Music for Ensemble

Iayxie was written in 1979 during the summer courses at Sargiano, held by Aldo Clementi. On that occasion I was able to bring together some of the best students of the course, creating a sort of illusory large orchestra made up of 19 highly heterogeneous instruments.

The piece was also a preparatory study for the work I was already developing in Wayang Purwa, for oboe and orchestra. Everything arose from a play on timbres and the non-ordinary sounds of the instruments: sound materials that became music through the poetry of timbre, rather than through the traditional articulation of notes.

In Objet d’art, timbral decomposition replaces harmonic perception and, in part, rhythmic perception, rising to a secretly poetic dimension.

Le erbe nella Thule is a composition in three parts inspired by three poems by Harry Martinson: Dora, Il cigno and Cimitero. The literary text acts as a formal constant: the voice does not sing the words of the poems, but sound fragments drawn from the original Swedish text, giving rise to a kind of abstract madrigal.

Il libro dell’interrogazione poetica I is the first part of a six-section composition inspired by Creation and Genesis. The work is based on a series of numerical relationships. The macrostructure contains two kinds of centres: ff-beat strokes of tom-toms and bass drum, and beats on the silence, the empty centre, which release energy. The interrogation becomes poetic when emotional desire and the idea of the search for beauty meet.

Il libro dell’interrogazione poetica III is based on resonance. A large set of gongs and tam-tams constitutes the primordial sound: its resonance passes to other metals, the brass instruments, whose breath in turn passes to the voices, in a magical and constructive circle where everything is the resonance of something else and everything enriches what is yet to come.

Kammerkonzert n. 1 was written in 1986 for the Israel Festival in Jerusalem. In two movements, the piece explores the perception of different planes and perspectives of time, dynamics, rhythm and timbre from the same “solo” musical part: in the first movement the flute emerges as the prominent part, while the other instruments extend its resonance; in the second, all the instruments become like a single instrument.

Kammerkonzert n. 2 was written in 1989 for the Philharmonisches Kammermusik Collegium Berlin, a group of soloists from the Berlin Philharmonic, and premiered in Sophia Antipolis, in southern France, during the celebrations for the centre’s twentieth anniversary. Dedicated to the memory of Giacinto Scelsi, it is a chamber concerto for ten strings without soloist.

La lingua della soglia arises from the study of the traditional musics of Central Africa and, in particular, from Simha Arom’s research on the music of the Aka Pygmies.

Some elements of those musical practices — ambiguity of pitches and durations, polymeter, the technique of hochetus, the polyrhythmic interconnection of accents, timbres and attacks — become materials capable of enriching the operational system of the composition.

Barravento begins with the study of traditional Afro-Brazilian music and the attempt to see how some of its elements might encounter and enrich the operational system of the composition.

In the practices of candomblé, barravento is also a rhythm and indicates the instant immediately preceding the propulsion into trance: a threshold of transformation, instability and possession.

Nimrud is a reflection on what no longer exists: ancient cities devastated and destroyed, now pure testimony to history and civilization. In a polyrhythmic fresco readable at different depths, the music comes into contact with the memory of what no longer exists and yet still persists in an illusory, or invisible, form.

Palmyra, subtitled polyrhythmic monody, was born as an intimate reaction to the destruction of ancient cities and sacred places in the Middle East. It was not conceived as a public gesture of denunciation, but as a silent way of giving form to an inner revolt.

The score is a dense web of rhythmic lines that, in the listener’s perception, tend almost to become a single melody: a trace left on a white page, in a desert where Palmyra, Nimrud and many other places no longer exist.