fictional history of the electric-guitar, that is underlying the entire project, is presented in a linear narrative way. According to it, the pickup was invented in 1833 by a weaver and amateur-physicist named Sieglinde Stern who also designed the first electrically amplified string instrument, the Di-Cord. Through a series of coincidences and circumstances the design plan lands in the hands of George Beauchamp who in 1933 – a hundred years after the invention of the pickup – produces the first electric guitar, the Rickenbacher A-22. This instrument then becomes a symbol of youth rebellion and Rock ‘n’ Roll and gradually grows to a symbol of masculinity and sexual potency. However, various developments – described by theoreticians as transcendal technophallacy and the specious-turn in media-theory – lead to a collapse of the popularity of the instrument, and the year 2033 marks the last public performance with this instrument. 
Why Frets? – Downtown 1983 (2021, duration: 25 minutes)
for live-electronics and three prerecorded guitarists on video This piece is based on a short piece for three guitarists that is documented on video. This recording is used as raw material for an elaborate solo with analog electronics where these signals are processed but also used as control signals for various forms of synthesis. The underlying video with the three guitarists (recorded by Nico Couck, Nele de Gussem and Alex Tentor) is presented as a concert that could have taken place in 1983 in Downtown New York. In New York’s Downtown Scene in the late 70s, 80s and 90s, the electric guitar took a central role across different styles of musical experimentation, such as new playing techniques with table-top guitars, alternative tuning systems, feedback and noise as extreme forms of expression. Roughly in the middle of the piece, the performance is interrupted by a series of interviews from the 80s of musicians from the New York downtown music scene, that express their relation to music and specifically to the electric guitar. Through the combination of commentaries and the inserted interviews, Why Frets? - Downtown 1983 creates a meta-text that further elaborates the fictitious history of the electric guitar. 
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Why Frets? – Tombstone (2021-22, permanent installation)
installation of interwoven guitars This installation consists of four electric guitars that are – quite literally – interwoven with each other, forming a musical sculpture in which the guitars hover horizontally with the support of four hi-hat stands. The strings are excited by electric magnets through which slowly ascending sine sweeps are played which results in a complex, constantly changing and slowly evolving harmonic texture. The hi-hat stands that the guitars are mounted on can be operated by audience members. When done so, a single guitar is lowered from its standard horizontal position. Since the guitars are connected to each other on the necks and since the strings of the instruments are interwoven, changing the position of one instrument affects the tuning of all four guitars. Operating the foot pedal of a hi-hat stand thus results in a change of harmony. Furthermore, after the interaction voices are heard that are complementing and extending the fictitious history of the electric guitar as it was presented in the performance lecture. 
Credits
This project has been produced by ChampdAction, Antwerp and the ORF (Musikprotokoll). It has been commissioned by ChampdAction, SKE-Fund and the Austrian Bundesministerium. Additional financial support was provided by Land Steiermark. The project has furthermore been supported by the Kunstuniversität Graz. Special thanks to Anne Ewing for recording the voice part of Why Frets? - Tombstone Also many thanks go out to Ann Andries (ChampdAction), Robert Höldrich (IEM/KUG), IOhannes Zmölnig (IEM/KUG) and Nicolas Trépanier (Univ. of Mississippi).
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