On that day my left ear became a frog

Alessandro Perini – “On that day my left ear became a frog” (2018)
for violin with amplified custom-made bow

Written for Marco Fusi

Click here to download score in PDF

Premiered in November 2018 at Inter Arts Center, Malmö (Sweden) as part of “That Damn Borderline. Sound art, improvisation, composition and the stuff in between”, organized by Hertzbreakerz

Part of the CD “The Expanded Body”

Camera: Karou Calamy

«Music for violin revolves around violin, of course, but what if the focus were on the bow? The bow runs up and down (left and right), and this is already a very important suggestion about space. It could be interesting, for a moment, to leave our role of human listener, and imagine how sound is experienced by the bow itself. A custom-made laser-cut bow was designed for the occasion: all in MDF, no hair – only a thin wooden layer flows on the string. Two contact microphones (the ears of the bow) are attached to the opposite ends of the bow, the frog and the tip. The point of contact with the string while the performer is playing is proportionally close or distant compared to the position of the two microphones, which lets us experience a stereophonic space of listening, tied to the position of the bow.»

In collaboration with Ars Nova Malmö, with the support of Musikverket.


Evolution of the bow design

Lasercutting the final bows

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s