MARKO CICILIANI
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Electronics and Mixed Music
Tullius Rooms

TULLIUS ROOMS
for piano, electronics & soundscapes

composed in 1999/2000


total duration: 80'

This piece was premiered in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam/Netherlands on the 27th of January 2001. The interpreters were Josh Dillon, piano and Marko Ciciliani, electronics. The concert was recorded by the VPRO. In October 2001 this piece was produced for CD release by the same interpreters at Radio Bremen.

From Antiquity up through the Renaissance, there are reports of people who had the ability to retain unimaginable amounts of information. These people accomplished such feats of recollection by means of a particular technique — the ars memorativa — which worked in the following way. One created a personal, imaginary building, all of the different spatial divisions of which one came to know well. In order to remember a particular subject, one would place various virtual objects in the rooms of the building. These objects would symbolically represent information. To recall something later, one would imagine oneself walking through that particular part of the building which housed the objects pertaining to the subject at hand and would then "decode" them. The idea of a fictitious building which, although uninhabited, is still "imbued," serves as the inspiration for this piece and as a metaphor for its formal organization. The form consists of 126 sections that were derived by means of a magic square. The architectural metaphor lends itself well to the piece and its sections, in that although the physical characteristics of individual rooms may greatly differ, together the rooms form an edifice. A second aspect in the piece is derived from architecture, in that the acoustic characteristics of the hall in which this piece is performed play an important musical role, as do those of the piano and the musician’s body. These last two are also utilized as "architectural" entities unto themselves. Furthermore, artificial and remote acoustics are brought in by means of electronics and soundscapes.
In 2002 “Tullius Rooms” was released on CD (Unsounds) with a recording by the pianist Josh Dillon.

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Download PDF score:
tullius_rooms.pdf
File Size: 1427 kb
File Type: pdf
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