For the New Music/Research Focus Day Topic of “Percussion and Movement,” I would like to propose a performance of Pierluigi Billone’s 2011 percussion solo “Mani. Gonxha.” The piece is a part of his larger series of percussion solos, each with the subtitle “Mani” (Italian for “hands”). Each piece in the series is dedicated to particular artists or historical figures and the work that their hands achieved. In the case of Gonxha, the historical figure in question is that of Mother Theresa, one of the major figures of 20th century Catholicism. The program notes for the piece read:

“Mani. Gonxha is an intensely intimate ritualistic experience for the performer that becomes naked and exposed when placed in front of an audience… Through the use of two Tibetan singing bowls – traditionally sacred instruments used as a signal to begin and end periods of silent meditation – Billone extracts a rich soundscape featuring a variety of impacts, timbres, resonances and harmonics one would not imagine could be produced by a single source. The bowls are an extension of the hands (Mani). They become part of the performer, just as the performer himself becomes part of the resonating body. The slightest contact between various materials – metal, skin, bones, torso, and voice – multiplies and propagates sound through the performing body and into the open.”

I propose this piece because the body’s movement is integral to the sounding of the bowls. Billone’s unique, graphic notation calls for sweeping circles of the arms, elegant weaving of the hands, gentle taps on the hollow cavity of the stomach, and more. Each movement is connected to a specific sounding result, lending an inherent theatricality that is not second to the music, but integral to it. Through this marriage of movement and sound, these separated elements begin to take on each other’s qualities. Over time, even the readjusting of the bowls in the hands, the most subtle movement of the fingers, becomes musical.