INVISIBLE CITIES
Le Città Invisibili (2021), composition in 11 movements for microtonal/prepared accordion and quadraphonic audio system, is inspired by Italo Calvino’s masterwork which explores imagination through brief prose poems describing fifty-five fictitious cities that are narrated by Marco Polo to the emperor Kublai Khan. His descriptions can be read as parables or meditations on culture, language, time, memory, death, or the general nature of human experience.

THE MUSIC
Jacomucci has chosen eleven cities, one for each group, and composed a music piece inspired to those descriptions. Each of these short compositions is based on a specific resource or technique of the microtonal/prepared accordion.

Jacomucci’s compositions are originated from an intimate knowledge of the accordion and characterised by a highly sophisticated feeling for its sound and expressive potential. He has explored on a deep level the instrumental most extreme sounds, extended techniques, reshaping re-inventing the sonic possibilities of the accordion.

In the live performance of the work, the accordion interacts with its alter-ego on the loudspeakers being mirrored by a quadraphonic audio system. In fact the electro-acoustic support is used mainly to multiply accordions, changing the source and direction of sound, echoing, distorting, amplifying and highlighting the microscopic world of sound of the instrument that is hardly audible in a normal acoustic listening.

No type of sound processing has been performed on the sounds reproduced by the speakers, not even filtering or equalisation.

THE INSTRUMENT
“In 2004 I wrote three cadenzas of a concerto for accordion and orchestra in which the composer had asked me to tune three reeds a quarter of a tone lower. These few reeds have generated an unimaginable quantity of very fascinating tonal combinations. In the following years, I continued the ‘sabotage’ of this instrument (a Pigini Sirius), tuning a quarter of a tone lower the reeds of some registers in the right manual, only in one direction of the bellows - like on the diatonic accordions. I changed the order of the higher reeds on the reed-blocks, bringing them in a relationship of 12th with the lower registers. I then experimented with some types of "preparation", removing the reeds and leaving the sockets open, I applied pieces of metal in contact with some reeds, I inserted small stones into the holes of the reed-blocks. In the left manual I tuned a quarter tone higher only one row of reeds in the reed-block, in this way I maintained the standard twelve tones button keyboards.
Just as children take apart and destroy toys, I have played around with the accordion without the pretension of designing a "serious" instrument and it will probably remain a very personal experiment. But the possibilities it offers are very peculiar and I really enjoyed discovering new sounds.
I thought I knew everything about the accordion but this research made me rethink and find new ways even with the traditional accordion: harmonics, multiphonics, sound beats, upward bending tones, adjustable multi-timbral registers, various distortion of the prepared reeds, varied air sound.
I probably would never have found these sounds without the guidance of Italo Calvino! His fabulous book forced me to research what the instrument had never revealed to me before”. (Claudio Jacomucci)