The fundamental principle of IRCAM is to encourage productive interaction among scientific research, technological developments, and contemporary music production. Since its establishment in 1977, this initiative has provided the foundation for the institute’s activities. One of the major issues is the importance of contributing to the renewal of musical expression through science and technology. Conversely, ...
IRCAM is an internationally recognized research center dedicated to creating new technologies for music. The institute offers a unique experimental environment where composers strive to enlarge their musical experience through the concepts expressed in new technologies.
In parallel to its fundamental missions of research and creation, IRCAM is committed to sharing its knowledge and know-how, its technologies with the general public. Cutting-edge research and diffusion of innovations, an international reference for education and the democratization of artistic practices are the driving forces behind the institute’s educational activities.
At the center of societal and economic concerns combining culture and information technologies, the current research at IRCAM is seen by the international research community as a reference for interdisciplinary projects on the sciences and technologies for sound and music, constantly exposed to society’s new needs and uses.
The fundamental principle of IRCAM is to encourage productive interaction among scientific research, technological developments, and contemporary music production. Since its establishment in 1977, this initiative has provided the foundation for the institute’s activities. One of the major issues is the importance of contributing to the renewal of musical expression through science and technology. Conversely, ...
IRCAM is an internationally recognized research center dedicated to creating new technologies for music. The institute offers a unique experimental environment where composers strive to enlarge their musical experience through the concepts expressed in new technologies.
In parallel to its fundamental missions of research and creation, IRCAM is committed to sharing its knowledge and know-how, its technologies with the general public. Cutting-edge research and diffusion of innovations, an international reference for education and the democratization of artistic practices are the driving forces behind the institute’s educational activities.
At the center of societal and economic concerns combining culture and information technologies, the current research at IRCAM is seen by the international research community as a reference for interdisciplinary projects on the sciences and technologies for sound and music, constantly exposed to society’s new needs and uses.
This quartet finds its inspiration in a pirate story. Not pirates of the Caribbean, with an eye patch and a parrot on their shoulder. Not airline hijackers either…. although…. Here, it is more "information pirates". In other words, the ancestors of today’s hackers. Their crowning achievement is absolutely unthinkable today, as long as the technologies they played with are obsolete: one night in November 1987, they hijacked a Chicago-area TV channel’s signal, replacing over 90 seconds of the scheduled show with a strange and fantastic transmission that would be perfectly at home in a David Lynch film. This was a double hijacking; in addition to the signal intrusion, they also committed identity theft. And they didn’t steal just any identity, because one of them was disguised as Max Hedroom, an extremely popular computer-generated science fiction TV personality. With total disrespect for the media they had taken over, the hijackers made fun of diverse advertising slogans, media icons, TV series, and songs.
This moment of interrupting the established order could only seduce Mauro Lanza who has already composed several pieces on this subject (recently at IRCAM with Ludus de Morte Regis [2013]). For this quartet, he makes use of an imagination that borrows references from the horror film Videodrome by David Cronenberg—in which particularly morbid video signals can possess a man and deform reality—and cyberpunk science-fiction in homage to Fausto Romitelli.
Technology
What does one do with this type of subject with an "augmented" string quartet? Hijack it, of course! Mask its identity and speech just as the hijackers did with the TVs of millions of Americans. Using a process inspired by techniques for frequency and amplitude modulation, common practices in radio and television, the composer shakes up the quartet’s microcosm, its hierarchy and codes.
Composer (born in 1975) Born in 1975, Mauro Lanza studied piano in Venice and electronic music at IRCAM. Tinted with irony, his compositions have always been the result of a continual, growing effort towards an intimate fusion of classical instruments w...