Composing for piano today is, from my point of view, one of the most demanding challenges: the composer needs to deal with an instrument which is heavily charged of history that even the single pressure of a key opens a thousand of musical echoes and references, more or less far in time, which roar in the ears. And that is still valid if one chooses alternatively to work ‘off the keyboard’ and to concentrate on the other components of it; in the same way, or even more one could say, the saturation is immediate and cumbersome. Deeply plunged in this scenario and looking to find my ‘own’ piano, I chose to put in connection all those different aspects, accepting the historical load, especially for what concerns the performing technique more that the linguistic one, to try to develop and create an ‘extended’ tool able to shatter its own limits and known sound world. The work, which is part of the cycle SOLO for solo instruments, is based on three different layers: the acoustic piano which is handled in a ‘traditional’ way with all its overwhelming past; the synthetic piano which is an invented instrument built on a varied and complex […]
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I was commisioned by the Camerata Variabile to compose a new work which had to be in relation to the topic of the concert which was the ‘fragment’ and the result is ‘Fragmente von der Vollkommenheit des Unvollendeten’ where I made a jump back to a language I was more familiar with in my beginnings as a composer and which I have amusingly ‘brushed up’ for this occasion. It was premiered by Karin Dornbusch at the clarinet and Christopher Dangel at the cello. photo © Stefano Pierini
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This composition is born as a part of a project dedicated to Igor Stravinsky that should have been realised to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of his death but, due to the difficulties connected to the pandemic situation, it did not take place in that occasion. I was asked to compose a new work with some connections with his music and which could convey evidence of the influence on my music developments as a composer and, possibly, on my artistic conception. This opportunity pushed me to read and listen again his scores, to reflect on what I have assimilated from them and finally to get directly in touch once more with his music world which, even if almost always there, was a bit more in the background of my research, with the opportunity to (re)discover works which I know less and going deeper in his creative conception. After a moment of preparatory study I left what I have absorbed to sediment in me and allowed myself to be carried away from that sound flux waiting that, as in a spontaneous chemical reaction, those elements would combine together to give life to new musical forms from which I could gather the compositional […]
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‘In a concert season dedicated to the anniversary of Beethoven an homage to the Orchestra would have not to be missing. Pierini chose a minor piano work by Beethoven, the Rondò a capriccio op.129, very loved by virtuosos as a brilliant concert piece, and transformed it in a Ipevariation, that is something beyond the concept of metamorphosis of the music matter. This Rondò indeed is a perfect example of how Beethoven’s music was manipulated from the beginning and, after all, still today, for commercial purposes of pure personal vanity. The Rondò a capriccio was published posthumous in 1828 by Diabelli, who falsely declared to have found it ‘vollendet’, complete, between the composer’s papers while it was not finished really. Moreover, a note on the first edition reported that the manuscript had a title ‘Die With über den verlornen Groschen, ausgetobt in diner Caprice’, the rage on a lost penny mitigated in a Caprice. Pity that the title was not by Beethoven’s hand but most probably added by the pernicious secretary Anton Schindler. In pierini’s version, Beethoven’s rage transforms itself from Wut to Zorn, which means the same thing but put a slight ironic distance from the greatness of the artist and the huge celebrative apparatus that […]
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‘On comprend par là que la poésie est anarchique dans la mesure où elle remet en cause toutes les relations d’objet à objet et des formes avec leurs significations. Elle est anarchique aussi dans la mesure où son apparition est la conséquence d’un désordre qui nous rapproche du chaos.’ (‘Le théâtre et son double’, Antonin Artaud) This composition is part of a cycle for solo instruments and electronics on its way of realization, the parts of which are all identified by the title ULTRAVOX and characterised by the fact that they are dedicated to a particular figure of the culture of our times with whom I have a specific bond. Each one of them has in common with the others the ground concept: the music materials are gathered from recordings of the actual voice of the subject of the piece and, through sound analysis and de-composition of some fragments, they are rethought and reworked by means of the electronics and put in dialectic communication with the instrumental matter. In the case of ULTRAVOX I the voice is Antonin Artaud’s and, in a more specific way, the recording of his final work ‘Pour en finir avec le judgement de dieu’ which […]
