Lucia Dlugoszewski

Here and Now with Watchers

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Transcribing Here and Now With Watchers by Lucia Dlugoszewski

Again at work on one of Lucia Dlugoszewski’s seminal pieces for timbre-piano, Here and Now with Watchers.
An evening-length piece written for the dance of Erick Hawkins and his new-born dance company, it was the result of a joined creative effort lasting years. The complexity and beauty of the piece, premiered in 1957, also represent many strong aesthetic and philosophical principles that Dlugoszewski and Hawkins developed in the following years, in each own field of art.
Dlugoszewski also took the occasion to formalize some important statements about music and the nature of timbre-piano.
The composition was created in close conjunction with dance, but ready to be standing alone (she performed it as a concert piece with the title “Archaic Timbre Piano Music”).
I concentrated my efforts on three sections of the piece. As usual, there is not a proper score: Dlugoszewski wrote for her own performances, and her notation – when existing – is not at all exhaustive for a performer.
This time I had the help of a precious folder kept at Library of Congress, Washington DC, with many notated pages clearly referable to one of the sections of “Here and Now”, tough in mixed order and probably coming from different times in composition and revision. There are even a handful of pages in nice copy, providing precious notational elements.
Still, this useful but scattered material is not enough. For my transcription I used as a main source one video of the 60ies with Hawkins performing the dance and Dlugoszewski the music, cross-checking sound and movement with the dance score. As I learned in “Cantilever” music, counting is mandatory in case of Dlugoszewski/Hawkins compositions! Constant discussion with Katherine Duke, director of the Hawkins Dance Company, followed the progression of the work.
Comparing these different materials had been very interesting to gather further information on the process of creation and eventually notation of the music; I have the feeling of an improved knowledge of Dlugoszewski’s musical world. I guess, as with the other pieces, that the destiny of this transcription will be to be revised several times, at least one for each future performance.
But for now the next task is to make the music of “Here and Now” alive again, ready in some weeks!
Tag on Lucia Dlugoszewski

Working on Here and Now With Watchers by L.Dlugoszewski



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Dlugoszewski in Berlin – MaerzMusik24 part 3

Research and people

Previous parts:
Dlugoszewski in Berlin – MaerzMusik24 part I, Behind (or before) the scenes
Dlugoszewski in Berlin – MaerzMusik24 part 2, Performance: music and dance


MaerzMusik collaborative project “Contemplations into the Radical Others”, dedicated to composer Lucia Dlugoszewski, was not only a precious occasion to listen to and perform her music. It gave us the opportunity to share the extensive research done so far, and gather together with people equally motivated.
The Library spaces hosted several theoretical interventions in the form of talks, gently led by musicologist Monika Zyla and warmly open to the public.
After the official presentation of the project, as an introduction to ensemble Musik Fabrik’s concert at Radyal System on the 20th, I’ve been included in the conversation “Ensemble Perspectives on Performing Dlugoszewski’s Music” with hornist Christine Chapman and conductor Lilianna Krych on the 21st March at Berliner Festspiele.

Radialsystem, 20th March, Kamila Metwaly, artistic director of MaerzMusik, speaking to the audience.
© Berliner Festspiele, Foto:Camille Blake

It was interesting to know other paths from the music to the score to the music, a challenge that each of us approached in an individual way.

Ensemble Perspectives on Performing Dlugoszewski’s Music, MaerzMusik Library, Berliner Festspiele, 21st March
© Berliner Festspiele, Foto: Fabian Schellhorn


Saturday 23rd was the day of the performative lecture “Problem as Possibility: Dialoguing with Dlugoszewski’s Scores” with musicologist Kate Doyle, PhD.

From MaerzMusik Library booklet.


Kate is a very sharp and creative mind with whom I had the pleasure to collaborate from the very beginning in my research on Dlugoszewski. Our time spent in conversation and reflection was and still is a constant opportunity to deepen my knowledge, on the composer’s ouvre and in general. For MaerzMusik Symposium we decided to use our article published in Contemporary Music Review as a starting point for a further dialogue where we could collect the new elements emerged so far.
The form of dialogue characterizes our exchange and is particularly fitted to an approach to Dlugoszewski’s work. We did this “in performance”, orchestrating a form with structure and openness, as the composer’s piano works often do. While preparing our intervention, we notated our ideas in a visual form, and Dlugoszewski’s visual maps and notes often came to our mind. Here you can see an extract, published in MaerzMusik Zine as a presentation:

Doyle-Toniutti lecture presentation for MaerzMusik Zine

Once more, our research on Dlugoszewski, instead of giving us certainty of answers, brought us directly into the experience of processes. Which is much more fun.

