Romina Daniele
Encyclopedia
Romina Daniele is an Italian
Italian people
The Italian people are an ethnic group that share a common Italian culture, ancestry and speak the Italian language as a mother tongue. Within Italy, Italians are defined by citizenship, regardless of ancestry or country of residence , and are distinguished from people...

 exponent of the vocal extended technique
Vocal extended technique
Vocalists are capable of producing a variety of extended technique sounds. These alternative singing techniques have been used extensively in the 20th century, especially in art song and opera...

 and an avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

 singer, a composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

 of electronic
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...

 and experimental music
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...

, vocalist and performer associated with contemporary music
Contemporary classical music
Contemporary classical music can be understood as belonging to the period that started in the mid-1970s with the retreat of modernism. However, the term may also be employed in a broader sense to refer to all post-1945 modern musical forms.-Categorization:...

, writer, photographer. Since the 2005, she has been working on sound research in the fields of vocalism and electronic music.

In 2005 she has been awarded with the Demetrio Stratos
Demetrio Stratos
Efstratios Demetriou better known as Demetrio Stratos was an Italian lyricist, multi-instrumentalist, music researcher, and co-founder, frontman and lead singer of the Italian progressive rock, jazz fusion band Area – International POPular Group.Born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, of Greek...

 International Prize for musical experimentation for the emerging artist best project, proposing the project Diffrazioni Sonore (RDM, 2005–2010).
The Career Awards have been received by Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás is an American avant-garde composer, vocalist, pianist, organist, performance artist and painter.Galás has been described as "capable of the most unnerving vocal terror", with her three and a half octave vocal range. She often screams, hisses and growls...

 in 2005, Meredith Monk
Meredith Monk
Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.-Life and work:Meredith Monk is primarily known for her...

 in 2007, Fred Frith
Fred Frith
Fred Frith is an English multi-instrumentalist, composer and improvisor.Probably best known for his guitar work, Frith first came to attention as one of the founding members of the English avant-rock group Henry Cow. Frith was also a member of Art Bears, Massacre and Skeleton Crew...

 in 2008, and Fátima Miranda
Fátima Miranda
Fátima Miranda is a Spanish singer and researcher born in Salamanca. She has a bachelor's degree in history of art, with a specialisation in modern art. As a singer, her compositions touch several genres like Mongol Song or Indian Dhrupad. She has investigated the human voice and created...

 in 2009.

She has been a finalist at ‘Premio Nazionale delle Arti' (Arts National Award) for Electronic Music and New Technologies, presenting the composition for voice and electronics La Prova, taken from her second record Aisthànomai, il Dramma della Coscienza (RDM, 2008-2010) in 2010 edition, and presenting the unpublished electro-acoustic composition La Natura Assente in 2011 edition.
In 2011 she has been awarded with the 'Arci Award' for musical experimentation

promoted by the Italian contemporary music centre "Centro Musica Contemporanea" in collaboration with the Italian cultural associations Arci

, presenting a preview from her new unpublished work titled Spannung. The related concert took place at the big stage area of "Carroponte" (Sesto San Giovanni, Milan) in July 2011.
The project has been presented in its different stages during the last performances as well, while detailed information has been given by the artist on the occasion of the 'Arci Award'.

Between 2006 and 2011, she presented her work and research at many prestigious festival like Arezzo Wave
Arezzo Wave
Arezzo Wave is a famous Italian festival that takes place every July in Arezzo since 1987.Born exclusively as a launching platform for young Italian rock groups, in its current form, the festival lasts six days and is totally free of charge...

 
, Electronika Festival
, Aterforum Festival - during the meeting with Meredith Monk
Meredith Monk
Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.-Life and work:Meredith Monk is primarily known for her...

 

, 5 Giornate per la Nuova Musica Festival - with which she has been collaborating since 2008
, Intermidia Festival - Slovakia; gaining attention from the international press as well.

Life and Works

Daniele was born and grown in Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...

 
, where she studied classic dance and classic guitar, and started to write poems, tales, songs, to paint and to photograph since she was a child. In the Nineties she participated to exhibitions and was noted and mentioned by local and national magazines. The poems written between 1995 and 2005 are today part of the collected poems book Poesie 1995-2005, English and Italian bilingual edition (RDM, 2010).

After the studies on Art criticism
Art criticism
Art criticism is the discussion or evaluation of visual art.Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty...

, aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

 and Cinema at the University of Naples Suor Orsola Benincasa
Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples
The Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples is a university located in Naples, Italy. It was founded in 1864 and is organized into 3 departments.-Organization:The university is divided into 3 departments* Education* Law* Letters-External links:...

, and that in vocals with Auli Kokko (singer for Daniele Sepe
Daniele Sepe
Daniele Sepe is an Italian musician, known internationally for interpreting protest songs from around the world.His first instrument was the flute, which he played at the San Pietro a Majella conservatoire...

's band), Daniele focuses herself in musical activity moving to Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...

  in 2005, where "the climate for experimental singing is more receptive", and where she received the Stratos Prize and has gone through different professional experiences as well.

