BERKLEE TODAY Magazine SUMMER 2008

… While Landay explores how to bring music into a virtual environment, Neil Leonard is doing the opposite by bringing virtual music into real environments. Leonard’s work began in Italy in May with a site-specific sound installation in the medieval city of Padova. The piece uscir ad ascoltar le stelle…, was performed as part of a citywide music festival called the Giornata dell’Ascolta (or Listening Day). Leonard’s piece was unveiled at the entrance of the Santa Maria dei Servi Church, in the midst of a 400-meter installation in the porticos of Padova’s historic district, along via Roma, the city’s central artery.As listeners entered the church for Sunday Mass, they experienced a sound-collage broadcast from three speakers arranged as an audio triptych. The piece required that Leonard and his collaborator, composer Professor Maura Capuzzo of Venice Conservatory, develop 10 hours of continuous, nonrepeating sound. With the aid of computer processing, the two extracted, exaggerated, and juxtaposed aspects of sacred and ritual sounds from around the world to create a sonic statement.

Titled Echo Resonance & Memory, the second phase of Leonard’s project is an installation developed in conjunction with Italian choreographer Gabriella Riccio and video artist Alia Scalvino.* The work was performed in a small village on the side of Mount Vesuvius, Napoli, in late May. It was based on a surround-sound collage of recordings of an outdoor modern art piece constructed from a cluster of weathered church bells by Italian conceptual artist Jannis Kounellis, at La Marrana, the private estate for environmental art in La Spezia. Rather than presenting the installation on a traditional stage, the three artists performed simultaneously in the passageway of a historic building. Leonard’s prerecorded processed sounds and live saxophone playing accompanied Riccio’s movement and Scalvino’s live video creating an echoing conversation that explored the work’s themes.

“Unlike a traditional piece with a beginning, middle, and end, this piece has no fixed point for the audience to focus on,” Leonard says. “We’re seeking to create something conducive to contemplating this site – a beautiful village on the side of an active volcano.” Later this summer, Leonard and his collaborators will perform Echo Resonance & Memory at the national Italian theater triennial in Napoli, Napoli Teatro Festival Italia.

In July, the third phase of the project brings Leonard to Germany to codirect a multimedia performance ensemble at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen. He will work with visual artists and computer musicians to enable his saxophone and computers to produce a live feed that will be “played” by kinetic sculptures equipped with light pens that will draw video images in response to the musical performance. The sculptures were created by Professor Claudius Lazzeroni.

Newbury Comics Faculty Fellowship will continue to promote the experimental, forward-looking work various faculty members have long pursued. “Berklee is a school of contemporary music, and contemporary musicians of all eras have collaborated with dancers, writers, visual artists, and architects,” says Leonard. “I feel what I am doing is consistent with that tradition.”

BERKLEE TOADAY

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