Francesca Verunelli: Songs & Voices

‘Songs & Voices’ is a large-scale sound fresco in which Francesca Verunelli uses compositional techniques to explore the absence of singing and the vibrant, colourful silence of the echo of an imaginary singer.
In her Five Songs (Kafka’s Sirens, 2016), the driving force behind her instrumental sound research is the presence of singing in the absence of the voice, a kind of aporia that, like Kafka’s paradox, aims to shift the boundaries of the instrumental ‘visible’.
For Francesca Verunelli, this question naturally leads to a second question: What is the voice in the absence of singing? The voice as pure presence, without its Orphic function? It was the exploration of this other half of the question that led to the integration of a vocal ensemble into this musical journey, which takes place between two extremes, absence and presence, singing without voice and voice without singing.