During the academic year 2006-2007 she teaches the results of her vocal research included in the record Diffrazioni Sonore at "Crams School of Music" in Lecco (Italy), working for collective experimental laboratories, concerts, and individual lessons as well.

Diffrazioni Sonore, released in 2005 and her first album project, "consists entirely of multi-tracked, and entirely improvised vocal music, some of it treated digitally (radical EQ, echo, and a little reverb), but otherwise left well enough alone", and is focused on the relationship between improvisation and construction.

The second record Aisthànomai, il Dramma della Coscienza, released in 2008, for voice and electronics, is focused on sound research in the fields of vocalism and electronic music, including compositions with texts in Italian, English and French.

Consisting of textual philosophizing more abundantly, it can been read like a theoretical work, an organized anthology and a poetical-musical form.

As Rick Moody
Rick Moody
Rick Moody is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of...

 writes, Daniele's approach seems to come more from the wilds of literature, and particularly from the wilds of European philosophy, than from any rigorous background in music. Both the two released records are, in fact, loaded with literature references, as a quick look at the booklets points out. They both include "theoretical line texts" which look like essays or manifestos; on one hand these essays explain the foundation of Daniele's musical activity, coming mostly from contemporary philosophy, in particular from the French philosophy by Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...

, Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...

, Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...

 and the theoretic-linguistic vision by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian film director, poet, writer, and intellectual. Pasolini distinguished himself as a poet, journalist, philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure...

; on the other hand, as Dionisio Capuano remarks, "her theoretic will can hamper the total fruition".
In the interviews Daniele declares herself to be devoted to "feeding doubt and a whirlpool of feelings, my primarily aim is structuring thought: a human one." Otherwise, music with new technologies is elected as research device, superior to every other one, in the study on the human being; in the same way, the voice is the most powerful mean of human expression, from an anthropological, physiological, and linguistic point of view, and just secondly a musical instrument
Musical instrument
A musical instrument is a device created or adapted for the purpose of making musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. The history of musical instruments dates back to the...

.
In particular:
Diffrazioni Sonore is a result of the research I have been conducting since 2000 in a number of areas: voice, composition by electronic means, philosophy applied to multimedia. Studying film history and theory, art criticism and aesthetic analysis, I approached the fields of thought that my research is based on, which include Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...

’s philosophy and Michel Chion
Michel Chion
Michel Chion born in 1947 in Creil, France, is a composer of experimental music. He teaches at several institutions within France and currently holds the post of Associate Professor at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle where he is a theoretician and teacher of audio-visual...

’s theory applied to film, a multimedia art form. I am referring specifically to the linguistic and morphological foundations of my work, by virtue of the relationship between, and coexistence among, different languages, including voice, poetry, writing, music, electronics, art, thought, man. (Romina Daniele on the Rumpus)


In the interview on the "Rockerilla" magazine, she also mentioned film-makers and painters as influences for her musical work: "Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...

, Friederich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...

, Jusepe de Ribera and Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, KC was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England...

, David Lynch
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...

 and Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian modernist film director, screenwriter, editor and short story writer.- Personal life :...

."
Between 2006 and 2008, during the work on her second record Daniele wrote the essay Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, Il luogo della musica nell'audiovisione (RDM, 2011), in English: the site of music in Audio-Vision, title which reminds to two previous studies, one is the Site of Film by Christian Metz
Christian Metz
Christian Metz may refer to:*Christian Metz *Christian Metz...

 
, the other is Audio-Vision by Michel Chion
Michel Chion
Michel Chion born in 1947 in Creil, France, is a composer of experimental music. He teaches at several institutions within France and currently holds the post of Associate Professor at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle where he is a theoretician and teacher of audio-visual...

.
As a matter of fact, the essay is the dissertation thesis with which Daniele degreed Cum Laude in Cinema Studies, supervised by professor Augusto Sainati from the Sorbonne
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...

 of Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, who has been studying the cinema combining the semiotic analysis and the historical and sociological points of view for a long time.
The Daniele's thesis is focused on the relationship between music and image in the cinema, conducted trough the detailed analysis of the French movie Ascenseur pour l'échafaud
Elevator to the Gallows
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud is a 1958 French film directed by Louis Malle. It was released as Elevator to the Gallows in the USA and as Lift to the Scaffold in the UK. It stars Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet as criminal lovers whose perfect crime begins to unravel when Ronet is trapped in an elevator...

(1959) by Louis Malle
Louis Malle
Louis Malle was a French film director, screenwriter, and producer. He worked in both French cinema and Hollywood. His films include Ascenseur pour l'échafaud , Atlantic City , and Au revoir, les enfants .- Early years in France :Malle was born into a wealthy industrialist family in Thumeries,...

, with soundtrack by Miles Davis
Miles Davis
Miles Dewey Davis III was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including bebop, cool jazz,...

. Furthermore, Daniele honours the Davis soundtrack covering the piece Nuit sur les Champs-élysées in the second record.

At the end of 2008, she starts studying electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...