Problem as Possibility: Dialoguing with Dlugoszewski’s Scores” with musicologist Kate Doyle, MaerzMusik Library, Berliner Festspiele, 23rd March
© Berliner Festspiele, Foto:Camille Blake

Here are some nice pictures taken under the impressive graphic reproducing Lucia Dlugoszewski’s dynamic scale map (take a look at this). You can see curator and researcher Dustin Hurt, Hawkins archive curator and long standing company member Louis Kavouras and musicologist Kate Doyle. Thanks for the pics to Ly Thien Co Friedrich, our guardian angel of production.

Previous:
Dlugoszewski in Berlin – MaerzMusik24 part I, Behind (or before) the scenes
Dlugoszewski in Berlin – MaerzMusik24 part 2, Performance: music and dance



Berlin Maerzmusik mm24_programm_contemplations_into_the_radical_others

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Dlugoszewski in Berlin – MaerzMusik24 part 2

Performance: Music and dance

Previous part: Dlugoszewski in Berlin – MaerzMusik24 part I, Behind (or before) the scenes
Next: Dlugoszewski inBerlin – MaerzMusik24 – part III, Research and people

Dancer and choreographer Erick Hawkins and composer Lucia Dlugoszewski met in 1952, soon after the foundation of Hawkins own dance company. Hawkins danced before – first male dancer – in the company of Martha Graham.
Hawkins explains in his writings the importance of music – live music – in au pair connection with dance and its “free-flow” movement. I already read all this and was excited to experience it with my hands and eyes working with dancer and choreographer Katherine Duke, former assistant of Lucia Dlugoszewski and actual director of the Hawkins Dance Company in New York. In fact Dlugoszewski, composer in residence of the Dance Company, took over the direction and even choreographic duties after Hawkins’s death in 1994. But, as long-standing Hawkins company dancer and Hawkins archive curator Louis Kavouras pointed out during our stay in Berlin, she was choreographing all the time even before. This was an interesting statement especially in relation with all the materials I saw at the Library of Congress. Maybe Dlugoszewki’s mind set was “in tune” with movement as much as with sound…

During rehearsals. This is one of the statements quoted by Dlugoszewski’s writings, a nice “cadeau” by MaerzMusik Festival.


This hypothesis became stronger while rehearsing with the (amazing) dancers selected for the project, Juan Corres, Laia Vancells Pi, Marco Rizzi, Kristina Berger.
Kristina was also performing the solo dance “Fountain in the Middle of the Room” with the music of the first two movement of Exacerbated Subtlety Concert for timbre-piano by Dlugoszewski. Here is what Katherine Duke writes about it:

“A Fountain in the Middle of the Room” was for me an intense journey with Lucia who is both the choreographer and the composer of the piece. She had wanted to premiere the solo in 1999 along with her beautiful new dance “Radical Ardent”, a huge work with eleven dancers organised in duets. […] She resumed working on “Fountain” to premiere it in April of 2000 with her epic work “Motherwell Amor”. Unfortunately, we lost Lucia on opening night; she had passed away in her apartment still working on the upcoming performance. The company and musicians performed “Motherwell Amor” that evening; “A Fountain in the Middle of the Room” was not performed as she was the sole musician. Lucia and I had a performance date set for the following month to perform the solo. Needless to say, I was devastated, thrown into wrenching times but forced myself to work on arranging the solo which I premiered on 26 May 2000 in silence and dedicated it to her. As opportunities to perform the solo continued to arise, I searched Lucia’s music to find something that felt connected. Finally, two of the four parts of her “Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why does a Woman Love a Man?)” seemed a match. […] For this dance, Lucia and I discussed a revolution of subtlety, the high risk of elegance and a torn non-linear wild elegance of space throughout the delicacy of construction. Lucia daringly embodied that delicate mystical ‘something’ of seeing and hearing for the first time which the haiku poets practice without respite.”

Rehearsing Fountain in the Middle of the Room, Kristina Berger dancer, choreography and music by Lucia Dlugoszewski, Exacerbated Subtlety Concert I and II. Pics by Louis Kavouras

Cantilever (1963) has a different energy, sunny, joyful and sparkling. Dlugoszewski sets the music so that she could keep constant eye-contact with the dancers, and literally follow them “step by step”. Louis Kavouras confirmed this, also telling us that she often corrected dancers in the studio, as she knew the choreography better than them! The rehearsals confirmed my first impression transcribing the piece (see Part I): there is an intimate connection between sound and movement, big or minimal, and a love for small precious details that Dlugoszewski and Hawkins clearly shared. It’s not something flashy, dramatic or showy; the adjectives that come to my mind now that I try to describe it are “simple, beautiful, elegant, subtle”… some of the favourite words used by Dlugoszewski. Looking at the dancers literally embodying these concepts, under the guide of Katherine, left me a huge impression.

