Programs

Marco Stroppa: "Traiettoria... deviata" for piano and live electronics

“'Traiettoria ... Deviata' (1982) sometimes adds to, and sometimes supplants, natural reverberations with echoing, otherworldly electronic sounds." - Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times

"Mr. Kigawa plays with a fundamental gentleness, even in intense passages, but he brings a precision to the relentless pricks and bristling repetitions in these pieces that’s especially effective when contrasted with the amorphous soundscape of 'Traiettoria ... Deviata.' That work’s concept — an interaction of acoustic and electronic — can seem pat in 2015, but the relationship between the two worlds is vivid enough to still persuade." - Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times

"The final seven-minute work was written by the young Italian composer Marco Stroppa. Unlike, say, Varèse and Nono, for whom electronics were experiments, Mr. Stroppa grew up with musical mathematics as commonplace as computers, and the electronic sounds heard against the piano, came not as novelties, but inevitabilities. Somebody once said that opera arias should be written as if speech was no longer sufficient. In Mr. Stroppa’s work, a piece of unending energy played solo by Mr. Kigawa, became transmogrified into computer sounds because that was inevitable. The same notes, but now twisted entangled, the energy of the piano a montage of sounds which the piano could never imitate, yet came from the piano itself. Always, though, we heard an energy–even though energy itself cannot be seen, heard, felt, touched. Where Debussy’s music eschewed the outer world for the inner mind, where Murail transcended piano music into 'remembrances of tones past,' Mr. Stroppa took us to a realm which never exists except that we need a word ('energy') for an imprecise definition." - Harry Rolnick, Cocerto.Net

"Marco Stroppa, the Verona-born composer of Traiettoria . . . deviata, Kigawa’s final number in his recital. A Fullbright Scholar in the mid-1980s, Stroppa studied computer music and artificial intelligence at MIT’s Media Laboratory, and he replaces the orchestra for Traiettoria . . . deviata with electronic music, which was performed live at Kigawa’s recital by Rafael Valle. This piece gave an otherworldly finish to the recital, with Kigawa’s chords and scales mingling harmoniously with the sounds of what seemed to be a spaceship landing onstage or a soundtrack to a movie about aliens." - Susan Miyagi Hamaker, JapanCulture・NYC