I/O was presented during the first edition of An Evening of Today at the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ in February 2013. Conceived as a thirty-minute work in which the concert hall itself became part of the compositional material, it unfolded through five successive situations. Across them, the spectators shifted position as the boundary between stage and audience was drawn and redrawn. Bringing together music, live electronics, scenography, video and performance, the work became the starting point for Stichting I/O, giving the group both its name and an initial artistic direction.
An Evening of Today
An Evening of Today was initiated in 2013 by Joël Bons, co-founder and artistic director of the Nieuw Ensemble, as a platform for young composers and music makers to develop new work in collaboration with professional musicians. At the time, I was assistant artistic director of the Nieuw Ensemble and worked closely with Joël on shaping and realising the first edition.
Presented by the Nieuw Ensemble and the then newly founded ensemble Looptail on 28 February 2013, the first edition brought together seven composers connected to the Conservatorium van Amsterdam: Giuliano Bracci, Wilbert Bulsink, Kaja Draksler, Trevor Grahl, Tak Cheung Hui, Noriko Koide and myself. The programme consisted primarily of newly written compositions performed by musicians from the two ensembles, while some works also included video, live electronics and sound produced beyond the conventional instrumental setup, or used the concert hall in different ways.
The title I/O and the initial idea
I/O takes its title from the technological abbreviation for input/output: what comes into a system and what goes out of it. I conceived the work as an exploration of dipoles, limits and borders — not only as lines of separation, but as conditions that produce two sides and determine what can –or cannot– pass between them.
One of the first ideas was to consider the concrete walls of the Muziekgebouw as such a border: between the controlled interior of the concert hall and the outside world, with its own sounds and activity. I began to think of the hall as a kind of “temple of silence,” a supposedly protected interior that could become impregnated by what existed beyond it.
My initial intention was to apply this idea across the entire concert hall. The production capacities and other limitations did not allow me to realise it at that scale. During the development of the work, the concept instead took the form of five studies, or tableaux. Each one created a different situation through which we explored a border, the two sides it produced, and the exchanges, tensions or movements that could take place between them.
Developing the work
I developed I/O with scenographer Roelof Pothuis and music makers George Dumitriu and Kieran Klaassen, who worked with me on live electronics and sound. Musicians from the Nieuw Ensemble and Looptail were joined by pianist Kaja Draksler, while George also played electric guitar. Musical material, technical experiments, rehearsals and scenographic ideas developed alongside one another, rather than being added as separate layers to an already completed score.
The musical language merged a deliberately limited amount of written material with elements of improvisation and electronics. All the musicians were able to work from notation, but their backgrounds differed, combining specialisations in classical and contemporary music with experience in free improvisation. The work lasts approximately 30 minutes.
Musical language and rehearsal process
To allow them to focus on the performance, move freely through the space and remain attentive to one another, I avoided the use of scores during the performance. Most of the material therefore had to be learned by heart. Rather than filling the available rehearsal period with a large amount of complex written music, we experimented with performative behaviours and with the internal logic of the musical language: its material, phrasing, direction and ways of developing. We also spent time training and rehearsing the spatial and performative parts, while gradually developing a shared musical approach as a group.
Across the work, the I/O idea was also translated into musical terms through the relation between horizontal and vertical material. Mostly fast, often microtonal lines formed its horizontal dimension, while major chords were used as vertical material. Several instruments, including the piano, harp and electric guitar, were retuned. The tuning followed a gradual micro-stretching away from a central pitch, so that the difference from standard tuning increased as the music moved higher or lower. This became especially apparent when the musicians came together in the third tableau to play in a quintet formation.
Interactive systems and the audience
Interaction ran through the work both technologically and spatially. Wii controllers, contact microphones, live electronics, MIDI instruments and live camera systems allowed physical actions to generate or alter sound and image. At the same time, the audience’s own engagement and position continually changed. The spectators were arranged around a tennis court, gathered into a circle around the quintet, pushed towards one side of the hall and, in the case of the miniature auditorium, drawn directly into one of the tableaux.
Their distance from the musicians, their viewpoint and their degree of involvement were therefore never fixed. The five situations allowed us to explore not only the borders created within the hall, but also the changing position from which the audience listened to and experienced the work.
Five tableaux
The five tableaux were developed by the creative team in close collaboration with the musicians, through a workshop-like rehearsal process. Each tableau established a different situation around a border, while the audience’s position and relationship to the performers would change as the work moved from one tableau to the next.
Tableau 1: Tennis
The audience entered an emptied, flat hall. There were no seats, no visible performance setup and no musicians waiting for them. Using white gaffer tape, we rearranged the audience in the space while marking out an imaginary tennis court.
Yvonne de Winter and Jaap de Vries appeared with tennis rackets fitted with Wii controllers and began playing a match. Their movements and strokes generated music, producing major chords mixed with electronics. Clarinetist Anna voor de Wind and violinist Jellantsje de Vries entered from opposite sides, playing ascending microtonal lines towards one another across the court. Ryoko Imai brought in a ladder, climbed it and whistled the end of the match. The rest of us removed the white tape, making the tennis court and its borders disappear.
Tableau 2: The stressed-out percussionist
A small percussion setup appeared in the hall, and Ryoko began to play. Some of the instruments were connected through contact mics to live electronics, allowing her playing to produce not only percussion sounds but also a changing sequence of randomised major chords.
A suspended gong belonging to the setup gradually moved farther away from her. Each time she needed to strike it, she had to leave the rest of her instruments, run through the surrounding audience to reach it and then return. As the distance increased, the task became progressively more difficult, and her growing effort and irritation became part of the performance.
Tableau 3: The quintet
Kaja Draksler appeared pushing a grand piano into the centre of the hall. The audience opened into a circle around her, creating the space for an impromptu stage. Ernestine Stoop followed with her harp on its trolley, George entered with his electric guitar while pushing an amplifier on wheels, Rob Dirksen arrived with his double bass, and Ryoko brought in a set of cowbells. The musicians joined one by one until a microtonal quintet had formed in the middle of the audience.
The quintet followed a semi-improvised structure and a shared approach to musical phrasing. Its material moved between lines and chords, as a free musical translation of I/O. The stretched tuning system was most clearly exposed here. Middle C on the piano remained at standard pitch; each successive semitone above it was tuned a further two cents higher, while each semitone below it was tuned a further two cents lower. The harp and electric guitar were also retuned, while the other instruments entered the same widening microtonal field.
Tableau 4: The moving square
After the quintet musicians disappeared with their instruments, we crossed the hall once again with white gaffer tape, gradually pushing the entire audience towards its rear side and away from the wall of the actual stage. From within the audience, Marieke Franssen began playing bass flute with live electronics.
Using different colours of tape, three of us from the creative team marked an imaginary square around her. As she slowly stepped towards the hall’s stage side, we continually redrew the square in an attempt to keep her contained within it. The interaction gradually intensified: our taping became increasingly frantic, alongside an accelerating, parlando-like musical line on the flute.
Tableau 5: Behind the stage
After the flutist vanished backstage, the audience remained gathered at a distance at the back of the hall. A live image of Ernestine playing the harp appeared on the rear wall of the stage. The wall slowly rose, revealing the backstage area behind the hall’s stage. There, the audience could see Ernestine herself and a miniature auditorium occupied by members of the audience who had been secretly invited to take part during the preceding tableaux.
Ernestine repeatedly played a dominant–tonic cadence, the kind of closing gesture that might appear at the end of a classical music piece, and the miniature audience had been instructed to applaud after each repetition. At the back, George and Rob played a slow, freely structured musical part.
At the same time, Ryoko and Kaja entered from the right side of the backstage area and tried to reach the harpist, but elastic bands attached to them repeatedly pulled them backwards. Kaja carried a MIDI keyboard which sounded whenever she accidentally touched it with her arm.
Ernestine eventually stood up. Marieke took over the live camera and followed Ernestine as they moved through the venue’s backstage area, trying to find a way out. After repeated attempts, Ryoko and Kaja both collapsed from the effort. Gradually, everything came to a halt. I then walked to the line in front of the main audience and removed a long strip of white tape from the floor, this time a border between performers and spectators, stage and audience.
From the production to Stichting I/O
The working relationships formed through the project developed into a longer-term group, and in 2014 Roelof Pothuis, George Dumitriu, Kieran Klaassen, Kaja Draksler and I founded Stichting I/O. The production established several ways of working that continued in later projects: forming a team around each work, allowing different artistic practices to affect its development from within, treating space and technology as parts of the composition, and always rethinking the relationship between a work and its audience.
Several of the artists involved in I/O have remained central to the company’s development throughout the years. The production therefore became not only its first project, but also the beginning of a sustained collaboration and way of working.
Credits
Devised by
Thanasis Deligiannis — stage director/composer
Roelof Pothuis — scenographer
George Dumitriu — live electronics/electric guitar
Kieran Klaassen — live electronics/sound engineer
Technical assistance
Daan Hazendonk — video
Performed by
Nieuw Ensemble
Marieke Franssen — bass flute
Ernestine Stoop — harp
Rob Dirksen — double bass
Looptail
Anna voor de Wind — clarinet
Jellantsje de Vries — violin
Ryoko Imai — percussion
Additional musicians
Kaja Draksler — piano
George Dumitriu — electric guitar
Performers
Yvonne de Winter — tennis
Jaap de Vries — tennis
Explore Further
An Evening of Today subsequently developed into a recurring platform. For its longer history, later editions and my current role in its artistic coordination, see:
→ Conservatorium van Amsterdam: Educational Practice
For more information about the 2013 edition check Muziekgebouw’s page:
→ An Evening of Today 2013
A longer video impression of the work can be found below:
→ I/O video impression (11′)
More about the development of the group and its subsequent projects can be found on:
→ Stichting I/O