ACPUSTIC PORTRAIT
by Andrea Liberovici
1997

Beginning from a reflection by J. Cage on the new compositional modalities and methodologies makes me think that creating music at the end of this century welcomes the principal characteristics of painting at the beginning of the century and of photography. It is fixed on digital canvases, thereby losing its prerogative, that is the possibility of future re-imagining by the interpreter, acquiring, from painting, fixity, and from photography, the fixity of a movement.
To maintain this similarity, sound, more and more, is becoming color, natural or synthetic (depending on the source) and the instruments of electronic music, powerful brushes. The sound, in fact, becomes the protagonist. You write for the sound, with the sound, going through the reasons for the sound. That said, I began to work on acoustic portraits. That is, I use the voice (therefore the image, therefore the fundamental color), for example, of Marinetti, and through the sound spectrum, the timbre and rhythm of his declamations, I create a portrait. This method inspired the idea of a gallery of portraits, picking freely from poets, orators, actors, politicians for analogy or for contrast. Some of them granted me their voice for this specific purpose, others were found with the help of various archives. This sort of acoustic gallery cannot solely refer to voices from the twentieth century, but also to the great sounds of this century: the machines, the landing on the moon, the atomic bomb.

Andrea Liberovici

Reviews

• The self, flautus vocis, By Achille Bonito Oliva
  Andrea Liberovici practices game theory, whose entour is the Self, taken as the vertical line instituting distances and remoteness. The game begins by establishing a non-place, a point of view that runs forwards and sideways, that establishes the primacy of hearing more than that of being looked at. The apology of the word is evident, as it is placed sideways, in the continuity of the rhyme and in the disseminating whole of a logos that always double somersaults in order to conclude where the unity of meaning dies. (…) The stereophonic portrait of Liberovici establishes that listening is possessing from a distance.