E-tudes - Programme Notes
E-tudes is simultaneously a performance and an installation. The six pianists are divided into two groups of 3 players each. The first group plays from the 6th book of madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa (1566-1613) and the remaining three pianists play etudes of their choice from the established piano repertoire. The composer plays live-electronics using the ensemble's audio and MIDI signals as material for the new composition. Therefore, what the ensemble plays will not be directly audible in the space.
The audience will have creative control over how they want to experience the performance. By choosing between listening to the speakers in the room or through headphones generating different outputs and distributed to the audience, each person will fabricate their own version of the piece.
E-tudes is a single multilayered composition that challenges the audience by questioning traditional performance practice and creating a cognitive dissonance: what you see is not necessarily what you hear, and certainly not what your past experience leads you to expect.
In E-tudes, the composer does not work with the performers by writing a score but rather, in Oswaldian terms, by plundering their audio signal. The plundering occurs in a live situation and that makes the performer an accomplice in the process of appropriation (of themselves) proposing the notion of plundering in real-time, or ‘Real-Time Plunderphonics’.