Opening: 28 May 2016
Duration: 24 min.
When: Salle Olivier Messiaen, Maison de la Radio, Paris
Production: Groupe Recherches Musicales (GRM) and  Ina – Paris

Resonant Cities: Venice
Madrigal for cello and city

Anyone who has been fortunate enough to get to experience Venice, behind the picture-postcard views, knows that Venice definitely imposes a rhythm. Being the product of motionless time, it’s the only city in the world with no outskirts; the original architecture has remained fundamentally still over time. Still? Maybe. But its stillness is like the apparent stillness of its lagoon. Stillness is, in fact, a constant, microscopic variation, between the generation and degeneration of its morphology, that is permanently trapped inside a perimeter. The belated time which Venice imposes turns out to be – to me, at least – a physiologically natural time, that can and must be traced back. It is a perfect time for listening to one’s inner antiquity, within the Ancient, completely unrelated to modernity, a dimension that feels much more like a sort of “time regained”.
That’s partially why I have decided to write a sort of madrigal, which as we know, was created in the period of maximum architectural flourishing of the city, together with motet. For this portrait I have chosen a single shot to show an entire day, 24 minutes for 24 hours. That is Rialto fish market, which was one of the first built up areas in the city. The text of the madrigal is based on the sounds of this site. So why a cello as a live solo voice? First of all because Venice is built on wooden piles and maybe that’s why, just like a cello, it is a place of resanonces…

Andrea Liberovici

Venice
Madrigal for cello and city

Structure
Evening 1 – (3 mn)
Night 2 – (6 mn)
Afternoon – (6mn)
Evening 2 – (3 mn)

Resonant Cities: Venice
Madrigal for cello and city
cello and electronic 5.1
by Andrea Liberovici
cello
Jeffrey Zeigler
Groupe Recherches Musicales (GRM) and Ina – Paris