…revolution is in perception rather than conception…

As for the rest of the program, including four piano solo pieces, that’s what I wrote in the booklet:

“[…] Henry Cowell and Alan Hovhaness both received commissions by Erick Hawkins Dance Company, although not for piano solo works. They were both connected to an important figure in Dlugoszewski’s formative early years in New York – though quite cumbersome in the later years: John Cage. Cowell pioneered the exploration of new sound production both on the keyboard and on the inside of the piano, and transmitted his explorative attitude to Cage, one of his students. I can’t think about prepared piano, or even timbre piano, without considering the mysterious sounds and never-before-seen gestures of Cowell’s “The Banshee” (1925). And the outrageous (for the time) clusters of “The Tides of Manaunaun” (1912) opened the field to among other things some of Dlugoszewski’s favourite techniques in “Cantilever”.
“Spring Music with Wind” (1973) by Eleanor Hovda is a solo piano piece for extended techniques. Subtle and delicate, connected strongly with breath, gesture and voice, it goes in search of new sounds with lightness. Quoting conductor Jeannine Wagar, “The title, ‘Spring Music with Wind’, suggests the flow of energy and its non-quantifiable shape”, a concept that Hovda often underlines and closely links to the timbre of sound. In this piece she prescribes the use of friction mallets and a curved glass bottle.”
Alan Hovhaness’s “Shalimar op. 177” (1950, rev. 1951) belongs to his “Armenian period”. As the son of an Armenian immigrant, he became increas- ingly attracted to Armenian and Eastern music after an academic training. In his own words, “Shalimar” was composed in Kashmir “after visiting the Mogul gardens and many beautiful mountains in the Himalayan regions. The foun- tains no longer gush forth their music and beauty in the Shalimar gardens, but the memory of their sound and visual wonder among the great Chenar trees, with steep, rugged mountains rising in the background, was in my imagination and I summed up the lost scenes during the days of Mogul grandeur. The form of the Suite, with its interludes for borders, suggests that carpet-like design of Mogul gardens.”

Concert programme, 24th March 2024


Below some pics of the show on Sunday 24th March (full house at the BerlinerFestspiele Side Stage!) © Berliner Festspiele, Foto: Camille Blake.
You can download here the very interesting booklet dedicated to the composer by MaerzMusik.

  • Friends in the audience
  • Looking at Kristina
  • Here she is
  • Cowell
  • Hovda
  • Hovhaness
  • Cantilever: Marco, Juan, Laia
  • Cantilever: Marco and Juan
  • Cantilever: Kristina, Juan, Laia
  • All of us with Katherine Duke

Previous: Dlugoszewski in Berlin – MaerzMusik24 part I, Behind (or before) the scenes
Next: Dlugoszewski in Berlin – MaerzMusik24 – part III, Research and people



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Dlugoszewski in Berlin – MaerzMusik24 part 1

Behind (or before) the scenes

This year’s MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin involved me both as a performer and as a researcher. I came home full of impressions, new knowledge and human encounters, a wealth of inputs that I am slowly metabolizing.

This was the second year of a collaborative project, “Contemplations into the Radical Others”, dedicated to composer Lucia Dlugoszewski and strongly desired by Maerz Musik artistic director Kamila Metwaly.
While the previous year I had the chance to present my previous work in performance – my research on Dlugoszewski begins in 2017 – this year I had the opportunity to go further.

In October 23 my research trip in Washington DC, USA, at the Library of Congress, had been illuminating in several aspects.
The Dlugoszewski/Hawkins archive is huge and I gave priority to searching for materials related to two pieces, Exacerbated Subtlety Concert and Cantilever.
At the time of my recording (Subtle Matters, Neuma Records, 2021) I spent a long time in transcribing Exacerbated Subtlety Concert from a recording by Dlugoszewski. No score was available, infact. This was my first encounter with the timbre-piano Dlugoszewski invented in the Fifties. Since then, and the last time after checking the Library of Congress documentation, I reworked the transcription 4 times, trying to get closer to the original idea and way of performance.
This unusual path to discover the piece and the instrument, first through the sound, then through notation, has been an incomparable way to access the composer’s creative process. And fruitful, also: besides the performances and recording, it started a wonderful collaboration with scholar Kate Doyle, PhD, a musicologist who’s also a creator in her own field. I will speak about this in the second part.

Old style transcription of Cantilever: pencils work pretty well…

Cantilever (1963) is a piano solo piece expanded in an ensemble version in 1968. It was written for a choreography by Erick Hawkins, and performed many times both in the piano solo version or in ensemble. I expected to find plenty of material at the Library of Congress. The fact is that Dlugoszewski, when it is the case of timbre-piano or piano parts, didn’t spend time in writing a regular score. She was the performer, and the music was stored in her head and hands.
So I transcribed the piece listening to three different recordings, two of them from early on and one of a performance from 1999. This, too, was an interesting work that put on the table a lot of questions and made me clearer about her compositional process and the very practical issues related in connecting with dance.

