Listening / Hearing

LISTENING/HEARING is an installation space for individual listening that will be available throughout the Festival in the Sale d'Armi at the Arsenale, with sound diffusion curated by French composer and sound engineer Thierry Coduys. This sound-chamber will present works of digital and acousmatic electronic music, both composed in the studio and generated in concert with innovative technologies, to showcase current trends in electronics in the field of research into absolute music. The listening space will be created by the German light designer Theresa Baumgartner featuring, in the centre of the space, a Disklavier for the world premiere of the installation version of Piano Space (2021) by the refined Russian composer Dmitri Kourliandski. This will be followed by the world premiere of the multichannel spatialisation version of Travelling Voices (2024) by German electronic research pioneer Christina Kubisch, a work based on recordings made in St. Mark's Basilica of compositions from the Venetian School performed by the Cappella Marciana conducted by Marco Gemmani, the Italian premiere of Flügelnwund (2023) by the acclaimed Moldavian composer and violinist PatKop, the French composer Bernard Parmegiani’s masterpiece De Natura Sonorum (1975), which will be produced by Radio France's INA GRM, the Italian premiere of the electronic work Volvelle (2015) by the English composer Natasha Barrett, and the world premiere of  Zeal, a work for multi-channel diffusion by the young Italian composer Mattia Parisse (1998), selected for the Biennale College Musica - Composers 2024.
Another major INA GRM production receiving its Italian premiere is the acousmatic work Meith by French composer François J. Bonnet, which will be flanked by one of Swedish composer Hanna Hartman’s famous electronic compositions Fracture (2016), produced by Deutschlandfunk Kultur. The programme also includes Iannis Xenakis’s electronic masterpiece Bohor (1962), a self-composing sound installation for solo Disklavier and multi-channel diffusion, Footnotes 1.3 (2024) by Alvin Curran, the world premiere of John Zorn’s version for multichannel diffusion of The Hermetic Organ, commissioned by the Biennale Musica, and the world premiere, commissioned by the Biennale Musica, of Absolute Hallucination (2024) for Disklavier generated by an Artificial Intelligence programme and conceived by the Iranian composer and programmer Ali Nikrang, in co-production with the Linz Ars Electronica festival.

Note: strobe lights are used in this sound exhibition.