Systema Naturae – A Composition Cycle by Mauro Lanza and Andrea Valle

ensemble mosaik, Berlin, Germany

What venue could be more suited to the Systema Naturae cycle than Berlin’s Natural History Museum, where ensemble mosaik will premiere the individual compositions under this heading by composers Mauro Lanza and Andrea Valle. The EvS Music Foundation will be supporting the premiere.
2013 saw the two composers start their collaboration on the four-part cycle Systema Naturae, comprising the compositions Regnum animale (2013), Regnum vegetabile (2014), Regnum lapideum (2016) and Fossilia. Each part of the cycle focalizes one field of the natural world or its exploration. Here both composers refer, on the one hand, to the cataloguing of research objects developed in the Middle Ages and, on the other, to the taxonomy, the systematic description of living organisms, that goes back to Linnè’s Systema Naturae.
In the force field of scientific observation and artistic discovery Lanza and Valle jointly develop collections of pieces whose fictitious titles follow the principle of the “binomial nomenclature”. Short character pieces arise where the sounds of acoustic instruments are combined with those of electro-mechanic machines and are fathomed in detail. Special instrumental techniques and manipulations of the instruments are explored and mixed with sounds of electro-mechanic constructions that were developed from everyday objects and are controlled by means of a computer program. The formal conception here follows algorithmic structures.

June 19, 2017
Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin

Further Information:
www.ensemble-mosaik.de