Composers

Born in Buenos Aires in 1966, Daniel A. D’Adamo studied music and philosophy in Argentina. In 1992, he joined the Sonus Department at the CNSM in Lyon where he completed his studies in composition with Philippe Maunoury and in electro-acoustics and computer music with Denis Lorrain. In 1996 he was working at IRCAM and met Tristan Murail with whom he explored a new approach to computer techniques applied to composition.

In 1996, he represented Latin America at the 3rd Forum for composers organised in Montréal by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne which premiered his piece for 15 instruments, Voices. The same year he won the first prize of the Composition Competition organised by Grame and the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain. For this occasion, he composed d’Ombra II, for 15 instruments.

In 1997, he was awarded two year’s residency at the Académie de France in Rome - Villa Médici - where he established the Musica XXI Festival.

His pieces have been performed by ensembles such as the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne of Montréal, Court-Circuit, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain, Nuove Sincronie (Milan), Freon (Rome), Alter-Ego (Rome), and conducted by Pierre-André Valade, Lorraine Vaillancourt, Renato Rivolta, Daniel Kawka, etc.

A CD devoted to his work on the Radio-France, Musique Française d’Aujourd’hui label, was released recently.

Daniel A. D’Adamo belongs to that new generation of composers who are able to free themselves from allegiance to any school and who affirm, above all, freedom of spirit before the creative act. This rejection of systems enable him to escape both from exclusive attitudes which can see salvation only through the filter of a dictatorial aesthetic and from a demagogic syncretism which flirts with the most antinomic trends provided they are fashionable. It is the need to work the material, to “knead the dough” one might say, which requires, whithin each piece, the use or development of one technique in particular.

The profusion of figures, the minuteness in the notation of phrases, articulations and nuances, the choice of the playing techniques bring out his concern for detail, a genuine passion for composition. Three directions that seem to characterise his aesthetic can be discerned from this composer’s work : an interest in musical time, a certain theatricality of writing and a recurrence of the theme of the “double”. The pieces for ensemble, Voices (1996) and d’Ombra II (1998) are representative of the concept of musical time Daniel A. D’Adamo has developed. In these pieces, the material is not deployed by a single process that leads immutably from one point to another, from a tension to a resolution. On the contrary, this composer prefers to delay the time of resolution : the material seems to follow a direction, but this leads on into a new process, into a renewed tension. Heterogeneous elements often infiltrate the discourse in an unexpected fashion and succeed in clarifying or contradicting the on-going process. These find their justification at a later point in the temporal sequence. Coeli et terrae (1998-99), for double bass and contrabass saxophone, is developed from a highly complex initial structure, built from a layering of different styles of playing techniques, which gradually becomes organised into wider phrases. But the development of this structure is broken by the irruption of new elements which impose their own formal logic.

This rejection of an overly obvious linearity of musical time goes hand in hand with a taste for theatricality in composition. Reversals of situations, sudden appearances, impromptu returns confer the status of a theatrical character on the musical objects which make up the material. This is more an internal than an external theatre, more in the abstraction of an idea than in the figuration of a representation. In d’Ombra II, the piano, the main character, opens the piece with a gesture in the low register, a sort of magma in fusion, that gives rise to increasingly pressant irruptions of the tutti. The final section is also theatrical, when the musicians of the ensemble progressively exchange their instruments for a percussion instrument. Die runde Zahl (1998-99), for six percussionists, inscribes its theatracality in the spacialisation of the sound. The percussionists, placed around the audience, weave a veritable “polyphony” of criss-crossed trajectories and layered rotations. The space becomes a structuring factor around which the flows of densities, rhythms and dynamics are arranged. At the very beginning of d’Ombra I (1997), for bass clarinet and live electronics, the electro-acoustic double is heard alone, like a shadow that signals the imminent arrival of a character. The theatricality of the piece lies in the play between the visible - the instrument player - and the invisible - the electronic part.

The double, as reiteration, shadow, reflex and distortion, perhaps constitutes the most original element in the work of Daniel A. D’Adamo. It is certainly one of the constants of his aesthetic. The piece Die runde Zahl, is constructed through a set of imitations, of delays, which are doubles of an initial motif. The idea of d’Ombra II is based on an experiment in acoustic distortion caused by distanced hearing. The piece is designed as the filtered reflection or the residual memory of music played in an inaccessible place. The role of the shadow is devolved, in d’Ombra II, to the electronics, by doubling the instrumental part. It is a sort of undisciplined shadow that interprets the instrumental gestures in its own way, sending back constantly distorted images. As in the Andersen fairy tale, the shadow finally takes the place of the man and destroys him.

Philippe Lalitte