for cello and electronics.

year: 2022-2026

duration: 12'00'' ca.

première: 28 September 2025, MA/IN Festival, Lecce (ITA), performed by Michele Marco Rossi.

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Technical notes: The electronic part consists of live processing of instrument's sound. An electronics performer is needed.

Stereo sound diffusion.

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program notes:

Cuoio explores perceptual tension as a physical and spatial phenomenon, treating sound as a material subject to deformation, resistance, and release. The compositional model draws on elastic traction: musical parameters behave like an elastic body under stress, whose perceptual shape changes according to energy, density, articulation, and spectral extension.

The first part articulates four modes of tension: constant, progressive, impulsive, and cyclic, emerging from micro-variations rather than from harmonic or dynamic contrast alone. In the second part, the cello is amplified at a microscopic level through contact microphones, revealing internal frictions and resonances. This sound is delivered directly to the audience, placing the listener inside the instrument’s resonant body, while the electronics unfold in the surrounding space. The result is a dual listening scale, intimate and external, where tension becomes a perceptual dialogue between proximity and distance, materiality and projection.

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