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Works - previous projects

a shrill thing that makes a bleep (2022)

flute, violin

c. 6-7 minutes

for Ensemble Suono Giallo

Andrea Biagini, flute; Chiara Franceschini, violin

My recent acquisition of a fidget spinner to help my anxiety has recently gotten me obsessed with such purposefully ‘useless’ commodity items. With all of their elaborate buttons, knobs, and mechanisms, they’re saturated in gimmicks of tactility; seemingly oozing a desire to be touched. In Our Aesthetic Categories, literary theorist Sianne Ngai finds that the somewhat sadomasochistic enfetishment of the commodity item is what grants such items status as ‘cute’; their seeming infantility and helplessness causes us to impart upon them an inanimate want for mothering, one which we fulfill in the act of touch. In this piece, “a shrill thing that makes a bleep” - one of a series of pieces exploring this concept matter including update status, always and a thing that splutters - I explore a sound world not dissimilar to many of the sounds that such infantile commodity items make. Saturated in pops, squeaks, glitches, and hints of broken melody, this piece annoyingly circulates around gimmicky micro-variations of the same material as its metaphorical ‘buttons,’ ‘squeakers,’ and ‘mechanisms’ are activated. Like a dog’s chew-toy being obsessively pulverized, the piece gradually runs out of energy through its duration until the initially lighthearted, delightful sounds full of life and rhythm at the beginning become only a fading specter of themselves by the end. 

Score pdf

Most of my scores are available for perusal in full. If you would like parts and/or printed copies, please get in touch via my contacts page!

Live performance: Ensemble Suono Giallo @ ilSUONO Contemporary Music Week, Sansepolcro, ITA - 07/24/2022

Performance History:

07/24/2022 - ensemble Suono Giallo @ ilSUONO Contemporary Music Week - Sansepolcro, ITA

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