The world premiere of Daniele Ghisi’s An Experiment with Time for ensemble, video and electronics will be performed in Milan (Teatro Litta) on 26 January by the Divertimento Ensemble.

The piece will open the XIII concert season of Rondò 2016, whose artistic director is Sandro Gorli. The work takes its title from an essay written in 1927 by the Irish aeronautical engineer and philosopher William Dunne. This essay recounts how Dunne devised and conducted an experiment on himself, meticulously taking note of his own dreams and counting how many of the them related to the past and how many to the future. The fact that the two resulting counts were more or less the same led him to conclude that during sleep there was no distinction between before and after: all instants of time occur simultaneously. Is the passing of time then an epiphenomenon of consciousness?

In this work Ghisi explicitly and freely gives expression to Dunne’s experiment and recount through the visualisation of an animated diary. The sounds of the animation are rendered partly by the instruments of the ensemble and partly by electronics. An experiment with Time is a recount, a game and a journey by way of a superimposition of temporal cycles that depicts the world and life as an immense polyrhythm. An Experiment with Time was commissioned by Ircam-Centre Pompidou and the Divertimento Ensemble in collaboration with Ulysses European Network.



An Experiment with Time (Reloaded)
per video, ensemble and electronics (2015)
WP: Milan, Rondò 2016, Teatro Litta, 26 January 2016 – Divertimento Ensemble   
fl (also bfl and picc), cl (also bcl and cl.in mib), pn  vln  vla vc -  electronics
Duration: 50’