TEADROPS
10-hour music installation
Sep 1, 2012 – Mariendom Linz, Austria
Another bright light in the 2012 Klangwolke cosmos is “teardrops,” a sound installation and concert for piano, noise gates, sonic feeds and church organ by Rupert Huber. He creates a causal relationship between the piano, its electronic extension and the church organ. Imitation and counter-movement are two parameters to which the two scales upon which the tonal space is based correspond.
A piano and devices connected to it to produce audio effects, the cathedral’s organ as well asits architecture and acoustics go into the making of Rubert Huber’s teardrops. The tones produced by a piano—both in their original, acoustic form and as electronically modified—will resound like audible tears amidst the monumental silence of the cathedral and, reflected by the walls and ceiling, echo throughout its interior and concert. Rupert Huber l plays a concert grand piano set up at the end of the nave directly in front of the altar, whereby the piano’s striking force triggers—by means of a specially developed technique (including noise gates, an audio effect in which sound below a preset volume level is suppressed)—filtered electronic real-time re-contextualizations of the piano’s sounds. An essential parameter in the piece is the actual distance that the sound waves travel within the church. In the second half of teardrops, the cathedral’s architecture and its physical dimensions will be explored in greater depth by integrating its organ (played by organist Tobias Chizzali), whereby piano and organ become intertwined, withdraw from this interwoven relationship, and finally settle into a complementary symbiosis.
“Dimensional music” is what Rupert Huber calls the musical format he has developed over the years, in which he takes (most often electronic) music and the sound it produces in a particular physical space and uses this as the acoustic basis for subsequent compositions. Showcases of Rupert Huber’s dimensional music have included the Wiener Festwochen (private exile, 2004), the Centre Pompidou (sonic process, 2002) and Ars Electronica (radiotopia, 2002).
