Vivienne Spiteri
harpsichordist

Vivienne Spiteri's work is entirely devoted to contemporary music. Since 1980, she has commissioned acoustic, electroacoustic, and interactive music for the harpsichord, in tempered and non-tempered tunings, from composers around the world.
Vivienne Spiteri believes that music is best experienced through phonology: over headphones, which offer a deep, inner and intimate listening, and through multi-speaker systems which offer the dimension of low and high relief. She has produced three solo compact disc titles:
 
Vivienne Spiteri is very seriously occupied with sound-composition, and with what she terms "electroacoustic orchestration". Initial experiments involving spatialization, over-dubbing and inner enhancement procedures appear in "the door in the wall...instrumentS d'illusion?" (kore, déploration, à perte d'espace, two pieces for harpsichord); these involve multi-track recordings of music played at the harpsichord, whereby elements such as microphone placement (3 pairs of microphones placed at strategic points in the space), specific positioning of the microphones in relation to the plucking mechanism of the instrument, and various editing, mixing, filtering procedures and other procedures, will seriously effect and put into question the perception of timbral, instrumental and spatial qualities of the sonic result. This work necessarily demands a departure from, and a re-Vision and recomposition of the originally conceived-and-notated-for-acoustic-performance score, thus raising questions of re-titling and joint-authorship of the revised and re-orchestrated/re-composed work.
Vivienne Spiteri sees an urgent need for the coupling of instruments with similar timbres to the harpsichord, and/or other plucked-string instruments, for a departure from the ill-sounding "baroque mold". She continues to commission scores for harpsichord with non-conventional and/or folkloric instruments (because that is where good timbral matches are to be found), such as accordion, steel percussion, electric and 12-string folk guitar, 5-string banjo, non-pedal harp, ch'in, koto, veena, cymbalon and mandolin. Her interest in micro-tonality and just intonation also continues. To date, she has received such scores from Bruce Mather [2], Ivo ilsson, Wendy Prezament, Elsa Justel, and John Beckwith [2]).
Vivienne Spiteri also works in the field of interdisciplinary art. She has to her credit three interdisciplinary events in various versions, which she invented and produced, and which she has performed. les villes invisibles (1994, 1993), is inspired by the literature of Italo Calvino, and includes computer graphics by Theo Goldberg. if on a winter's night a traveller... (1991) is for ambulant audience. in the stillness of the seventh autumn (1992, 1991) is inspired by the music of Brian Cherney, and unites Brian Cherney, Josquin des Prés, Morton Feldman and T.S. Eliot.
Vivienne Spiteri is unique in her approach to playing music in that she is researching - through the science of sound, music acoustics, performance and phonology - questions of time in music played at a harpsichord, the antagonism which exists in concert between space-time and music, and questions of nuance and dynamics in the context of the particular acoustic properties and physical mechanism of the harpsichord. In 2001-2002, Vivienne Spiteri will undertake an unprecedented research project concerning the spectral life of harpsichord strings when plucked by elements other than the plectra native to the instrument.
Vivienne Spiteri's writings include:
 
Vivienne Spiteri is trying to escape tyrannies, including that of tradition. Her work and ideas have been termed iconoclastic, finds herself setting precedents, a fact not displeasing to her.
Vivienne Spiteri's singular teacher is the microphone, her musical inspiration, glenn h. gould.
"eyes uplifted to the stars, she dances... to the music of her heart"
 

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