The coreographer and dancer Erick Hawkins was a strong advocate of live music on stage; while collaborating closely with Dlugoszewski, he also commissioned from early on a number of works to other composers. Among them, Cowell and Hovhaness.
I chose some solo piano pieces by Henry Cowell and Alan Hovhaness that seemed to me related to Dlugoszeski’s ones, to movement and dance.
Eleanor Hovda‘s solo piano piece was a beautiful discover, very connected with the rest of the programme. Using extended techniques, she creates her unique world of lightness and amazement, with sounds produced by friction mallets, breath, voice sound, and a bottle. Researching about her, I found out that Hovda and Dlugoszewski met and write eachother regularly. The younger Hovda writes in a letter to Lucia “how often I give thank to you for your influence on my life and art.”

So, the music program seemed ready. Now it should meet with movement. Because, yes, this was an other exciting opportunity to explore at MaerzMusik: the connection between Dlugoszewski’s music to the other art always present in her life, dance.

Next:
Dlugoszewski in Berlin – MaerzMusik24 part II, Performance: Music and Dance 
Dlugoszewski inBerlin – MaerzMusik24 – part III, Research and people


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Washington D.C., in search of Lucia Dlugoszewski

Looking forward an intense week of research just starting today at Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (USA).
After many years I will finally be able to see and read some of Lucia Dlugoszewski‘s scores. This in-depht study will be very important for further develop my knowledge of the composer’s aesthetic and repertoire, and will also lead to the next performance for 2024 MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin.
Grateful for this fantastic opportunity!


Below some pics of the week’s highlights

  • Finally trying Dlugoszewski’s original timbre-piano objects!!
  • with Dr Libby Smigel, the Dance curator at Library of Congress, Music Division
  • Very first three boxes of Dlugoszewski’s papers… how excited!
  • Monumental, green, sunny Washington DC


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June reviews from Germany

A couple of very nice reviews came from Germany this month: one on Glissando magazine about MaerzMusik performance in Berlin in March, the other published on the historical Schott music magazine Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik (founded by Robert Schumann, it dates 1834).


Monika Zykla wrote an extensive review about all the events of MaerzMusik festival 2023 for magazine Glissando. That’s how she refers to Subtle Matters recital: “In the first part of the three-hour-long evening program titled Subtle Matters the Italian pianist and researcher, Agnese Toniutti, delivered a stunning solo piano recital that explored the sonic possibilities of the instrument „beyond its body” as described in the program. One of the highlights was Toniutti’s enthralling performance of Lucia Dlugoszewski’s four-part solo “timbre piano”4 composition, Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does a Woman Love a Man?) (1997/2000). This piece was juxtaposed with Tan Dun’s C-A-G-E, fingering for piano (1994), an homage to John Cage, and a selection of compositions for real and toy piano by the American composer Philip Corner. As in her solo album released in 2021 under the same title, Toniutti showed exceptional sensitivity and insight in her selection of the pieces. As a result, a fascinating dialogue emerged between Dlugoszewski and Dun’s compositions that further contextualized and situated Dlugoszewski’s music and aesthetics as part of the New York scene. It subtly referenced Dlugoszewski’s ambiguous and changing attitude towards John Cage as its most prominent and central figure which I read as a hint towards the question of why Cage’s silences were louder than the silences of others. Toniutti undertook an extensive body of research so that subtleties like this could surface and be signaled through music. Not to mention the amount of work she put into performing Dlugoszewski’s piece in the first place, despite the score being unavailable, as Toniutti explained in the program note.”
You can read the complete article here.

