UC Irvine

Mauro Lanza and composer-technologist Andrea Valle’s cycle Systema Naturae (2013- 17) combines acoustic instruments with computer-controlled mechanical sound objects. The first work of the cycle, Regnum animale, surrounds a string trio with a circle of computer-driven, electro-mechanical devices, whimsical creations that offer a second life to discarded consumer electronics such as hair dryers and electric knives. Every performance of Regnum animale will be different, as the jerry-rigged mechanical objects necessarily break down or malfunction, as part of an instrumentarium in a state of constant becoming. Regnum animale thus represents a paradoxical combination of ideals. The composers demand extreme rigor from themselves and their performers. Yet both composer and performer blend their efforts with the the contingent sounds and rhythmic qualities of found and discarded consumer objects. Lanza recomposed five of the Regnum animale for orchestra as the basis for Anatra digeritrice (Piccola Wunderkammer di automi oziosi) (2014), inspired by the Eighteenth-century inventor Jacques de Vaucanson’s duck automaton Le Canard Digérateur (1739). Although the recomposition imparts a certain a sense of depth and grandeur to its source, Anatra remains, in Lanza’s words, «a little collection […] of precision-made mechanisms that move about pointlessly». Lanza’s The Kempelen Machine from 2015 celebrates Wolfgang von Kempelen’s speaking machine developed at the end of the 18th century by orchestrating the results of a humanmechanical voice hybrid. 1