Duo Dubois
Alberto Cavallaro,
saxophone
Federico Tramontana,
percussion
> Duo Dubois, Sound and Rituality on the IIC Melbourne Vimeo channel: click here
Programme
Pierluigi Billone (1960)
Mani.Gonxha (2012) for 2 Tibetan cups
Maurizio Azzan (1987)
All the extensions of the aura (2019) for soprano saxophone, percussion set and electro-acoustic device
Maria Teresa Treccozzi (1982)
Orazion picciola (2019) for soprano saxophone, drum, objects and electronics
Salvatore Sciarrino (1947)
Thanksgiving song (2018)
Mutation for saxophone by Alberto Napolitano
Pierluigi Billone – Mani Gonxha (2012) A prayer. Mani Gonxha is a ritual experience of intense intimacy for the interpreter, who finds himself naked and exposed when he is in front of an auditorium. It is like visiting a church and finding someone deeply immersed in personal prayer; this moment of great individual significance generates a somewhat embarrassing but attractive situation for the observer.
Through the use of two Tibetan cups – traditional sacred instruments used as a signal for the beginning and the end of moments of silent meditation – Billone brings out a rich variety of contacts, timbres, resonances and harmonics that would not be imagined possible in a single sound source. The cups are an extension of the hands. They become a part of the interpreter, as if the interpreter himself became part of the resonating body.
The smallest contact between the various materials – metal, skin, bone, torso and voice – multiplies and propagates the sound through the acting body and outwards. Gonxha is a reference to the Albanian name of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu. Gonxha in Albanian means “bud”, or “bud grown on a plant that develops into a flower” as well as the elaborate sonic universe that developed from the simple source of two Tibetan cups.
Maurizio Azzan – All the extensions of the aura (2019) Four sound sources indistinguishable from each other come together in a perfect symbiosis in which the corporeality of the performers is canceled out in the iridescence of a slowly evolving sound mass. Sound transforms over time, occupying space in an unstable way.
From time to time, its sudden expansions and contractions make different components emerge almost by mistake, internal voices that at times take over the others to guide their development. Suspended between bodies of leather, wood and vibrating metal, the sound expands, acquiring plasticity and volume. Sound is volume, space that marks time. All the extensions of the aura represent the paradoxical image of an organism that needs to feed on itself in order to feed itself.
Maria Teresa Treccozzi – Orazione Picciola (2019) The subtle and insinuating timbre of the soprano saxophone interacts, in a continuous interchange, with the snare drum to evoke the small Orazion, the speech with which Dante’s Ulysses convinced his companions to the “mad flight “Beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Inferno, canto XXVI) and which gives the title to the piece by Maria Teresa Treccozzi (2019).
Fragmented musical sections blend with textual quotations, entrusted to the voices of the performers and enhanced by the electronics: thus the word “ssiticcàni [you have arrived]” and the famous triplet “no na life of pacifiers and mules emerge. mu followed, but the vertu and the canuscenza suli [made you not to live like brutes / but to follow virtue and knowledge] “, from the translation into Calabrian dialect by Don Giuseppe Blasi (edited by Umberto Di Stilo, Cosenza, Pellegrini, 2001 ), as if to reconnect the Dante hero to the vast Hellenic unity of Magna Graecia.
Salvatore Sciarrino – Thanksgiving song (2018) On the monodic instrument the polyphony was no longer apparent, because at certain points very different emissions were emulsified at the same instant. And since each type of sound has its own reverberation time, the real sound will overlap the tail of the previous one.
Phenomenon further exasperated by the opposite dynamics. Given the happy outcome, I had no choice but to thank the gods. At that time I also felt indebted to Goffredo Petrassi who has shown me affection and respect many times; I thought of dedicating thanks to him. In referring to Beethoven, I was not cured of an illness. Yet with this the creative labor has notable commonality, especially if intransigent with one’s soul. The song is a geometric construction on a few sounds left suspended by spells. Strophic, polyphonic, polyrhythmic, only to the vampires of music can an accompanied melody appear as bloodless.
The Duo Dubois was born from the passion shared by two instrumentalists for contemporary music. Both were born in 1995 and followed, until completing their studies at the “Fausto Torrefranca” Conservatory of Music in Vibo Valentia, the same academic path and then continued, Alberto in France at the CRR in Cergy-Pontoise and the “Verdi” Conservatory in Milan later, and Federico at the Hochschule der Künste in Bern in Switzerland.
In 2020, the Duo was admitted to the Advanced Master in Contemporary Music at the KASK Conservatorium in Ghent (ICTUS Academy), under the guidance of Tom De Cock and Toma Pauwels thanks to a research project aimed at the use of minimal instrumentation for the next two years.
The ensemble has performed for various festivals, such as: CLUSTER of Lucca, “MACRO asilo” – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome for the review curated by Giorgio De Finis, White noise, Festival Musica Nova, Italian Institute of Brussels, Ensemble New Music from Savona, Dialogues on composing, Inco_ntemporanea Festival, Salotto under test and many others.
The Duo is an active promoter of the music written in the last 10 years, with a particular attention to the development of the repertoire for this formation, thanks to the collaboration with the composers of our time.