, as post graduate studies, at the Milan Conservatory
Milan Conservatory
The Milan Conservatory is a college of music which was established by a royal decree of 1807 in Milan, capital of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. It opened the following year with premises in the cloisters of the Baroque church of Santa Maria della Passione. There were initially 18 boarders,...

, which led her to one of the finalists for the 'National Award of Arts' in 2010 and 2011.

In the same year she also starts working in the field of silent movies screened with live improvisations by a collaboration with Riccardo Sinigaglia
Riccardo Sinigaglia
Born in Arona in 1953, Riccardo Sinigaglia is an architect as well as musician. He teaches electronic music at Milan Conservatory where he studied during the seventies with Angelo Paccagnini....

 Electro-acoustic ensemble.
Between the 2008 and 2011 she dedicated herself to literature production, publishing the books mentioned above and the essay Il dialogo con la materia disintegrata e ricomposta, un'analisi di Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) di Luciano Berio (RDM, 2010). It is an analysis of Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) by Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.-Biography:Berio was born at Oneglia Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian...

, described as the first electro-acoustic composition in the history of western
Western
Western may refer to:* Western , a category of fiction and visual art centered on the American Old West** Western fiction, the Western genre as featured in literature* Western music, a type of American folk music-In geography:...

 music
Contemporary classical music
Contemporary classical music can be understood as belonging to the period that started in the mid-1970s with the retreat of modernism. However, the term may also be employed in a broader sense to refer to all post-1945 modern musical forms.-Categorization:...

 made entirely with voice and elaboration of it by technological means. The voice was that of the great American avant-garde singer Cathy Berberian
Cathy Berberian
Catherine Anahid Berberian was an American soprano and composer. She interpreted contemporary avant-garde music composed, among others, by Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, John Cage, Henri Pousseur, Sylvano Bussotti, Darius Milhaud, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati , Igor Stravinsky.She also interpreted...

, reading from the Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...

 by James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

. Thus, this book is categorized as a biography
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...

, and also as an autobiography
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

 as can be found in Google Books. On the other hand, Daniele has been working on the essay Voce Sola (Solo Voice) for some years, a book describing her aesthetic and linguistic research in all fields of her activity, mostly focused on music and vocalism.

Considering the contemporary
Contemporary classical music
Contemporary classical music can be understood as belonging to the period that started in the mid-1970s with the retreat of modernism. However, the term may also be employed in a broader sense to refer to all post-1945 modern musical forms.-Categorization:...

 western
Western
Western may refer to:* Western , a category of fiction and visual art centered on the American Old West** Western fiction, the Western genre as featured in literature* Western music, a type of American folk music-In geography:...

 music and its twentieth-century history from the Musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...

 to the experimental music
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...

, to the most recent experiences on technology applied to music, her work seems focused on a kind of electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...

 as sound research or sound art
Sound art
Sound art is a diverse group of art practices that considers wide notions of sound, listening and hearing as its predominant focus. There are often distinct relationships forged between the visual and aural domains of art and perception by sound artists....

.
From the vocal point of view her work is focused on the transfiguration of the song form through the organic changing of the voice, vocals-electronics assimilation, the dramatic
Dramatic soprano
A dramatic soprano is an operatic soprano with a powerful, rich, emotive voice that can sing over, or cut through, a full orchestra. Thicker vocal folds in dramatic voices usually mean less agility than lighter voices but a sustained, fuller sound. Usually this voice has a lower tessitura than...

 experimentation on the text
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

-vocals, sound poetry
Sound poetry
Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging between literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words"...

 and the total theatre-song
Musical theatre
Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...

:

(...) A peculiar combination of different disciplines including theatre
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...

, philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

, aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

 and electronics used as a movie soundtrack
Soundtrack
A soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, book, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the...

, can be seen as a real opera of avant-garde theatre
Experimental theatre
Experimental theatre is a general term for various movements in Western theatre that began in the late 19th century as a retraction against the dominant vent governing the writing and production of dramatical menstrophy, and age in particular. The term has shifted over time as the mainstream...

. Romina Daniele put herself in front of the audience stimulating it and producing a thrilling and a charming sound with vocals creating dark/shining atmospheres throwing the listener in a lyrics-voice-music spiral that oblige us to confront with ourselves. (Alessio Arena on Drexkode)



Although, as Moody remarks, Daniele's work "is not only complex, only demanding, only methodical, but, actually, though it has its challenges, it is also playful, sweet, sometimes funny, and, on occasion, rooted in an appreciation of vernacular music like jazz, blues, and pop."

Discography

  • Diffrazioni Sonore (RDM, 884502382761, 2005–2010)
  • Aisthànomai, il Dramma della Coscienza (RDM, 634479662485, 2008–2010)

Writings

  • Il dialogo con la materia disintegrata e ricomposta, un'analisi di Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) di Luciano Berio (RDM, 9788890490514, 2010)
  • Collected Poems (RDM, 9788890490507, 2011)
  • Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, Il luogo della musica nell'audiovisione (RDM, 9788890490590, 2011)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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