Vaia's Gift
Electroacoustic composition for ensemble and octophonic diffusion — in development
Vaia's Gift transforms the memory of Storm Vaia (October 2018) into an immersive sonic experience. The title plays on a linguistic ambivalence: "gift" in English, "poison" in German — like the storm itself, destruction and rebirth held in the same word.
The compositional structure derives directly from the storm's anemometric data: wind speed, atmospheric pressure, and direction are translated into musical parameters, generating a form in four sections that traces the arc of the event — from apparent calm to climax, through the silence of devastation, to the first signs of renewal.
The diffusion system is integral to the concept: eight Vaia Cube speakers — made from the wood of trees felled by the storm — arranged in a circle, each with a vibrating transducer attached. Sound moves through space following the wind patterns of that night, and the wood itself becomes a medium of transmission as well as of memory. The audience moves freely within the installation.
Ensemble — Chamber ensemble, electronics, octophonic diffusion system Expected duration — 15'
Walls
For string quartet, vibraphone (2 percussionists), live electronics, and multichannel diffusion — in development
Walls is a sonic exploration of the wall — physical boundary, psychological barrier, the impossibility of dialogue. The source material is the Adagio from Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, celebrated for its dramatic confrontation between piano and orchestra — interpreted by Beethoven himself as Orpheus calming the Furies. The work radically subverts its timbral parameters: the strings play exclusively with sticks of various materials; the vibraphone is bowed with bows by two percussionists.
This inversion generates an expressive short circuit: the strings, instruments of the cantabile tradition, become percussive and builders of sonic walls; the vibraphone, a percussion instrument by nature, desperately tries to sing, but remains irreparably foreign. The Beethovenian dialogue — already conflictual in the original — becomes impossible: two worlds speaking incompatible languages, distorted mirrors of each other.
The work unfolds in five sections: Foundations, Iteration, Stratification, Impasse, Coexistence. The live electronics multiply and distort the acoustic sounds, creating echoes, granulations, and reverberations that seem to come from behind invisible walls. Multichannel spatialisation is dramaturgy: sounds migrate, recede, become lost. The performers, positioned at opposite corners of the rear stage, are frontal but distant — opposed in scenic geography as in timbral substance.
Walls offers no resolution. The finale dissolves into an extreme pianissimo that fades into the electronics: the wall persists even when we can no longer see it.
Ensemble — String quartet, vibraphone (2 percussionists), live electronics, multichannel diffusion system