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 is my love letter to the ocean. In it I try to express something of my feeling of awe: power-danger-peace-beauty, but also something of the adventure; Odysseus’ adventure, but also the adventure of life; my feeling that we are all riding on the surface of an ocean, that there are depths just beyond our sight, and that we must steer our vessels as skillfully as we can, and to the extent that we can, at the mercy of providence or fate.

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.