Lamento del molare frustrato - S. Bassanese

Lament of the Frustrated Molar
by Stefano Bassanese
Nicholas Isherwood - Baritone
“Sixth dentistica sitting” for voice of bottom, electronics and video
extracted from “Fuori dai denti”
text of Tiziano Scarpa



I met Stefano when the Hub was at the Music Conservatory in Cuneo, Italy in June of 2006 where he leads the Computer Music and New Media Department. While he was helping us get ready for our concert with his students there, he was also preparing to Leave to be part of the "June in Buffalo" festival in Buffalo, NY. There he would primere the english version of this piece sung by Baritone Nicholas Isherwood . This is a "rough mix" that Stefano passed on to me. It is very amusing and surrealistic. We are all missing the 8 channels of surrounding speakers and video that are part of the live performance. With any luck we will have an opportunity to see it performed this way.

Lamento of the frustrated molar constitutes the sixth “dentistica sitting” outside from the teeth, a job of musical theatre devised with Tiziano writer Shoe. A history that plays between grotesque and the surrealistic one around the topic of the teeth, included the terror that this argument can provoke, alluding metaformation to that “bad tooth” it can represent. I have articulated a sonorous world invented round to a subject that just inside finds of the mouth, imagining that the teeth are arranged nearly to mark the border of the same fonatorio apparatus. We can say that the hidden subject is therefore the same vocal identity. Taking cue from the surrealistic and often comic situations that the drammaturgia succeeds to produce, the sonic language develops a evocativo lessico constituted from nervous pulsations, resonant micro-cavities, sussulti telluric, liquid ecstasies, etc.

Here the Molar thinks of being the stationary calcification of a pre-historic jellyfish, a free time to swim in the ocean with its transparent umbrella and its melted filaments, but that by now made solid he is hostage of the dental arched one, with roots in the gum. The musical writing tries to integrate imagination perceptively and truth, plays on the schizoide dissosciation of the molar/ricollocandol jellyfish in the distribution of the vocal registries, uses gestures primarily which the vibratory pulsations like rhythmic elements in order to generate and to control different sonorous elements, constantly converses with the flow parallel of the images video giving place to a complementary counterpoint of perception.

an automated translation of Stefano Bassanese hence the occasional untranslated italian words.

Enjoy