Bacchetto/Sabey Duo

Bacchetto/Sabey Duo is a collaborative project of San Francisco based composer/performers Nick Bacchetto and Ben Sabey. The duo creates new spatial audio works for piano and interactive electronics with a custom modular analog synthesizer controlled by a MIDI Polyphonic Expression instrument (Eurorack, Melbourne Instruments Nina, Roli Seaboard). They also perform a transcription of Messiaen’s “Feuillets inédits” (originally for piano and Ondes Martenot).

 
 
 
 
 
 

“The wine-dark sea”, Homer's ubiquitous epithet, evokes the awesome power and intoxicating beauty of the ocean. But why did Homer describe the color of the sea as “wine-dark”? Interestingly, ancient Greek had no word for “blue” -- and even more interestingly, neither did any contemporaneous culture in the world. Why? Some have speculated that ancient Greeks actually perceived color differently than we do today. While this hypothesis is farfetched, at best, it nevertheless gives rise to a beguiling fantasy: What if I could see what Homer sees? What kinds of consonances or dissonances might arise from this cross-cultural and trans-chronological mind-meld? In The Wine-Dark Sea, I explore these questions as I attempt to merge the disparate sound worlds of piano and analog synthesis in a spatialized environment.

 

Nick Bacchetto’s Dissolutions explores recursive proportions (fractals) and the deconstruction and expansion of the piano’s sonic profile. Much of the pitch and rhythmic language of the piece derives from a process that begins with a single pitch or rhythmic interval (57 half steps or 2500 milliseconds, respectively) and adds additional elements to the set based on a given proportion (5:7, 4:11, 23:57, etc.). This procedure is applied recursively, adding further frequencies or rhythmic time-points based on the proportion(s) defined at the outset of the process until rich pitch and rhythmic complexes are generated that have the property of self-similarity at various levels of scale akin to structures encountered in fractal geometry. These complexes are articulated by both the acoustic piano (human performer) and a synthetic piano (VST) interdependently.