CANCELLED DUE TO THE CORONA CRISIS!<\/p>\n
Mario Davidovsky is one of the great figures of American New Music \u2013 but has hardly been played in Europe. As a pioneer of electronic music, he was already working at the \u201cColumbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center\u201d in 1960. His work includes by far not only electronic music. His most famous works, the \u201cSynchronisms\u201d, a series of over a dozen works written over a period of more than 40 years, have influenced generations of composers. In combining \u201cclassical\u201d instruments with pre-produced electronic sounds, Davidovsky, unlike many other composers of this genre, is not interested in special \u201csound effects\u201d in any way, but rather seeks a fusion of instrumental sound with electronics, resulting in both continuity and intrinsic musical expression. The earliest \u201cSynchronisms\u201d date from a time when today\u2019s sound technology was still in its infancy, but they are nevertheless masterpieces without equal; the long time span in which the \u201cSynchronisms\u201d were created also documents the technical progress in this field over the time. In addition to a large number of awards for his work, Mario Davidovsky received the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 explicitly for his work \u201cSynchronisms No. 6\u201d.<\/p>\n
Luciano Berio is in many ways a European counterpart to Davidovsky. His in-depth study of individual instruments and their playing techniques in his Sequenzas is based on a similar interest that Davidovsky pursued in his Synchronisms. Our program features a work by the young Berio, composed at the end of the 1950s. In Diff\u00e9rences, he explores the infinite variety of sound possibilities of the five live instruments and juxtaposes them with their \u201cmirror images\u201d recorded on tape and electronic sounds. Sometimes an electronic shadow of the instruments, sometimes foregrounded, the tape is conceived as a fully-fledged sixth chamber music partner.<\/p>\n
Since the concerts had to be cancelled due to the Covid crisis, the EPhB decided to do a combined audio and video production of Davidovsky\u2019s \u201cSynchronisms\u201d.<\/p>\n