Post-Music Post
A blog dedicated to new music discourse in the form of articles and concert reviews
Post-Music Post Concert
27.07.2025 - OS Showcase /
Lichtenbergschule, Darmstadt
Raphaël Belfiore
Abstractive extensive studies
(for string quartet)
Abstractive Extensive Studies is a series of four diagram-based scores for string instruments. All four are variations of a single gesture: moving across the entire length of both the strings and the bow at the same time.
The first study repeats this gesture. The next three studies transform it by approaching specific points—first on the strings, then on the bow, and finally on both at the same time.
The piece comes from reflections on the original links between music and knowledge, especially in relation to string instruments. In ancient Western music theory, particularly in Pythagorean thought, the divided string provided not only the basis for musical organization but also insights into the rules of the cosmos. The string instrument acted not only as an instrument of music but also of knowledge.
These studies aim to continue that dual role. They are influenced by the ideas of mathematician and philosopher A. N. Whitehead. In his theory of nature, aligned with 20th‑century physics, space and time are not fixed containers but abstractions drawn from lived experience. Instead of being made of infinite points and instants, they are ideal limits that come from actual movement. Whitehead calls this process the “method of extensive abstraction.”
The title refers directly to this process. Each movement explores this abstract gesture and its sonic consequences. The work is also a way of thinking through and with instruments, and more broadly, about forms of thought that cross between the arts and other areas of abstract and concrete knowledge.
Violin: Ioanna Boultadaki, Carmel Curiel
Viola: Yu-Yun Peng
Cello: Maksim Barbash
Viola: Yu-Yun Peng
Cello: Maksim Barbash
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Raphaël Belfiore
text scores 37, 44, 61, 65, 70 & 126
from the book "Contents"
(version for Double Bass and surtitles)
These "textual graphic scores" come from the book Contents, created between May 2020 and May 2021. The publication consists of verbal scores written daily for a year. Within this originally textual project, the graphic scores emerged as a response to the constraints of daily writing: they allowed the process to continue when no verbal idea could be found on a given day. Composing a structure of typographic signs was, at first, simply a workaround. It gradually developed its own visual logic and aesthetic value.
Over time, these scores have detached themselves from the framework of the book and found a place within my current compositional approach. What interests me most about them is their complex status of text, image, and score simultaneously. Made of typographic symbols that have some conventional meanings, they retain a minimal textual quality (punctuation, left to right / top to bottom reading, organization in paragraphs, etc.). As images, they act as vectors for qualitative input: they suggest gestures, dynamics, speeds, tensions, or textures to be activated. As scores, their layouts refer not only to sound, but also to the physical aspects of the instrument and the performer such as the number of strings, the size and position of the bow, or the direction and quantity of bowings.
Performing these scores means bringing all three aspects together into a single act. The performance is shown alongside the original score — like surtitles in an opera — to highlight, through their difference, a shared abstract gesture. This gesture becomes a vector for mobility between music and other disciplines.
Double Bass: Pietro Elia Barcellona
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Dakota Wayne
C 📹 👋🎹🌊🎼🎤H
(for piano, electronics and video)
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek suggests the idea of ‘virtual reality’ is a poor one; instead we should think of the ‘reality of the virtual.’ If we accept that our imagination prescribes unrealized potentials to that which seems actual before our perception, we can read the virtuality of music backwards from a common notion of ‘musicality.’ The figurations, characters, and affects of the virtual space of animated sound this musicality reveals, however, are interdependent with an already-existing real – however one conceives such a notion. Medially speaking, the piano contains a reflection of the capacity of human hands: touch is inscribed upon the technics of the instrument. So, with this work, I use the hand both as pre-forming technical medium and site of transfer between actualized matter and potential virtuality, between unformed sound and fictionalized music. That everything is seen from an artificial eye and ear (the camera and microphone) can be read as not only an acknowledgement of the deterministic role our other senses play in mediating this zone of transfer, but also of the propensity of today’s recording media to further exaggerate the transfer function.
Piano: Sasha Katsalap
Electronics: Dakota Wayne
Electronics: Dakota Wayne