Phase Portrait: Dacia (2025)
Collaboration with Ilinca Fechete
Hosted by Museum Brandhorst in Munich
Phase Portrait: Dacia is a performance-based work that draws on György Ligeti’s Concert Românesc (1951), composed during a period of intense restriction under Hungary’s authoritarian regime. Though the piece outwardly adopts acceptable stylistic references, namely folk motifs and traditional orchestration, it was ultimately banned after a single rehearsal. Its rejection stemmed not from overt dissent but from subtle compositional decisions, which were only truly understood much later: microtonal inflexions and tuning tensions embedded within otherwise sanctioned musical forms.
This work begins with buried gestures. A selection of passages for horn is performed live and interpreted not only through conventional musical techniques but also through a digital environment that responds to expressive parameters in real time. Drawing on Guerino Mazzola’s theory of performance fields, a mathematical model for describing continuous transformations in tempo, intonation, and dynamic motion, this system maps live performance input to dynamic modulation. These mapped vectors serve to articulate the internal motion of the piece.
Rather than reinterpreting Concert Românesc in a traditional sense, the performance treats it as a site of gestural potential, a musical surface under which compressed expression is stored. By expanding and amplifying the piece’s internal vectors, the work seeks to make audible what remains largely invisible in the score itself: not only the affective contour of Ligeti’s resistance but also how gesture and constraint can coexist in a single compositional form.
Full recording coming to physical release.
Documentation: Diogo Frazão