Kaija Saariaho’s Près and Jardin Secret I

Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía (C3A), Córdoba (Spain)
December 19th, 2024 | 20.00

Last December, I participated again at Exploratorio C3A. On this occasion, I performed two electronic music pieces by Kaija Saariaho in a concert together with the Japanese noh singer, Ryoko Aoki, and the cello player Aldo Mata. The program concert, entitled Tradición y actualidad de la música contemporánea. Una visita desde (o hacia) Japón consisted on pieces composed entirely by women, such as Annachiara Gedda, Zuriñe Gerenabarrena, Wang Lu and the above mentioned Kaija Saariaho. You can download here the concert program (right click button):

I designed in the SketchUp program, with the invaluable support of Guillermo Garrido, two different layouts for the diffusion octophonic speaker system of the concert. The first of them tended to recreate the arena of a sort of noh theatre, in which people sat around surrounding the artists at a reasonable height. The last idea, no represented at the totality of the 3D pictures below, was to amplify all the inputs (voice and cello, together with electronics), while hiding the sources under the audience’s grades. It would have implied to implement an important time on equalizing all the non-direct signals, but the idea of illusion made by sound seemed pretty appropriate for such an environment:

Besides that, I designed a second layout. It consisted of a kind of semicircular deployment of the sound sources oriented directly to the audience, which sat on a two-sizes frontal, set square-like structure. This non-surrounding design implied a bit more risk in terms of sound diffusion. In spite of that, it presented several advantages. One of them was the possibility of recreating segmented stereo tracks in a richer, more intriguing way (that was the case of the piece Jardin Secret I). Another one was to organize an expanded front-fill for the live electronic process at the piece for cello and electronics, Près, through which electronics evolves facing the audience in a pretty natural, organic way. And last, but not least, the speaker disposition resembled somehow the Sala de las Musas del Museo del Prado in Madrid, but settled the other way round (convex layout, instead of concave), establishing a hidden dialogue among both artistic spaces: