Novaga | Pilia

Alessandra Novaga and Stefano Pilia present at Standards their new upcoming record Stanze Illuminate, the result of a collaborative studio residency occurred in the venue’s space during July 2017.

Stanze Illuminate is a project for two electric guitars, based on a tuning with just intonation and on the division of the octave in non-temepered intervals. The relative pitches are derived from a selection of the degrees of the scales corresponding to some Indian raga; this does not reflect an interest towards Indian traitional music, as much as the purpose to ground the project on different intervals than the usual, and on a physical and gestural approach to the instrument different from the conventional. The two guitarists have so fretted their instruments in another fashion, forcing themselves to a diverse practice of their gestures and intoning themselves on other intervals. The work follows an open score that includes, as a grounding and imaginative principle, the idea to cover the course of a day, using pitches derived from raga associated to the various phases of day and night, by analogy with Indian classical music, and to some practices exclusively peculiar to the usage of the instrument: “to us this is the occasion to investigate different ways of sound production, to work on our relationship as a duo, and to succeed to try to find some freedom of execution within some certain form or given path”.