Creation : 09 october 2019 at Hangar Bicocca, Festival Milano Musica
Musicians : 6 percussionists
The composer has received a grant for the writing of an original musical piece from the French Ministry of Culture
Duration : 25′
Kore is a piece of 6 percussionists using smart-instruments scattered around the audience.
It takes its inspiration from the Xenakis’ masterpiece Persephassa and aims to extend the possibilities found by Carmine-Emanuele Cella when he created Inside out, performed by Les Percussions de Strasbourg at IRCAM in 2017.
In Persephassa, the musicians use a large range of instruments and sound effects during the piece, among which wood blocks called simantras, that were conceived on purpose for this piece.
In Inside out, many changes of paradigms have been made in the continuation with Xenakis’ research. With the help of new electronic devices used on large size instruments, Carmine-Emanuele Cella managed to create a new global and physical instrument around the audience, played collectively by all the musicians. These devices still had a primitive form then, but they presented an extreme potential in terms of conception of the timbre and interaction man-instrument. The piece was a big success.
With Kore, Carmine-Emanuele Cella develops ce process. The percussions should be big enough to make the system efficient (such as timbals, bass drum, tam-tam, etc.) and the percussionists should be displayed around the audience, in the spirit of Xenakis’s Persephassa.
In addition, again inspired by Xenakis, Kore deploys 6 new instruments called Xulon based on the technology developed for Inside out. The main characteristics of Xulon are that they can completely transform the sound and the interaction of the musician depending on the gesture. This process creates augmented instruments that can fully integrate the listening space, merging the immersiveness of the global electronics with the location of the source and creating a new paradigm for listening to the electronic sound.