Projects

SONIC MEDITATIONS > THE ACT OF LISTENING (2024)

Claudio Jacomucci Sonic Meditation #1 (2024) for overtone singing and accordion

Alvin Lucier Music for accordion with slow sweep pure wave oscillators (1993)

Pauline Oliveros Rhythm Circle, heartbeat (2005)

Claudio Jacomucci Sonic Meditation #2 (2024) for instruments and field recordings

Claudio Jacomucci, accordion, overtone singing

Possible guests featuring:

Simone Spinaci, overtone singing, guitar

Dario Calderone, doublebass, deep listening teacher

A sound meditation is an immersive experience inspired by the practice of Deep Listening created by the American composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros. Participants sit in a circle with the musicians.

The performance has a ritual character and begins with a “warm-up” carried out according to the principles of the Alexander Technique. It serves as a tuning of mind and body, as preparation for the act of listening: by easing mental and physical tension, balancing posture, freeing the breath, participants can achieve greater awareness and sensitivity: in a contemplative state, the sound resonates in the body and imagination of each listener in a unique way, creating a collective experience aware of the process of transformation that involves both the performer and the audience.

DIAMAGNETIC WINDS (2025)

Jasna Veličković

magnets, coils, velicon, power banks, ventilators, plasma lamp, adapters, remote control, bat detector

Claudio Jacomucci

quarter-tone, microtonal/prepared accordion

Past projects

INCANTESIMI (2023)

Claudio Jacomucci, classical accordion and microtonal/prepared accordion

Dario Calderone, 5 strings doublebass

Simone Spinaci,  electric guitar

Gareth Davis,  bass clarinet

Claudio Jacomucci

Incantesimi (2023)

for accordion, electric guitar, doublebass and bass clarinet

[25’]

Charm is from carmen, song, and the primary associations of charm are with music, sound and rhythm. The native word for charm is “spell”, which is related, if somewhat indirectly, to the other meaning of spell in the sense of reading letter by letter, or sound by sound. Riddle is from the same root as read: in fact “read a riddle” was once practically a verb with a cognate object, like “tell a tale” or “sing a song”. And just as the connections of charm are closer to music, so the riddle has pictorial affinities, related to ciphers, acrostics, rebuses, concrete and shape poetry, and everything that emphasises the visual aspect of literature.

The project of this work was born from the collaboration with the visual artist Lucia Romualdi for the realisation of a multimedia event based on a Joyce-style fable written by two close relatives of her during the imprisonment in the camps of Cholm Wietzendorf in 1944/45. Despite the dramatic context in which it was written, this fable for children and adults has a playful character, with subtle political, social and existential implications that are not at all explicit. On the contrary, they are hidden and only suggested by puzzles and riddles that the characters of the fable have to solve.

My intent is to create a kind of meta-composition where performers are involved on a creative plan to (re)compose the piece. Rather that notating a ready-to-play score, I’m interested in making a piece of music that develops in constant dialogue with the performers through a written guide, the musical score. They will run it through - step by step - following the instructions, obstructions and other basic rules like on a board game. Performers are not required to improvise on a given structure but they are challenged to realise (compose, notate) their own sound objects, textures, gestures, phrases according to the composer’s timeline. The score will alternate composer’s given materials and performers’ choices, elaborations, inventions. The intention is to build up a kind of enigmatic work (using also musical cryptograms, chronograms) that has to be solved, completed by  the performers.

Identifying the artistic analogies between the theme of spell in literature and the writing of a musical score is my starting point and serves as a stimulus to tackle compositional issues that I have never faced before. The ludic aspect of the performance, of the involvement of the performers on a creative and performative level is what I would like to focus on more in this work.

The collaboration between composer (score) and performer integrates relationships with an awareness of the embodied cultural knowledge of the performer and with a specific sensing scheme to capture her particular gestural vocabulary.

The combination of individual ‘atoms’ of movement and sound leads to a complexity that must be practised until they can be performed with ease as an embodied interaction. I find the process of collaboration and its articulation as a dynamic interactive structure fascinating and enduring beyond the specific technologies employed.

ARTE DELLA FUGA (2020)

Claudio Jacomucci, classical accordion, prerecorded tracks

Works by Bach, Webern, Ligeti, Nancarrow, Jacomucci

[65']

Canons, fugues, ricercare, palindrome and mirroring forms, labyrinths, pendulums and other contrapuntal inventions from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Art of Fugue, Musical Offering, Goldberg Variations, and by XX Century and contemporary composers.

COSMOGONICA (2017)

Claudio Jacomucci, accordion, samples, voice, prerecorded tracks

Works by Ligeti, Bach, Stockhause, Lohse, Ives, Elgar, Jacomucci

Texts by Eco, Baudrillard, Gualtieri, Baricco, Steiner, Kepler, Borges

[60']

Both in cosmogonic myths and in traditional cosmology, we speak of sound and music.

According to Pythagoras, theorizing the principle of the music of the spheres, the Sun, the Moon and the planets of the solar system, as a result of their rotation and revolution movements, would produce a continuous, imperceptible sound from the human ear and all together would produce harmony.

The universe sings and man is a note of the immense cosmic symphony; the one who thinks in music can access the highest peaks of spiritual consciousness. It is no coincidence for Hinduism that the original sound is similar to Om's root mantra (resumed by Christianity in Amen and Islam in Ammin). Plato described astronomy and music as twin studies for sensory perceptions. For Kepler, the music of the spheres is the medium that connects geometry, cosmology, astrology, and music. NASA has even recently recorded interstellar space sound.

This concert is a journey into the music and thought of composers, poets, scientists and philosophers of different ages that somehow reconnect to astronomy; a kind of Voyager Golden Record with a program ranging from The Unswered Question by Ives to the unfinished counterpoint of J.S.Bach's The Art of the Fugue, from the Zodiac constellations of Stockhausen to the Enigma of Elgar, from Ligeti’s Coulée of sound to Lohse’s polyrthms , passing through a series of original compositions by Jacomucci for his "pneumatic machine", a sophisticated and rare accordion of which he explores the potential to extreme limits, in sonority, technique, and even inintonation, using his own prototype of microtonal accordion, tuned to quarter-tones and prepared.

The use of pre-recorded sounds (almost always concrete and natural) creates the depth of acoustic space while the suggestive texts by Umberto Eco, Mariangela Gualtieri, Jorge Luis Borges, Alessandro Baricco, Johannes Kepler, Jean Baudrillard, Rudolf Steiner and Rob Brezsny they are a reflective counterpoint to music; as Eco writes: "After all, we seek, in our lifetime, an original story that tells us why we were born and lived. Sometimes we search for a cosmic story, the story of the universe, sometimes our personal story. Sometimes we hope to make our personal story coincide with that of the universe.