Aria Mechanica
Aria Mechanica - a video and performance of Offenbach's opera by four players: two women and two machines
A perforated paper roll for a 1906 mechanical push-up pianola is used as a musical score to be cyclically re-interpreted: first as a graphic score by Adrienn Illés, whose performance on piano was recorded, converted to MIDI and laser cut into a new paper roll. This roll was then played on an original Aeolian push-up pianola by Lottie Sebes. Rather than a traditional piano, the Aoelian plays a midi keyboard, triggering sampled sounds of Sebes’ breath. Das Werk erhebt damit Anspruch auf die Genealogie der technischen Medien, mit denen es sich auseinandersetzt, darunter auch das musikalische Speichermedium MIDI, das sich direkt auf Pianorollen zurückführen lässt.
At every step in this multi-layered process of interpretation, translation and re-translation of the score, aspects of inaccuracy, modification, or poetic license – be it via human or machine ‘error’ are contributed to the piece. Air and agency are passed between human and non-human players of the work as Illés breathes into an electro-pneumatic device to turn the original scroll as she reads it, while the laser-cut scroll is played by Sebes pushing air through mechanisms of the Aeolian to sound her breath.
On the original roll is Offenbach’s Opera ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’, which features the story of Olympia, a singing mechanical doll with whom the male protagonist falls in love and who invokes a cast of similar feminized musical automata from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Questions of agency, will and control permeate the discourses surrounding these female-formed musical automata who, by virtue of their mechanical bodies formed by their male inventors, could not possess their own wilfulness. Sebes and Illés play new roles in this old story of women and musical automata, disrupting binaries which have normatively divided men and women, as well as humans and machines.
Aria Mechanica will be presented at the Rundgang as a combination of live performance and video, in the project’s multiple comprising iterations sing in chorus.