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DREI SZENEN is composed by three abstract scenes, ‘without a story’, populate by obscure characters who tell of mysterious and indecipherable deeds of which is not given any chance of comprehension and interpretation (if that is possible at all anyway…). The texts are drawn by the collection ‘Klänge’ by Wassily Kandinsky; in 1913 he created a book which included his own poems side by side with original xylographies in the attempt to conjugate the two dimensions in a single context, an attempt which remained unique in its genre and never repeated by the painter. The language used, by itself, is constructed with a special attention to the words sound and their rhythmic structures (the author defined it a ‘musical album’), hence it is quite naturally to set it in music. The composition music material I have selected is dry and essential, oriented toward the sound quality of the word and to susatin and support the theatrical gesturality which is implied in them; for this reason I have chosen the title ‘Drei Szenen’, three short scenes perfectly accomplished and defined within their ambiguity. The voice and the cello therefore move in symbiosis and in dialogue, the first of which including, whenever […]
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RIZOMA I is part of a cycle of four compositions which bears the title RIZOMATA (‘roots’) each connected to one of the natural elements: fire, air, water and earth. The general idea is inspired to the four founding principles of the ancient greek philosophy (from here the title) and every one is set to a text of a different author who deals with the subject from a different perspective. The common feature though is that in every of them the considered element appears to be missing or unreachable and acquires its meaning through that lack, creating a distance that becomes a presence and a ‘identity’ itself. It is de facto a negative ‘cosmogony’. The text of RIZOMA I is ‘Le point noir’ by Gérard de Nerval in which the author describes a common physical phenomenon that everyone of us has probably witnessed: after staring directly at the sun a black spot remains impressed on the retina and, for a certain amount of time, overlaps itself on everything we look at hiding the shapes and making us aware that we are not able to watch the star directly, it is painful and its strength is too powerful for our possibilities, only the eagle […]
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The history is filled with examples of composers who searched for new forms of expression in the music of the past masters; some focal works that arose specific musical issues were metabolized by the following generations that ‘translated’ and transformed them in new shapes enlarging the music language and thinking in many ways and degrees. This work belongs to that ancient musical practice but from a different conceptual point of view: the current case, more than finding new form of expression, is an ‘act of love’ towards a composer of immense stature whose music represents for me a inexhaustible source of inspiration and pleasure. The title of the composition is borrowed from a poem by Pietro Bembo and describes well the subject of the work: an interpretation of six Monteverdi’s Madrigals, three with voice where the original text is conceived as a ‘palimpsest’ of which only some fragments remain in the new context, and three for string quartet where the music text is faithfully respected but developed timbrically. In the Madrigals with voice Monteverdi’s music is analyzed and explored mainly by the string instruments through a process of deconstruction and transfiguration of its most relevant elements while the voice is regarded […]
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SOLO IV is a piece composed by three sections, three études each one developing a aspect of the instrumental technique of the oboe and with a precise stylistic connotation. This work is the result of the collaboration with Ernest Rombout with whom I had the opportunity to deepen my knowledge of the oboe and experiment interesting solutions through a ‘trial&error’ process that led me to the choice of the materials I used in the composition. More precisely we worked on specific multiphonics, different emission and embouchure techniques, alternative uses of the reed, etc. The electronics has an important role and is conceived as an alter ego of the acoustic instrument: the dialogue between the real oboe and the virtual one happens through the timbrical complementarity and the fusion into one unique ‘meta-instrument’ in which the continuous cross references from one to the other create the structural elements where its form articulates. For the première the reproduction system of the electronics used was a mono device widely used (the Bose Soundtouch 20 specifically), conceived as a alternative sound source but with projection characteristics the more similar to those of the acoustic one. SOLO IV was composed and is dedicated to Ernest Rombout for […]
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QUADERNO KOSOVEL is inspired by the Slovenian poet Srečko Kosovel who wrote during his short life, 22 years, an enormous number of poems of the greatest value (which is not fully appreciated yet). He lived across the First World War of which his work experiments the ‘extreme sense of life’ and bears all the mortal wounds of it: like one of the pines in the Carso often described in his poems with the roots sticked into the hard land while its foliage is shaken by the wind, Kosovel lingers to his roots but is agitated by the explosive changes coming from outside the borders and, as a catalyst, assimilates and transfigures them through his being a poet. The composition is articulated in four moments, everyone related to a text, four ‘voiceless madrigals’ in which the word is implied, four ‘soul landscapes’ where the relation between the written sign and that one which is heard is investigated in a space of Listening inbetween two polarities (Music/Word), where the sense should and has to be assembled swaying from one to the other. Thus the listener free of movement in this space will choose her/his own interpretation path, overlapping the two poles […]
