Music for HASGS: Study 1b

Abstract

The work presented here is based on the Hybrid Augmented Saxophone of Gestural Symbioses (HASGS) system with a focus on and its evolution over the last six years, and an emphasis on its functional structure and the repertoire. The HASGS system was intended to retain focus on the performance of the acoustic instrument, keeping gestures centralised within the habitual practice of the instrument, and reducing the use of external devices to control electronic parameters in mixed music. Taking a reduced approach, the technology chosen to prototype HASGS was developed in order to serve the aesthetic intentions of the pieces being written for it. This strategy proved to avoid an overload of solutions that could bring artefacts and superficial use of the augmentation processes, which sometimes occur on augmented instruments, specially prototyped for improvisational intentionality. The definition of an instrumental technique is largely underlying the aesthetics of the pieces that constitute the repertoire of an instrument. The repertoire developed for HASGS is an example of the creative variety that mapping supports. Consequently, the difficulty of accurately defining a standardised instrumental technique is enormous, even when the relationship between an augmented system and an acoustic instrument allows us to establish similarities, insofar shown by how composers made similar use of the technology. The gestural phenomenon of interaction between instrumental and electroacoustic sounds became a fundamental point of interest of contemporary music. A mission of the 20th Century art was to make the invisible visible; in the 21st century artists may become more concerned with finding ways to allow us to sense the invisible as new perceptual modes may be uncovered. This concert features music by Henrique Portovedo, Nicolas Canot, Stewart Engarts and Rodney Duplessis.