A Sense of Space / Music for Tracensemble
Commission with contemporary ensemble ESMUC in Barcelona
My piece Lines of Fragmentation (2015) for trumpet, trombone and two percussionists had its world premiere on 17th February 2016, performed by ESMUC Ensemble, conducted by Lorenzo Ferrandiz Carrillo at the L’Auditori in Barcelona as part Sampler Series Festival about ‘Music and Architecture’ which paid homage to Iannis Xenakis and Edgar Varèse who also featured on the program. An article about the work appeared on the website Núvol, a digital newspaper of culture in Catalan, which states: “The first release is Lines of fragmentation (2016), from Australian Daniel Portelli. It is a combination “very difficult to amalgamate at the level of color”, as it is for trumpet, trombone and two percussionists. According to Vicent Minguet, “the Australian compares his work with a swarm of birds and their multiple movements. With this approach, Portelli retains a difficult consistency, achieved thanks to the way they draw the broad lines of an irregular nature to which the title of the piece refers.”
https://www.nuvol.com/musica/classica/sampler-presenta-esmuc-ensemble-33163
Robotic piano composition and workshop
I was involved in a robot piano workshop with Professor Peter Ablinger (University of Huddersfield) and Professor Winfried Ritsch (Institut für Elektronishe Musik und Akustik, Graz) where they brought their computer-controlled/robot piano ‘RHEA’ to the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM) at the University of Huddersfield. From 19th – 25th October 2015.
A concert of works were performed on 25 October in Phipps Hall at the University of Huddersfield. You can watch the premiere of my piece, Hyperbodies, here
Photo of Daniel Portelli with Peter Ablinger at the robotic piano workshop in Huddersfield in 2015
See Peter Ablinger’s ‘Speaking Piano’ piece, which uses the same robotic piano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4
A documentary was made by filmmaker Angela Guyton, which allows you to see inside the processes behind these workshops and RHEA’s week-long residency at CeReNeM.
Jan-May 2015 - Updates
Journal Publication – My article ‘Mapping Australia’ features in the fifth issue of the CeReNeM Journal. The journal is an online interactive website, written, edited and designed by my colleagues at Huddersfield University. Edited by PhD composer David Pocknee and web design by artist Ana Lemnaru, they have created an innovative and beautiful platform to showcase recent research in music. This issues journal covers touch, cartography, topology, nuns, pornography, synaesthesia, membranes, desire, exploded instruments, Beethoven’s piano usage, slow-motion performance, piano destruction, Australia, Big Data and trumpets.
Full Journal: http://cerenem.ricercata.org/
My Submission: http://cerenem.ricercata.org/articles/mapping_australia/page01.html
My piece Animal was reviewed in the newspaper ‘The Australian’. The piece was premiered at the Samstag Museum in Adelaide on the 12 April 2015:
“The second work premiered, Animal by young Sydney composer Daniel Portelli, drew text from the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention 2014, consisting of recollections of children who were held in detention.”
“Positioned upstairs in a balcony, sopranos from the Adelaide Philharmonia Chorus whispered their words like a hovering throng of tiny lost souls above the audience’s head. Then a burning flame, projected in slow-motion video, symbolically incinerated all memory of them.”
Multimedia work Animal (2015)
“Soundstream Collective performs Silence augmenteth grief in the year that marks the 100 year centenary of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli, acknowledging the grief caused by war which is followed by suppression and silence. Featuring works by Liza Lim and Stuart Greenbaum, with world premieres by Jon Rose, Peter McNamara and Daniel Portelli and conducted by Vienna-based Warwick Stengaards. Soundstream Collective expands its group to include electronics, string quartet, video and the Adelaide Philharmonia Chorus in this emotionally charged program of works by leading Australian composers.”
The performance is on 16 April 2015 at the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum, University of South Australia, Adelaide.
Impus Music Academy
At Impuls Music Academy in Graz, Austria I made Copy-Make (2015), an interactive video installation as part of creative series called Composition Beyond Music (from 13-25th February, 2015).
The work is a visual representation of my compositional process where physical gestures are captured and played back simultaneously as individual .gif like sequences repeating at different rates in a 3 by 3 grid, on transparent paper.
Program note:
Meeting with composer Richard Barrett
At Impuls, i had the opportunity to meet with composer Richard Barrett and have a comprehensive discussion about composition and my creative practice.