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I drew the inspiration for this composition from Vincent Van Gogh, a paradigmatic artist to the art of whom I feel very connected. The title includes the two elements which are at the basis of the work: the ‘canzone’ as a musical form and narrative mean and the ‘sol’ (in italian it has a double meaning: the ‘sun’ and the pitch G) both as symbol of creation and destruction as well as a sound frequency (all the musical material of the piece is deduced from the partials of the first string of the double bass). The idea behind the use of the harmonic spectrum of G, beyond the playful wordplay, is to use a ‘raw’ matter obtained from the physical phenomenon directly (the ‘natural landscape’ of the painter) and artificially transform it passing from the ‘natural’ level to that one of ‘art’ (the eye of the painter) which is exactly the process that Van Gogh describes often and in details in his letters. However these two dimensions are not detached but live together and are interpolated between the two instruments in a constant dialogue or, it would be better to say, in a osmotic relationship, as parts of the same entity. The texts […]
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‘[…] the pieces are often short, even miniatures, but it’s as if that smallness of scale makes you aware of some gigantic vacuum around them.’ (Tom Service, A guide to György Ligeti’s music) The piece is composed by eight parts that are the development and expansion of SOLO I for basset horn (through the mid step elaboration of DUO I for basset horn and percussions); the resulting complex combination gives birth to a ‘archipelago’ constellation, a kind of ‘microcosm’ of musical events tightly linked together through analogical relations and sharing the same music material. Every section has in common with the others elements of different kind (the ‘accent’ element, the ‘tremolo/trill’ element, the intervallic profile of some of the sections, etc.): they are developed and inserted in various contexts and, through their not immediately perceptible and distant relations, provide coherence to the composition. The fragments lay on ‘attraction pitches’ that define the harmonic level: they are twelve (the total chromatic), allocated along the formal arch. The general scheme of the fragments sequence, with their general character and the attraction pitches, is the following: I. Gesture (from Solo I) – G#, C, […]
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‘The work of a craftsman, which it would easily be a paraphrase, becomes, in the hands of a great composer, ‘secondary’ art (in other words, a comment, a gloss, a topic about), but for this reason art of no less quality. Liszt interprets (in the etymological sense) the text and, in turn, the performer has to interpret his interpretation. It is an operation squared, that seized Verdi and Bellini through Liszt, but perhaps and more, Liszt through Verdi and Bellini’ (from ‘Le parafrasi di Liszt’ – Michele Campanella) PARAFRASI DEL NERO is a composition inspired by some of the last piano pieces by Franz Liszt, particularly ‘‘Nuages gris’, ‘Unstern! ‘, ‘Trauer-Gondel n.1’, ‘En rêve’ e ‘Bagatelle sans tonalité’, in which the musical matter drains and reduces itself to its own skeleton, a shade compared with the vital and flourishing previous production, especially for what concerns the piano music. Repetition without variation, monody as final melodic synthesis especially because connected with the polyphonic instrument par excellence, harmony that rotates on itself symmetrically but without a real direction, sclerotic and obsessive rhythms are all elements of the ‘new’ poetics of the last Liszt that open unheard and mysterious prospectives, nobody went […]
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SKETCHBOOK is, paradoxically, a vocal composition, a madrigal without voice, whose text is implicit and only visible in the score; the connection between music and words, here in its extreme abstraction, is what generates the compositional process: is the attempt to put in music not the word in its completeness but only its reflection, in the same way of a inner reading, without its vocal emergence. The inspiration of the composition is drown from Edward Easting Cumming’s ‘In Just-‘, written in 1916, that describes a children’s game scene set in a muddy street of a unspecified city during the spring; to the event takes part an old weird and disturbing man who brings some balloons and gathers those kids around him blowing violently in a whistle. The meaning of the poem is something ambiguous: the narrator seems to be a child who expresses himself by means of a creative and free use of the language and who describes what he sees in a direct, fragmented and visionary way; what is going to be experienced is a very dynamic moment, with huge energies, coordinated by this dreadful character but, at the same time, of the utmost attraction. The old man bears on himself […]
