Electroacoustic circus in the imaginary of Jean Tinguely

Curated by Milano Musica
in collaboration with
IRCAM – Centre Pompidou
Conservatorio G. Verdi of Milan

With:
Jérôme Comte, clarinet, soloist of the Ensemble Intercontemporain
Luca Bagnoli, sound engineering Ircam
Yann Brecy, electronics Ircam
Wind Orchestra of the G. Verdi Conservatory of Milan
Sandro Satanassi, conductor

 

The Public Program dedicated to the Jean Tinguely exhibition presents Electroacoustic Circus in the Imaginary of Jean Tinguely, a concert within the exhibition spaces, in direct dialogue with the artist’s works.

The event, which is part of the schedule of cultural events created to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth (1925-2025), is produced by Pirelli HangarBicocca and curated by Milano Musica with the collaboration of Ircam-Centre Pompidou and the G. Verdi Conservatory of Milan. The concert draws from Jean Tinguely’s research on sound, which has been present as a central element, inseparable from the visual, in his works since the 1950s.

Fascinated by the research of “musique concréte”, considered the first form of electronic music, which used sounds taken from reality and mechanically generated, Tinguely came to define his works as “machines for mixing sounds.” In some sculptures such as Méta-Maxi, featured in the exhibition, the artist inserts actual musical instruments along with other mechanisms that produce deliberately discordant sounds.

The tribute to Jean Tinguely takes its inspiration from one of his most famous works, the Fontaine Stravinsky, which the artist created in 1982-83 together with Niki de Saint Phalle in the square of the same name in Paris, between the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Saint-Merry church, on the roof of the building that houses the Ircam (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music), one of the most important research centers on electronic and electroacoustic music: the work comes about thanks to the suggestion of Ircam founder and first director Pierre Boulez, who had developed a close friendship with Tinguely.

The program begins with one of the first works Boulez conceived for Ircam, the Dialogue de l’ombre double (1982-85), which features a live clarinet and a recorded track.

The acoustic-musical component that belongs to many of Tinguely’s works is present in the second piece on the program, an “imaginary crossing” made by Yann Brecy and Luca Bagnoli into the sound world of Cyclop, the enormous sculpture more than 22 meters high created by Tinguely with Niki de Saint Phalle in the Milly-la-Forêt woods starting in 1969, which includes sound mechanisms, a small theater and moving metal machinery and is the result of a collective work of several artists that lasted almost fifteen years.

The concert then continues with the Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet conceived by Stravinsky at the time of Histoire du soldat in 1918 and concludes with Feu de joie, a piece for wind orchestra composed in 2023 by Mikel Urquiza (Bilbao, 1988) on commission from Ircam on the occasion of the restoration of the Fontaine Stravinsky.

 

PROGRAM:

Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)
Dialogue de l’ombre double (1985, 20′)
for solo clarinet and recorded clarinet

Cyclop (2024)
An immersive soundscape inspired by Jean Tinguely’s Le Cyclop (2024, 8′)
proposed by Ircam and conceived by Yann Brecy and Luca Bagnoli, at the site of Milly-la-Forêt

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Three pieces for clarinet solo (1918, 4′)

Mikel Urquiza (1988)
Feu de joie (2023, 13′)
for wind orchestra

Ircam-Centre Pompidou Commission, with the support of AXA on the occasion of the restoration of the Fontaine Stravinsky in Paris
First performance in Italy