Memory Tape
Performed by:
Stephen Menotti – Trombone
Ellen Fallowfield – Cello
http://www.cellomap.com/
http://www.en.eunoiaquintett.com/musicians.html
With reel-to-reel tape machines and small speakers spread out across the room playing samples of tapes crackling.
Performed at St Pauls Hall at Huddersfield, UK
LIVE: CeReNeM PGR Daniel Portelli rehearsing w/ Ellen Fallowfield & Stephen Menotti. Premiere tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/Doq7EYisVQ
— CeReNeM (@HuddCeReNeM) 4 February 2015
Tokyo Music Festival - 2014 Updates
Composer Bruce Crossman reports from the Asian Music Festival 2014, held in Yokohama and Tokyo 1-7 November.
“Australian composer Daniel Portelli produced a work of living breath that undulated its way into being. Portelli’s piece, entitled Undulations, explored shakuhachi-like breath qualities of two soprano saxophones whose long airy dronal qualities were reed-stabbed with dabs of colour which gradually grew in density and tension before subtly subsiding back into breath tones. The unpredictable inevitability of the shifting dabs of colour harkened to Jackson Pollock-like ‘blue poles’ of sound. This visual approach to sound is something that the late venerable Peter Sculthorpe identified as an Australian approach to sound perhaps drawn from a visual landscape culture and certainly expressed in his Sun Music series.”
Living Breath, Juxtapositional Flow and Emergent Spirit
My performance at Soundstreams Emerging Composers Forum in Adelaide on 4 November 2014 won the Winston Music ECF commission of $1500 for my piano multimedia work, Mapping Australia (2014). Performed by Gabriella Smart, the concert was recorded to be broadcast on ABC Classic FM’s New Music Up Late program on 29 November at 10:30pm. I was also asked to write a new work for the Soundstream Collective.
Daniel recently represented Australia as the Young Composer Representative at the Asian Music Festival 2014 in Tokyo and Yokohama from 1-7 November 2014.
My piano work Mapping Australia (2014) was chosen by a jury to be performed at
Soundstream: Adelaide New Music Festival.
This is what was said about the competition: “A large number of works were received and the mentoring composers, Stephen Whittington (AUS), Melody Eotvos (AUS) and Jan-Bas Bollen (Nl), acknowledged that the selection process was intense, due to the quality of the works submitted. Melody Eotvos commented on the outcome: ‘the five scores that we did choose will certainly all be very strong contenders for the commissions.’
Here is a media article about my work Undulations (2014) for two soprano saxophones:
Works by Crossman, Dillon, Pertout, and Portelli at the ACL Festival in Japan
I participated in an insightful workshop by the Social Anthropologist Tim Ingold, at Leeds University. Run by CePRA (Centre for Practice-Led Research in the Arts).
The event focused on Ingold’s research into overcoming the distinction between ‘practical’ and ‘intellectual’ craft, and related problems such as the tension between ‘creativity’ and ‘research’, or whether we might think of a new word – not ‘research’, not ‘scholarship’, but something else instead – to describe the generation of new knowledge.
http://www.cepra.leeds.ac.uk/events/tim-ingold-seminar-workshop/
I have been selected to represent Australia at the Asian Composers League Young Composer Competition at the 32nd Asian Composers League Conference and Festival, 2-7 November, 2014 in Yokohama and Tokyo, Japan, with my work Undulations for two soprano saxophones.
I participated in a workshop reading session of my work Falls and Rises (2014) with soprano singer Peyee Chen as part of the Centre for Research in New Music Program (CeReNeM) in Huddersfield, England.
Started a PhD at Huddersfield University (UK) in 2013 with main supervisor Liza Lim and co-supervisor Julio D’Escrivan.
2010-2012 – MA (hons)
Completed a Master of Arts (Hons) in composition at the University of Western Sydney with principle supervisor Bruce Crossman and co-supervisor Ian Stevenson.
My orchestral work Finding Kensho was performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra as part of the Cybec 21st Century Australian Composers’ Program – with mentoring by Australian composer Nigel Butterley. See work here
Western Sydney University graduation exhibition of Fine Art, Electronic Arts and Music at Bay 19, Carriageworks, Everleigh, Sydney, 2009. The exhibition, Watershed at zed end, marked the end of ‘Z block’ and the Fine Arts and Electronic Arts degrees at Western Sydney University. Much of the footage was shot locally in at South Creek in St Mary’s, Mt Druitt, and on Cockatoo Island.
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