In the two works on this album, Netherlands-based Argentine composer Claudio F. Baroni sets recorded speech against acoustic and electronic pitched sounds. The instrumental material emerges entirely from digitally aided speech analysis, which identifies occurrences of Western scale pitches within the natural intonations of speech. From these pitches, Baroni selects and assigns certain tones to instruments and electronics. The scores consist of the written speech text paired with musical notes, precisely aligned with the syllables from which they were drawn. Performers listen to the recorded speech and play the notes accordingly, resulting in instrumental sounds that synchronously “shadow” the speech.

J’ai Connu features an excerpt from “Essay Mémoire Xxe” (2022) by essayist Géraldine Schwarz. Re-Genetic Mutations incorporates the full original recording of Robert Ashley’s solo voice piece “Love Is A Good Example” (1991). Baroni engages with those two sophisticated and radical texts, yet his listening is not focused on their semantic registers. He does not interpret, comment, explain, reinforce, conceptualise, or illustrate the meaning they narrate. In this sense, the semantic integrity of the texts remains untouched by sound. Instead, by drawing out the musicality of speech, the composer loosens words from their primary function as semantic vessels and highlights them as temporal and sonorous events. By closely following the sonorities of speech and subtly playing along, his compostional principle constitutes a materialised act of listening.

Claudio F. Baroni lends his ear to the spoken words and gently touches them with sound. By closely following the sonorities of speech and subtly playing along, his compositional principle constitutes a materialised act of listening. He invites us — the second listeners — to join him in this heightened state of attention. (Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec)