L'Aquila, A City To Listen To
L’Aquila is a city that not everyone can visit, in the wake of the earthquake, but one to which we can all listen. Hence the “A City To Listen To/Una città da ascoltare” project devised by L’Aquila’s Alfredo Casella Conservatoire and the Abruzzo Symphony Orchestra: an event that will be presented to the G8 delegations in the Guardia di Finanza School Auditorium on the evening of 8 July. The project, which falls into four sections, bears witness to L’Aquila’s creativity, its niches of excellence and its ability to create synergies between art and science by weaving a novel path between tradition and innovation.
L’Aquila, City of Innovation – The Sound Installations
The first part of the event consists in a three-stage artistic sound installation created using holophones and planophones: high-technology works of visual art and music at the same time. They are the outcome of an avant-garde research project that the Conservatoire and the University of L’Aquila are carrying out jointly with major national research centres.
The “Anthems Promenade”
The G8 delegates will take a stroll illuminated by beams of light to the Auditorium entrance at 9.30 pm. The melodies of the anthems of the countries attending the Summit will issue from the “sound projectors,” or holophones, each flying the flag of the country concerned.
The Anthems
When they reach the final stretch of their walk, in a virtual esplanade created by the sounds and lights of the concentrically arranged holophones, the various countries’ anthems will merge into a composition created for the G8 and symbolising the utopia of a future of the utmost harmony among all the nations of the world.
The deviser and creator of this path is Michelangelo Lupone, composer and lecturer in music at the L’Aquila Conservatoire.
The “Musica in forma” Sound Installations
Two sound installations, the “Musica in forma” sculptures, are on display in the Auditorium foyer. The works have the ability to interact with each other and with the audience and to adapt, via a computerised process, to variations in light, movements and sounds in the surrounding area. The project has been created by Michelangelo Lupone with visual artist Licia Galizia and is the result of the scientific and artistic research conduced by the Department of New Technologies and Musical Languages at the L’Aquila Conservatoire in conjunction with the University of L’Aquila Faculty of Engineering and Mathematics and the Rome Music Research Centre.
L’Aquila, City of Tradition: “Voices” – the vocal and symphonic concert
“Voices,” the vocal and symphonic concert given by the Abruzzo Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marcello Bufalini, will be held in the Auditorium. After the technological innovation of the walk featured in the first part, the second part marks a return to tradition, with Italian vocal and symphonic music in the grand style. The orchestra will be joined, for the occasion, by the most talented members of the Abruzzo Youth Orchestra as a token of the desire to involve young people, and by the 100 choristers from Chieti’s Teatro Marrucino Chorus and the Teramo Opera Foundation Chorus, under their chorus masters Fabio D’Orazio and Paolo Speca. The soloists will be soprano Carmela Remigio and mezzosoprano Monica Bacelli, two artists who represent Abruzzo, where they were both born, on the world’s major stages.
The first part of the programme features passages from Rossini’s Semiramide, an Italian Mozart.
