Deathstar, 2017-2023
Unpublished version for Disklavier piano
Soloist: Marino Formenti
Long-lasting performance.
Thursday, October 26, 12:00 pm to 8:30 pm | Friday, October 27, 12:00 pm to Saturday, October 28, 12:00 pm
Marina Rosenfeld's Deathstar is one of her longest works-in-progress, with incarnations in many formats: sculpture, sound installation, concert, musical score, drawing and recording.
The score for the durational (48 hour) performance version of the piece, which is always performed by pianist Marino Formenti, is a transcription, many times over, of a series of sonic and locational displacements of a singular set of sounds. The process was initiated in 2017 with as a solo exhibition, Deathstar, at Portikus, Frankfurt.
The Portikus exhibition featured a network of microphones (the "Deathstar") designed to continuously listen to and recirculate sounds and their distortions in a recursive system. Rosenfeld periodically transcribed the installation's heavy amplified silences, as well as its momentary eruptions of noise and vocality.
To do this, she used both traditional musical notation and a graphic format of her own invention, which places spectral fields of noise and distortion on its vertical axis at various degrees of distance from the piano's "central C". The resulting score gives the performer a great deal of freedom: it's up to him or her to select, repeat, reorder and transpose the pages of the transcription.
Marino Formenti's first performances of the work also date back to 2017: first as a solo at the closing event of the Portikus exhibition, and then in Deathstar Orchestration, Rosenfeld's literal "orchestration" of the ever-changing sound events generated by the "Deathstar". Subsequent iterations of the work first took the form of a reduction for chamber orchestra, before its score was transformed into a full-length solo performance, still performed by Formenti.
Deathstar explores the fundamental instability and contingency of situated listening and the possibility that an exhibition can also be a work of music. In this new instantiation created for the central hall of Chandoline, a Disklavier piano, programmed with Rosenfeld’s transcriptions of the noise of its own playing, plays itself while Formenti rests, further reproducing the work’s uncanny morphological and temporal distortions.
Photo 1: Marina Rosenfeld, Deathstar, performance view with Marino Formenti, piano, Portikus
Photo 2: Marina Rosenfeld, Deathstar, notation, 2017
