Martijn Tellinga

Martijn Tellinga’s ‘of two / six by 2’ is a site responsive piece for pianos and acoustic resonances. Evolving over six consecutive days through moments of both activity and near-stasis, the work probes the different states of intersection between concert and installation moving in and out of place. This Rozenstraat exhibit will be the first public presentation.

Two concert piano’s are centrally placed. They remain opened for the full duration of the exhibition, with music scores and chairs in place and dimly lit. Facing the piano’s from opposing sides are two small speaker drivers lowered from the ceiling. Besides this imminent scene, the space remains empty.
The speakers carefully emit a slowly shifting interval of two electronic tones, different every day. The tones are chosen from a series of six, matching the six strongest resonances of the space. They provide the material for a durational melody, unfolding over six days. Corresponding in frequency with the spatial dimensions of the room, the tones are naturally amplified: causing the space to quietly hum at its inherent pitches. The resonant tones now envelop the piano’s, omnipresent and physical without being loud. Wandering around the gallery, highly specific modulations of the interval can be experienced, changing from step to step.

Every day, pianists Dante Boon and Reinier van Houdt visit at an individually chosen and unannounced moment. Following their arrival, they perform their daily part lasting two hours. If or for how long they meet each other is unknown. You might be there to witness, or not. Daily, they play one movement of a combinatory graphical score. It instructs how evolving tones, chords and phrases can be played around, on, and geometric to the resonant tones heard in the space and, potentially, in response to the other pianist. The specifics of their playing as soloists and as duo are left to their discretion, enabling to evolve their reading of the score as the piece progresses.

Articulating and pushing the static tones into movement, the two pianists will cause a shifting topology of highly place-specific acoustic instances to arise within the space, the experience of which is dependent on the ever-evolving relation between one’s position as a listener and the performed material at a given moment.

Martijn Tellinga is an artist, composer and occasional performer. His practice fuses elements of concert, installation and performance art. Drawn from a reduced formalist-seeming vocabulary, his work centres on the exploration of sound, listening & musical methods to express ideas of space, place and process: their reciprocal production, contextual intertwining, and potential as a perceptual, performative and social medium. Much of his work is score-based. It includes a wide variety of conceptual actions and chance operations, probing the emergent field between intended and accidental occurrences. His current work questions how a concept of musicality as a generative, post-media compositional device can be imagined and developed through installation work.

www.martijntellinga.nl