Jakob Böttcher reviewed Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano by John Cage, released this spring on Neuma Records, on Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik issue 2/2023.
Here is the English translation, and below the screenshot of the original review in German.
“Screws and erasers – in view of the unbelievably rich sound palette that unfolds, it is hard to believe that these are the only objects that John Cage opposes to the sublime piano as preparation objects. Even Cage himself noted that the sound result of the preparations can vary greatly depending on the instrument. With her version of the opus magnum for prepared piano, composed in 1946-48, the Italian pianist Agnese Toniutti has succeeded in creating an incredibly high-resolution and subtle recording, both in terms of interpretation and sound. Cage certainly did not call the one-movement miniatures, most of which are barely three minutes long, Sonatas and Interludes without a hint of irony. The symmetrically nested 16 sonatas and four interludes follow in their arrangement and form a stringency that continues in the musical text in the form of idiosyncratically angular rhythms and patterns. Toniutti understands how to implement the often mechanical character of the pieces with emphasis (she herself writes in the booklet that she understands it as her role to implement especially the tone durations as precisely as possible) and yet to recognize and emphasize the humanity, even a cantabile gesture, that they contain. Her fine pianistic agogic delivers an authentic and at the same time organical result. A similar dualism is found on the tonal level. The musical text and the preparation go hand in hand.
The preparation evokes the machine-like character, in which the piano mutates into a real sound apparatus through the screws and erasers. On many recordings, the piano is almost unrecognizable behind these drum-like, often wooden sounds. Agnese Toniutti’s preparation takes a different approach and refreshingly does not hide the sound generator; with many notes the piano tones are clearly recognizable. Paradoxical – and ingenious – is the fact that the preparation sounds are not drowned out by this, but can even be experienced all the more intensely. Thus, Toniutti’s piano is uniquely balanced in reproducing the preparations in an exceptionally wide range of colors (the screws are obviously carefully selected and placed) and at the same time combining them with the familiar tones of the concert grand. The keys are always softly struck, even in the most machine-like conditions, despite the considerable dynamic reduction due to the preparation, which – as Toniutti notes in the booklet – often tempts one to play with more weight. The soft attack underpins the tonal fusion of piano tone and preparation sound. The high sound quality of the recording (sound: Marco Melchior) contributes decisively to the tonal brilliance, which portrays the grand piano very directly and yet warmly and spatially. Agnese Toniutti has succeeded in making an excellent recording of the Sonatas and Interludes, in which she coherently and nuancedly balances machine-like and human agogic as well as preparation and piano sound. The sound result is unique.

  • Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik 2/2023


Contemporary Music Review

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Contemporary Music Review and Der Freitag – Dlugoszewski’s timbre-piano

More about Lucia Dlugoszewski’s timbre-piano: it just has been published an article written in collaboration with Kate Doyle, PhD, for Contemporary Music Review Special Issue: Engaging Analysis and Performance. Kate is assistant Professor of Music in the Department of Arts, Culture & Media at Rutgers University—Newark, and I had the pleasure of collaborating with her for several years now about the work of Dlugoszewski. This is our more recent production after partecipating to Toronto Symposium and to the American Musicological Society Annual Meeting. The title of the paper is Problem as Possibility: A Dialogue about Performance and Analysis with Lucia Dlugoszewski’s Experimental Notation as Case Study (https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2023.2193090).
Here is the abstract:

The musical score can be a site for dynamic exchange between performance and analysis, a place for conversation about material and meaning. As is typical in conversation, conundrums or disagreements generate new ideas and new forms; problems become possibilities. Such is the case in navigating the scores of Lucia Dlugoszewski, who sought radical ways to produce and notate sound forms from around 1950 until her death in 2000. This article is not intended to serve as a survey of Dlugoszewski’s work but to document an exploration of the role that dialogue plays when performing and analysing musical repertoires. Its two authors will perform an excerpt of an ongoing dialogue about the challenges of navigating Dlugoszewski’s innovative scores. A circularity emerges as every potential solution is performed, evaluated, and questioned anew; through this cycle, analysis and performance become a unified, continual process. A thesis emerges from the dialogue: Dlugoszewski’s scores are a documentation of logic that is not present as much as one that is, a kind of notation in reverse, an ideal realised through performance at the edge of practical execution.

Der Freitag and Die junge Welt also wrote about March Subtle Matters recital in Berlin at MaerzMusik Festival (music by Dlugoszewski, Corner, Dun). Quoting Der Freitag in the words of Michael Jäger, …the program announced “sound worlds full of unexpected textures and resonances,” and it was not an over-promise… In the compositions of Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925-2000), Tan Dun (*1957) and Philip Corner (*1933), playing not only on the keys but even more so on the strings under an open piano has always been the main move. We have heard it before, but in the compositions presented here (Tan Dun’s bears the name C-A-G-E, fingering for piano [1994], which refers not only to a sequence of notes, but also to that great initiator, and thus implicitly puts Cage on the same plane as B-A-C-H), the strings are often used like a zither, and sound almost like a zither, sometimes melodious, sometimes “sublimely” chaotic, both then occasionally doubled by the keys – a piano, so to speak, in dialogue with itself. As if communicating with [the] unconscious…


Maerz Musik 24.3.23

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Subtle Matters in Berlin – MaerzMusik Festival

Very excited to take part to MaerzMusik Festival – Berliner Festspiele in Berlin!
On March, 24th I will play “Subtle Matters”, with music by Lucia Dlugoszewski, Philip Corner and Tan Dun, following my 2021 release by Neuma Records and adding a premiere of Philip Corner.
The recital is part of “Contemplations into the Radical Others”, a long-term project by Maerz Musik focussing on composer Lucia Dlugoszewski in cooperation with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, Ensemble Musikfabrik and many others.
Here you can find the program of the evening, featuring me and Ensemble Musikfabrik, here you have the whole program of the festival, and here there’s an interesting review about Dlugoszewski‘s life and work.

