September 18, 2009: A violinist "in the loop"

Playing in "real time" against one or more repeated samples of one's own performance is nothing new;  but it provides an approach to "music with repetitive structures" (the phrase that Philip Glass prefers to the less-informative word "minimalism") that can be achieved by a soloist whose technical skills extend to the demands of the sampler.  It also requires cultivating a skill for identifying the samples that should be captured and using them to their most imaginative advantage.  Luca Ciarla is a soloist with those skills.  He is currently touring the United States to promote his CD, Fiddler in the Loop;  but it was clear from the performance he gave here last night at the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco that his recordings were not exclusively products of studio ingenuity.

Indeed, rather than restricting his attention strictly to the compositions included on the CD, Ciarla used this recital opportunity to introduce the visual artist Keziat as a co-performer.  Each work that Ciarla programmed was accompanied by a display of images that unfolded under Keziat's computer-based control.  The one exception occurred with a screening of her video animation, "Memoria di un Folle," for which Ciarla (with the assistance of his sampling technology) improvised the "sound track."

The entire program was a relatively short one, consisting of seven compositions.  The rhetorical approach to repetitive structures reminded me of my early experiences of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, except that the rhetoric was now in the hands of a soloist, rather than an ensemble.  (This may also be a result of some of Keziat's more surrealistic images (as in the Fiddler in the Loop CD cover shown above) bearing some family resemblance to some of the old Penguin Cafe album jacket art work.)  Since Ciarla's studies include jazz, as well as the classical repertoire, his "post-Coltrane" approach to "My Favorite Things," going back to a very "square" waltz rhythm for the sake of sampling, was a clever way to twit a jazz classic that is not necessarily well served by having achieved monumental status.  He also offered some of his ideas about "fusion" in "Bach Tarantolato," in which the gavotte from Johann Sebastian Bach's fifth solo cello suite gradually accelerates into a tarantella.  On the whole the concert provided yet another example as to how an appreciation of a new voice can be facilitated when that voice understands the value of a light touch.