Premise…
Perceiving our limits and feeling the urge to confront them leads us to look for creative solutions. This is how Nebula is born: a journey through sound, connected to a personal, introspective universe, that also generates a spiritual dimension and a welcoming space for sharing experiences.
Nebula is a music project arising from organist Giulio Tosti’s need to voice his own music universe without being confined inside the traditional limits of his instrument and the interpretation of the repertoire.
The organ is a very special instrument, because its sound is created inside the architecture hosting it. The architecture of a church is a part of the organ’s sound and the organ’s sound is a part of the architecture of a church. This leads to the organist’s need to always adjust his musical imagination to the instrument he will play. Performing the traditional organ repertoire means constantly facing this kind of situations, which can sometimes be perceived as a limit to one’s own expressive freedom.
But when the foundation of the project is the absolute sound experience, limits become catalysts of discovery, research and manipulation of the sound material. All of this comes to life in an extemporaneous creation.
A sound experience…
The aim is to transform the acoustic space of the church into a galaxy of sounds. And every location will generate a different, unique galaxy.
Nebula owes its name to the primary material of this musical research: air. It is evocative of clouds, of fog and obviously of a nebula in outer space. The air becomes a plastic material that takes on different and opposing shapes: chords soundscapes, beating effects, expressive monodies, hypnotic rhythms.
The idea is to offer to those who are listening a different way to enjoy music: not a concert in its traditional meaning, but a sound experience, a musical meditation.
The performer creates the music together with the listeners: the audience takes part in the sonic event, which is unique every time, and the organist is both a performer and a listener, his ears and spirit are intimately connected to the present moment. Nebula uses improvisation as its medium.
The organ…
In order to realize this project, Giulio Tosti went through a deep research about mechanical pipe organs and their potential, exploring unprecedented, unconventional timbric universes. By using extended techniques connected to the variation in the distribution of air inside the pipes, and to the microvariations in the pressure on the keys, in addition to the research for controlling the valves’ emissions and to the employment of percussive techniques (partly deduced from drums handbooks), the pipe organ is transformed into a true “sound machine”. The musical system this research is based on goes way beyond organ repertoire and classical music, wandering off to musical worlds that are traditionally far from the organ (like electronic music).
Nebula was hosted in the Internationaler Orgelsommer in Potsdam, Klosterlandschaft in Marienmünster, Berlin’s Heilig Kreuz Kirche, Festival “Toulouse les orgues”(FR), Orgelpark in Amsterdam and other venues.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/90nebula/
