Ensemble DME presents an exciting concert featuring works by Portuguese and Belgian composers. This concert is part of an artistic residency supported by the EFFEA grant, in collaboration with the LOOP (Brussels, Belgium) and CROMA (Oeiras, Portugal) festivals. The concert highlights a rich cultural exchange and includes a new work by Judith Adler de Oliveira, offering a programme that reflects the innovative spirit of each composer and the unique collaboration fostered by this international residency.
Programme :
Annette Vande Gorne - Faisceaux (1985, rev. 2016) - piano and electronics
Thierry de Mey - Ice (1990) - Violin and cello
Arshia Samsaminia - [Dis]orient[ed]alized (2024)* Violin, cello and electronics
Mariana Vieira - Lissabonleipzig (notes added to a text) - Flute, bass clarinet, violin and electronics
Judith Adler de Oliveira - World premiere
Jaime Reis - Sangue Inverso: Quartzo (IV) + Sangue Inverso: Rosa do Deserto (V) - Flute, clarinet, piano,
violin and cello
Thierry de Mey - Ice (violin, cello):
We haven't heard from him.
Arshia Samsaminia - [Dis]orient[ed]alized (2024) (violin, cello)
The title itself is a play on words, combining "disoriented," "orientalized," and "dis-orientalized," reflecting a sense of being lost or displaced, while also engaging with historical cultural perceptions of the "Orient." This title suggests a confrontation with both internal disorientation and external cultural frameworks, while simultaneously challenging orientalist material—rejecting the exoticization often imposed on art through identity. This concept forms the central idea of the piece.
Technically, the composition consists of two main parts. The first part includes sounds designed to resemble electronic tones, which are combined with sounds heard in the fixed media through the use of various objects. The second part is more atmospheric, where I employed the tuning system proposed by the 10th-century Iranian polymath Al-Farabi in a vertical manner to create different frequency-beating phenomena. This serves as the second primary material for the composition, merging with electronic sine waves from the fixed media. In this piece, the composition gently transitions from percussive, pulse-like electronic sounds to more subtle and smooth vertical microtonal harmonies.
Beams of spectral rays arising from a driving interval (a C-sharp — G diminished fifth). The development of the piece leads the listener’s perception from inharmonic sound to harmonized music. An amplified piano accompanies the electroacoustic part to the point where it becomes a soloist. The piano part, seemingly easy, explores attack modes, the affect trajectories of a single note, vibration modes, and the harmonic sounds made possible depending on the quality of the instrument. The work reverses the common relationship between the instrumentalist and the electroacoustic part: here, the musician must listen to the part to accompany it and enter into a dialogue with the fixed sonic flux.
- Mariana Vieira - Lissabonleipzig (notes added to a text) - 8’ (flute, bass clarinet, violin, electronics)
The work “Lissabonleipzig (notes added to a text)” was inspired by the book of the same title “Lissabonleipzig” by Maria Gabriela Llansol.
It mainly deals with two questions that were directly informed by the book:
One is the relationship to the past. The book features characters from different time periods (such as Bach, Pessoa or Espinosa). I tried to re-interpret this idea by exploring through new lenses some features from J. S. Bach's music.
The other is the idea of “drafting” or “annotating” that is present also in Llansol’s book. In a very summarised sense, we can say that the book is divided in two parts. The first is a reflection about the writing process itself, and the second is the narrative. I was as well, during the first stages of composing, creating annotations on specific ideas that the book had evoked in me – namely, the ideas of “home”, “journey” and “absence” – that finally came to be the sections of this piece.
Work commissioned by the Gewandhaus Leipzig.
- Judith Adler de Oliveira - A Walk Through Mnemonic Spaces
for flute, clarinette, piano, violin and cello - 10’
- Jaime's, Quartzo:
Sangue Inverso - Inverso Sangue is a piece of large duration divided in parts. The names
for each part are inspired in mineral elements. All structural elements, from micro to macro, are
based in ideas of symmetry.
Sangue Inverso - Inverso Sangue is a piece of large duration divided in parts. The names
for each part are inspired in mineral elements. All structural elements, from micro to macro, are
based in ideas of symmetry.
