ALESSANDRO PERINI: Wishart / INTONAL 2025

Trevor Wishart – from Fabulous Paris

3. "Fabulous Paris" (1991). Duration: 24’

1. "The Division of Labour" (1994). Duration: 18’

In this concert, I will be diffusing two works by Trevor Wishart, whose music is on focus this year, and who will be present at the festival. Known for his Composer's Desktop Project, a software he developed to transform sound in many different ways, especially tailored to working with vocal sounds. His work is a reference point in electronic music courses across the world, particularly Vox V, which is often cited as a milestone in acousmatic composition.

The two movements are extracted from Fabulous Paris, a "secular oratorio" commissioned by Swedish Radio and the Birmingham Rumours Festival. As Wishart states, "This 3-movement, secular oratorio explores our collective and individual experience of the mass industrial society in which we live, through the medium of the human voice."

I will first diffuse the third movement, which carries the same name as the oratorio. Here, the manipulation of voice is evident from the start, showcasing Wishart’s signature process of blending layers of recorded voices and transforming them into textures that evoke urban landscapes. Quoting the composer: "this movement, the earliest composed, uses recordings made in many cities - the traffic tunnels of Stockholm, the Paris metro, an amusement park in Kobe - voices from American TV adverts and game shows (recorded whilst working at Allen Strange's San Jose studio in the early 80s), traffic announcements on the California freeways (recorded, at my request, by the sound-poet Larry Wendt), the voices of astronauts, President Kennedy, Adolf Hitler, and others."

The second piece, The Division of Labour, is actually the first movement of the oratorio and takes inspiration from the historical realities of the Industrial Revolution. At its core is the voice of Alex Gordon, reading excerpts from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776): "A workman not educated to the business could scarce make one pin a day. But one man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top. The head requires three distinct operations. To put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins another. In this manner, making a pin is divided into eighteen distinct operations, and those persons can make forty-eight thousand pins a day."

Alessandro Perini's artistic production ranges from instrumental and electronic music to audiovisual and light-based works, net-art, land-art and vibration-based works, recently focusing on custom-built machines. A recent CD issued by KAIROS, “The Expanded Body”, gathers some of his solo and chamber music works. Based in Malmö, he’s a founding member of Hertzbreakerz, a group curating – among other events – SOUND SPACES, dedicated to new and recent instrumental music. Since few years he's been collaborating with INTONAL and Inter Arts Center, curating the acousmatic program at IAC. He currently teaches Composition at the Conservatory of Mantua (Italy).

Visit Alessandro Perini’s artist page – alessandroperini.com

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