Nuages

Nuages, for piano trio and Smartphone Orchestra, was created in a collaboration between Arnold Marinissen and the Smartphone Orchestra team, for the occasion of the 2017 Storioni Festival. It was premiered as the final piece in the closing concert, on 28 January 2017 in Muziekgebouw Eindhoven. Claude Debussy’s Nuages, the first movement of his orchestral work Nocturnes, served as a starting point and inspiration. It fired off the composition process, sets the initial mood for the work, and sound snippets, mostly considerably transformed, can be heard in the course the work. Marinissen created the structure of Nuages, composed the music for piano trio, and made the outlines of the material for the Smartphone Orchestra. The Smartphone Orchestra team then used those outlines to create the material that sounds through the smartphones of everyone in the audience who is in the possession of a smartphone, and who links up with the system. Each smartphone is addressed individually by the Smartphone Orchestra system, receives a musical part in the form of an audio file, and contributes this to the performance, through its tiny loudspeakers. This way, an infinitely detailed spatial sound system is created by means of all the available smartphones. The piano trio performs together with the music that sounds through the smartphones. The result is a new type of triple concerto: a work for piano, violin, cello and indeed an orchestra of smartphones.