ID#: 631

Hammerklavier (2024) ; 4:54

by Antonio Argentieri

Conservatorio Niccolò Piccinni

Antonio Argentieri’s “Hammerklavier” is an acousmatic composition that reimagines the sonic potential of the piano through radical extended techniques and innovative digital processing. The work is constructed entirely from recordings of non-traditional piano gestures—scraping, striking, and manipulating the instrument’s strings, frame, and body—revealing a hidden world of resonances, percussive attacks, and spectral textures that transcend conventional pianistic expression. At the core of Hammerklavier is a sophisticated computational approach: custom Wolfram Language algorithms are employed to deconstruct and recontextualize raw piano samples, generating intricate timbral mutations and gestural transformations. This algorithmic intervention allows for an organic evolution of sound, where the boundaries between the instrument’s acoustic identity and its digitally abstracted counterpart become increasingly fluid. The result is a dynamic, percussive soundscape that merges human intuition with machine-driven recomposition, offering a listening experience that is at once immersive and unpredictable. Rooted in the electroacoustic tradition, Hammerklavier engages deeply with questions of materiality and abstraction, exploring the tension between the tangible, physical properties of the piano and the intangible, ever-shifting sonic architectures created through digital processing.