Shaping Time: Composing as a Bodily Experience of Sound

Abstract

The time spent at Harvard allowed me to work on findings new ways to translate my inner sound imagination into audible sounds. The results of such experience are represented by my portfolio: eight compositions, selected from the works written during the past seven years. They show the effort to build new musical trajectories, a more complex polyphony of sonic elements and musical structures. In different ways, they exemplify my musical research path during these years: from the necessity to build strongly directional multi-layered musical forms, to the possibility of shaping micro-temporal structures derived from the vibrations of the sound. The resonance of the sounds, their connections and projections towards the musical material, have been always central to my vocal, instrumental and electronic compositions. Sound as a bodily experience is deeply connected both to my musical world as a composer and to my initial training as a soprano. The singer perceives sound as internal vibration: the body is the instrument that resonates into the hidden facial cavities; the effortless mastery of sound becomes then the ability to project the internal vibration towards the external space. Then, shaping the vibrations in time - as timber and as rhythmical structures - crafting its directionality and its kinetic energy, represent the backbones of my compositional research. In the same way, my interest in the electroacoustic music is strongly embedded into my sound imagination. My work with the electronic media enables the access to the internal structure of the sound, and then its projection in the space. Composing multiple sonic spaces in a concert hall, a polyphonies of timbres, which merges into the acoustic instruments, the articulation in time of the internal sound's vibration, are the kernels of my work with the electronic. These elements guided my personal musical research during my years at Harvard, and they will certainly converge into my future work.