 


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Dlugoszewski in Toronto

Another step forward in researching the work of composer Lucia Dlugoszewski.
This time a four-handed reflection, along with Dr Kate Doyle, on how our collaboration – and collaboration in general between theorists and performers – could lead to a step forward both on stage and in the field of musicology.
We will share our insights by speaking at the Dialogues: Analysis and Performance symposium, held October 7–9, 2021, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music.
Here is our abstract:

Problem as Possibility: Experimental Notation as Nexus of Concept and Praxis, Theorist and Performer

Kate Doyle (Rutgers University-Newark) and Agnese Toniutti (independent)

What happens when a score becomes a site for dynamic exchange between theorists and performers – where conundrums generate new ideas and forms? We have worked at such a place in dealing with the experimental scores of Lucia Dlugoszewski, who sought innovative ways to notate sound forms from 1950 until her death in 2000. As we sorted through Dlugoszewski’s graphic scores (held at the Library of Congress and the Archives of American Art), it became clear that they hold numerous challenges for performance – pitch arrangements do not match the composer’s descriptions, inconsistencies in graphic signs are frequent, instructions press the performer beyond the limits of even extended techniques. Through our dialogue about these problems, we developed an analysis that considers Dlugoszewski’s notation an attempt to capture what the composer simultaneously regarded as not able to be captured – the nuances of sonority. We began to understand the score(s) as a documentation of logic that is not present as much as a logic that is, as a kind of notation in reverse, as an ideal existing beyond the domain of practical execution. We each produced new forms in response to this analysis that reflect our primary work, but our dialogue continues as an integral aspect of both respective and mutual projects. We propose to perform a concise version of this dialogue as means to openly explore the possibilities of exchange between theorist and performer in the negotiation of concept and praxis in experimental notation.


front 138-itunes-booklet

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“Subtle Matters”- new release by Neuma Records

Last update December 2021
Spring is blooming and brings a brand new recording! “Subtle Matters” will be released by American label Neuma Records on April, 16th.
It features compositions by Lucia Dlugoszewski, Philip Corner and Tan Dun.
Dlugoszewski, pioneer in experimental musical scene, is the inventor of “timbre piano” and Corner, internationally known as a composer, musician and artist, is co-founder of Fluxus movement. Almost all the pieces are played with extended techniques in the inside of the instrument.  
The album will be welcomed on Monday, 29th March by Alley Stoughton’s show “Not Brahms and Liszt” for Cambridge MIT WMBR Radio. You can also listen to the very first track here on Bandcamp.
To know part of the (adventurous) story behind the recording you can read the booklet here (Italian version in pdf here.)
To purchase the album: physical copy on Bandcamp or digital download here (from April, 16th).

REVIEWS:
Top Five of Manifesto Year 2021
Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classics – April 2021

“[…] Ms. Toniutti impresses with the practiced ease with which she moves from sound event to sound event. Agnese Toniutti takes to these works with enthusiasm, imagination and eventful awareness. As one re-listens a few times the structural and sensual elements of each work becomes more pronounced and readily understandable, until in the end you see that no piece is arbitrary but rather poetically sensible and comprehensible in the pianist’s vision of each segment. The music vacillates between high abstraction, cavernous atmospherics and post-ethnic primality. In so doing the album sums up the spectrum and state-of-the-art for the continuingly fertile extended technique pianisms operative today. I warmly recommend it.”
Grego Applegate Edwards, Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review, August 23rd, 2021

“[…] Agnese Toniutti is not only a deserving Italian artist but, as far as her subject matter is concerned, she is at the top of the world scene. […] If only for the inclusion of this suite [by Dlugoszewski, ed.] the value of “Subtle Matters” seems to be immeasurable. […] In conclusion, “Subtle Matters” is an important disc, for the material it contains, for the excellent performance, for the excellent sound and for the more than accurate packaging.”
Mario Biserni, Sands-zine, August 21st, 2021

“Tinkly, booming, comedic, and thought provoking. ”
Cousin Mary, KFJC, July 30th, 2021

“If the extended technique is the “canon” of the 21st century, the pianist Agnese Toniutti deserves a place of honor among the performers who have emerged in this twenty years of amazing creative fervor: figures like hers nourish and even inspire the repertoire of the new avant-gardes dedicated to the instrument of the romantic ideal par excellence […].[…] an all-out action on the metal surface of the taut strings, a landscape of vivid tonal and non-tonal polychromy, a playing field and set of profound dramatic tension that Toniutti masters with extraordinary control, offering us […] one of the most meaningful essays of inside piano never heard.”
Michele Palozzo, Percorsi Musicali, June 20th, 2021

