Biography
Having an international career as saxophone soloist and sound artist, I've been directing and extending my focus into the research of contemporary musical performance. Through performative practice, recent experiences oriented my research concerns. Apart from the experience performing with interactive systems for means of real time composition or studio composition as for example Martin Parker's Grunt Count, the design, practice and composing for HASGS (Hybrid Augmented Saxophone of Gestural Symbiosis), two other performative experiences characterises the changing paradigm of performance in this new century. On the one hand, Lachenmann's "musique concrète instrumentale", in which the approach emphasizes the concrete nature of the instruments, re-thinks their potential as sound sources, and congruously presents a musical notation that describes performance actions and extended techniques, in composer's words "this means a music in which sound events are chosen and organised in such a way that the nature of their origin is considered at least as important as the resulting acoustic properties themselves" (Lachenmann in Craenen 2014). On the other hand, the music of Verrando and Maierhof in which building new instruments inspire sonic imagination, an imagination that builds on the twentieth-century focus on timbre, yet emphasises the twentieth first-century focus on material objects, instruments, and new notations. The move is one from quantitative to qualitative compositional approaches, or from thinking with symbols to operating at the level of the signal. The creation process goes from the concrete physical reality towards an external space, based upon an understanding of the adaptation of the technical and technological means to the needs of creation, while the creation process relies on an awareness of the technological potential as a means to attain an artistic result.
