Regarded as “one of the most influential percussionist of the last 30 years” (Modern Drummer – Michael Bettine – 6/04), since 1974 Centazzo started to perform solo concerts and later, since 1998, multimedia shows, using an array of 200 percussion instruments and the latest models of digital percussion linked to the computer, creating a sonic landscape and interacting with his own videos projected in the background.
Here you have a selection from “Eistein’s Cosmic Messengers” produced by LIGO and NASA and more plus the new projects’ presentation.
… On Thursday night Caltech hosted the world premiere of “Einstein’s Cosmic Messengers;’ an astrophysics-infused multimedia concert by Andrea Centazzo aimed at artistically interpreting the relativistic phenomenon of gravitational waves…
The event took place in Beckman auditorium as an interdisciplinary effort to describe. celebrate and interpret the cosmic waves, a major consequence of Einstein’s theory of gravity that has fascinated physicists for nearly a century. The centerpiece of the evening was a whirling artistic exploration of gravitational waves by Andrea Centazzo, an award winning percussionist and multimedia artist.
In what was most likely the world’s first ever musical interpretation of gravitational waves, Andrea Centazzo ended the evening in an appropriate display of percussion, vibration, resonance and imagery. The concept of the performance was conceived by Centazzo and Michele Vallisneri, a theoretical physicist at JPL, and the multimedia written and compiled by Centazzo. The artist sat surrounded by percussion instruments, synthesizers and, of course, his MacBook, emanating vibrations from the stage in what must have been an audio wave analog of two colliding black holes. An animated Centazzo spun and pounded amid a backdrop video montage saturated with images of historical scientists, numbers. equations. spinning galaxies and computer simulations of propagating gravitational waves. The video was appropriate accompaniment for a mostly percussion-based musical piece… Ultimately, the five part performance demanded one of the most essential qualities of any great scientist, patience…
The bridge between science and art has never been easy to construct, but with these three masters plugging away from opposite ends, on Thursday night we may have gotten as close as we’re ever going to get.
Dennis Callahan, The California Tech