“[…] Spooky and entertaining by turn, one’s left curious to see exactly how the work [Dlugoszewski’s Exacerbated Subtlety Concert, ed] is notated, and Toniutti’s intensity and concentration keep us listening. Tan Dun’s C-A-G-E is subtitled a “fingering for piano”, passages where the piano’s strings are strummed hinting at pentatonic folk music. Repeated listenings highlight the work’s ingenuity and beauty, and there’s naturally a focus on the four notes which spell the name of John Cage, a friend and mentor to Tan. Philip Corner’s Toy Piano is ear-tickling, and his A really lovely piece made for & by Agnese showcases her ability to make  the unlikeliest musical material sing.“
Graham Rickson, The Art Desk, May 22nd, 2021

Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classics – April 2021 “This riveting recital by the Italian pianist Agnese Toniutti brings together the work of three disparate composers, all of which involve exploring the inside of the keyboard. In her liner note essay she writes, “Walking into a new score is like opening a door, having in hand a magic access-key to someone else’s inner universe—their music, first of all, but also a world of feelings, thoughts, decisions and reactions, an individual view of life. That notion is crucial to the opening work, the four-movement “Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does a Woman Love a Man?)” by the Polish-American Lucia Dlugoszewski, who wrote and recorded the piece using the “timbre piano,” one of many instruments she designed before her death in 2000. Toniutti had to learn the piece through that recording and research various ways to get at the sound, since apart from knowing some of the devices she used (including thimbles, hairpins, jars), there was no specific instruction about the instrument. She transcribed the recording and found her own way forward to create something clearly related to the original, but also her own, rife with alien, evocative textures, resonances, and sonic fractures. She also leaves her own impression on works by Tan Dun and Philip Corner.”
 Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily, April 29th, 2021

“In a unique CD, the researcher Agnese Toniutti collects the experiments of the last century of musical history – […] “Subtle Matters” is a rare and courageous example of artistic documentation of poetics by authors who have made and are making the history of piano music -and not – of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. […] Between sound echoes of Noh theater and Kabuki (Dlugoszewski), arpeggiated and dreamlike piano delicacies (Tan Dun), fragments of wandering and bewitching sounds (Corner), this work is a “unicum” projected into the future“.
Marco Maria Tosolini, Il Gazzettino, April 25th, 2021

“Agnese Toniutti, sonic subversion loves lightness –
In her heretical itinerary she meets today Dlugoszewski, Tan Dun and Corner – Far from academisms “Subtle Matters”, the new album by the pianist from Friuli”
“…if in this album the four of his works [of Corner, ed] stand out for their acumen and a degree of singularity which is rarely remembered the same, it is certainly due to Toniutti’s acumen and singularity. […] In one of Corner’s pieces, Man In Field (the sound as “Hero”) […] the word masterpiece can be written without hesitation. […] Toniutti magical.”
Mario Gamba, Il Manifesto, April 21st, 2021
 

Subtle Matters – Intervista ad Agnese Toniutti (ITA)
musicaelettronica.it, blog by Tempo Reale, Firenze

Marco Baldini e Luisa Santacesaria, April 19th, 2021

“[…] a poetic landscape where the key acrobatics are nothing short of stunning.
A very exciting album that nearly redefines how one interprets the piano, Toniutti’s dedication to her art is only proving to be more gripping with each subsequent project, and it be will be interesting to see what happens next.“
Take effect Reviews, April 18th, 2021
 

“The young pianist, an excellent performer, is here dealing with a repertoire of contemporary music written between 1994 and 2020, ranging from the tribute to John Cage by the Chinese Tan Dun to the dedicated pieces (also for toy piano) by the American Philip Corner, although the surprise remains the initial concert in 4 parts by the Polish-American Lucia Dlugoszewski, an extraordinary artist and inventor of a timbre-piano in which hammers and keys are replaced with strings and plectra. 5/5: Unique.”
Guido Michelone, Alias – Il Manifesto, April 17th, 2021

“A very original cd […] by the talented pianist Agnese Toniutti, which presents a courageous choice of authors out of any commercial homologation: Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925-2000), Tan Dun (1957) and Philip Corner (1933). Sounds and peculiar paths that open not only to musical perspectives but also to existential ones. Congratulations for this choice and for the excellent interpretation that demonstrates how much Agnese Toniutti is convincingly inside this music which is also a different interpretation from the usual repertoire.”
Renzo Cresti, April 10th, 2021

