dedicated to Anish Kapoor

Closing concert Dirty corner by Anish Kapoor. La Fabbrica del Vapore | Milan, Italy, January 2012

40 tubas, 5 contrabass tuba soloists, 6 percussions, choir, extended vocal technique soloists & live electronics

“The fusion between music and sculpture is complete: Dirty Corner, a 60 meter long and 8 meter high corten steel tunnel becomes a listening space but also a real musical instrument, used by the musicians to contain, produce and spread vibrant and haunting sonorities. Besides the forty-five tubas, coming from nine Italian academies of music and two ministerial bands, the Avital’s work counts on six percussion instruments, a fourteen voice chorus and four soloists. Three conductors will hold the concert. The tubas, placed at the ends of the Dirty Corner, will dialogue together, while the cymbals, the gongs and the work itself played by percussionists will accompany the sound of the brass.”
(Abitare magazine)

“Talent on the international contemporary music scene (...) an impressive organic and never experienced (...) A musical composition for excellence and creativity.”
(Domus Magazine)

Sample score - Download

A one-of-a-kind large-scale sonic experiment, GARON (in Hebrew - "throat") is a unique contemporary concert designed to involve the public and performers in an architecture of sounds and structures.

GARON is a journey of listening, written in an unknown language - archaic and new at the same time, with an exceptional overwhelming orchestration, used for the first time in the history of music: 45 tubas (ranging from contrabass Tubas to Euphoniums - the tenor tubas) are the foundation of this sonic mass (in a symphonic orchestra usually there is only one tuba player), 6 percussions, 1 large choir of professional singers, soloists of extended vocal techniques and non-musicians, 3 conductors, 1 programmer for the live electronics played in 12 speakers.

GARON is a visionary journey that takes the audience and the musicians through a path made of acoustic, electric, polyhedral and tridimensional sounds: premiered January 2012 as closing event of Anish Kapoor's Dirty Corner site specific installation in Milan, and considered as one of the most ambitious musical projects created in the city for years. A large heterogeneous audience composed of enthusiasts of classical and experimental music joined together into a surprisingly large crowd of spectators, rarely seen in contemporary music concerts; entire families decided to participate in this extraordinary event, attracted not only by this unusual music formation but also by its unique architecture of listening.

GARON creates a tridimensional sonic tunnel in which the spectator is invited to explore freely its entire richness, walking between the musicians alternating sound architecture perspectives, sometimes standing, sometimes sitting or even laying down on the floor.

The dialogue that GARON had created with the world premiere performing venue and Kapoor's sculpture could be repeated in any large indoor environment crossed by a narrow corridor created by an architectonic detail, a physical material (metal, wood, cloth, plastic) or virtually (for example with the help of light design).

The musical score of GARON presents fifty minutes of constant elaboration of basic primordial sounds: breath, rumour, shout, constant drones, crystallized fragments. Each moment is shaped till its minimal detail, each musical gesture is defined and coded, but the overall result does not bring the listener to a state of orientation, quite the opposite. It is as if time and environment transform into a blurred endless context, an abyss composed strictly by Materia. No melodies, no harmonies, no musical narrative, only structure and strong gestures.

Using a massive sonic ensemble positioned in chosen points in space gave Avital the possibility to shape sound around the listener almost as a physical material. The structure within the score is a nesting of constant transitions between opposite parameters (silence & sound, low & high, dense & rare), in reference both to the cone shape of the tuba (and also of Kapoor's sculpture) as to an experience of walking between light and darkness.