“Pianist Agnese Toniutti has a bracing, incisively performed new recording, ‘Subtle Matters’, on the Neuma label, featuring pieces by three composers. Lucia Dlugoszewski’s ‘Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does a Woman Love a Man?’ is a rigorous, four-part exploration of the piano’s interior. There’s a lovely, jagged but dreamy work by Tan Dun, ‘C-A-G-E fingering for piano’ and four wonderful compositions by the always inspiring and challenging Philip Corner. Excellent work, do check it out.”
Brian Olewnick, April 1st, 2021

“A wonderful album of modern piano landscapes, all gorgeous and unusual in their own voices. A sonic journey / exploration of dynamic acoustic atmospheres.”
Collin J Rae, March 30th, 2021

“One of those people that doesn’t just play the piano, she plays the piano going beyond just hitting the keys and even bringing toys into the arena. An experimental work that doesn’t feel like it’s just pulled out of the air on a whim, this is less a recital than a journey inhabited by stops and starts, twists and turns. Often becoming head music for cosmic experiences, if you start with Varese and go from there, this might just be the musical comfort food you want on your plate.”
Chris Spector, March 15th, 2021, Midwest Record

 
Il Manifesto, April 21st, 2021
 

Il Gazzettino, April 25th, 2021

RADIO BROADCASTING AND INTERVIEWS:
#RadiostArt (Italy) – Interview for Clocks and Clouds with Stefano Taglietti
10.45 pm, June 28th, 2021


#Radio UNAM (Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico): Interview for Testimonio de Oídas curated by Dulce Huet (espagnol – podcast)
June 15th and June 19th, 2021


#Radio Horizon 93.9 fm (Johannesburg, South Africa)
May 18th, 2021

Philip Corner: Toy piano, A really lovely piece made for & by Agnese

#Radio CiTR 101.9 FM – University of British Columbia (Canada) Bepi Crespan Presents
May 8th 2021
Lucia Dlugoszewski: Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does A Woman Love a Man?) – Part IV,  Tan Dun: C-A-G-E, fingering for piano

#Radio Centraal (Antwerpen, Belgium) Vhoorspel with Rudi Claessens
April 29th, 2021

Lucia Dlugoszewski: Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does A Woman Love a Man?) – Part I e II, Philip Corner: Man in field (Sound as hero), A really lovely piece made for & by Agnese

#Radio Onde Furlane (Udine, IT)  Ator ator, interview with Paolo Cantarutti (Furlan/ITA)
April 28th, 2021
 Podcast here
Lucia Dlugoszewski: Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does A Woman Love a Man?), Tan Dun: C-A-G-E, fingering for piano, Philip Corner: A really lovely piece made for & by Agnese

#Radio WFCF (Flagler College Radio, Florida, USA)  Music of our Mothers with Ellen Grolman
April 28th, 2021

Lucia Dlugoszewski: Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does A Woman Love a Man?)

#Radio Horizon 93.9 fm (Johannesburg, South Africa)
April 26th, 2021

Lucia Dlugoszewski: Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does A Woman Love a Man?), Tan Dun: C-A-G-E, fingering for piano, Philip Corner: Man in field (Sound as hero), Small pieces of a Fluxus reality

#Radio KUNM (University of New Mexico, USA) Other Voices, Other Sounds – Contemporary music and sound art with an international perspective
April 22nd, 2021

Lucia Dlugoszewski: Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does A Woman Love a Man?) – Part III and IV

#Radio Panik (Bruxelles, Belgium) Indiedrome : “Exacerbated Subtlety”
April 20th, 2021

Lucia Dlugoszewski: Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does A Woman Love a Man?)

#Radio Capodistria (Slovenia) Sonoramente Classici interview with Luisa Antoni: “Agnese Toniutti presents Subtle Matters” (ITA)
April 18th, 2021

Philip Corner: Man in field (Sound as hero), 
Tan Dun: C-A-G-E, fingering for piano, Lucia Dlugoszewski: Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does A Woman Love a Man?) – Part 4

#Radio CiTR 101.9 FM – University of British Columbia (Canada) Bepi Crespan Presents
April 17th, 2021

Philip Corner: Man in field (The Sound as hero), 
Small pieces of a Fluxus reality

#Radio Electus (Seattle, USA) #85: Music of Memory with Michael Schell
April 8th, 2021

Lucia Dlugoszewski: Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does A Woman Love a Man?) – Part 2.

#Wrmbr Radio, MIT Institute (Cambridge, USA) – NOT Brahms and Liszt with Alley Stoughton
March 29th, 2021

Tan Dun: C-A-G-E, fingering for piano, Philip Corner: A really lovely piece made for & by Agnese

#Difficult Listening (Australia)
March 28th, 2021
Tan Dun: C-A-G-E, fingering for piano

A brief extract from Dlugoszewski’s Exacerbated Subtlety Concert  – Part IV for “timbre piano”, performed at Angelica Festival, Bologna (IT), on Sept 18th, 2020 (European premiere).


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