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καιρος (Kairos) is a greek word that means an undefined period of time in which something special happens, on the contrary χρονος (Chronos) is related to the logical and sequential time: it is the quality of time opposed to its quantity. KAIROS for string quartet was composed for the international conference Time Machine Factory 2012 organized by the Astronomical Observatory of Turin in collaboration with the Politecnico University that had as main subject the Time and the possibility, from the scientific point of view, to travel through it. In this context it was conceived this composition, a sequence of seven sections representing ‘specific moments’ the time of which is suspended and almost without a real direction; the parts are grouped in two categories, those ones named ‘Melos’ that develop the horizontal linear dimension through a ‘melodic tendency’ that however never becomes a real melody line and those named ‘Ensemble’ that develop the vertical harmonic dimension. In the ‘Ensemble’ I and III the rhythmical parameter is almost nullified while in the II is an element of utmost importance, worked up by means of polyrhytmical patterns; the ‘Melos’ moments, as said before, present a linear contour gradually elaborated heterophonically and that involves, starting […]
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Il concetto di questa composizione è contenuto nellʼambiguità del suo titolo: da una parte la Cadenza come oggetto musicale e allora il ʻDeʼ è inteso come la particella latina riferita ad un argomento da trattare ed osservare, dallʼaltra la ʻcadenzaʼ come attitudine e destino e allora il ʻDeʼ è inteso quale connotazione di un ʻcadereʼ specifico, quello relativo al deterioramento e alla consunzione.Inoltre la funzione della Cadenza è, per sua natura, di sospensione: il discorso si interrompe per un momento e lascia intravedere ʻaltroʼ; è un momento attivo in cui lʼelemento di rilievo è il movimento verso un apice, il ʻcorporaleʼ in primo piano, è lʼidea del frammento in qualche modo decontestualizzato (la Cadenza senza il suo Concerto…) che è in grado di aprire uno spazio enorme nella sua pur estrema brevità. La composizione si articola in dieci momenti secondo questa successione: I Eingang 1 II Cadenza 1 III Cadenza 2 IV Cadenza 3 V Intermezzo VI Eingang 2 VII Cadenza 4 VIII Eingang 3 IX Cadenza 5 X Clausula La Eingang I e la Clausula condividono lo stesso materiale musicale; anzi, l’ultimo frammento porta a compimento ciò che nel primo era stato solamente accennato, lo completa e […]
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秋來ぬと 目には爽に 見えねども 風音にぞ 愕かれぬる (Fujiwara Toshiyuki no Ason) (Although to the eye it cannot clearly be seen that autumn has come, still I find myself surprised by the whisper of the breeze) (English translation by stefano Pierini) SCENA D’AUTUNNO, inspired by a haiku composed by the japanese poet Fujiwara Toshiyuki no Ason (?-907), is an étude on the relations between timbre and harmony and, at the same time, a research on the resonance considered both from the physical point of view connected to the duration of sound in time and from that one of the perception and the ‘persistence’ in the memory of the sound itself. The ‘pretext’ of the composition is the Autumn, interpreted as a ‘metaphysical’ season of changing, despoliation and tension towards ‘stasis’ (the Winter); a moment of impermanence, transition and transformation towards a new state. The composition is structured in three sections, each developing the previous one and broaden it: three ‘variations’ in which the time stretches and decelerates while the sound expands in space and resonates to the limits of its physical capabilities, conquering the musical horizon completely. The music material, very homogeneous, almost redundant, is conceived as a […]
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I had the first contact with Wu Wei and the sheng in 2009 in Amsterdam through the Atlas Ensemble and a new music world opened to me: I discovered the magic sound of this instrument with its stunning versatility that combines the characteristics of a wind instrument together with the possibility to produce complex harmonic textures. Although belonging to a very connoted music tradition, the sheng is not overwhelmed by that; on the contrary, its flexibility fits very well with the needs of a contemporary composer as I am and, with the huge catalogue of its different techniques, becomes an ideal ‘new’ tool to work with. I have made two versions of SOLO III, a first one that was premièred in Tokyo on the December 25th, 2012 and in Berlin on February 2013 but not more existing, and this one that was premièred in the Composers Festival in Krakow on the April 2015. The piece is made up of five parts in the following sequence: I – Gesti 1 II – Melos 1 III – Figura IV – Melos 2 V – Gesti 2 The musical gesture is the main object of sections I, III, V, […]
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SOLO II is a suite of études on the short form written for the Composition Workshop held by Fabio Nieder in the Scuola Civica in Milan and performed during Milano Musica 2010 by Alfonso Alberti. The sequence of the fragments, each of them with a different character and a different stylistic inspiration, is the following: I. Pendulum II. Rima III. Arabesque IV. Umbra V. Lullaby VI. Hommàge
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In the beginning of 2009 I received a commission to compose a piece for the 1st International Basset Horn Festival organized by Peter Geisler (the eminent former basset horn player of the Berliner Philharmoniker) that took place in Germany in Kandern during the spring of the same year; I accepted with enthusiasm and curiosity since I had not the chance to work on that instrument before and I made a research on it looking for new and hidden aspects of its technique. I worked on it deepening some specific features that interested me and the result was SOLO I, premièred on May 22nd, 2009. It is made out of four ‘music objects’, four fragments expressing different emotional conditions (and it could be said existentialistic too), inspired to some canvas by Paul Klee (‘The mask and the little flag’ – 1925, ‘The shelter’ – 1930, ‘Embrace’ – 1939, ‘The prisoner’ – 1940) developed through the dialectic contrast of their elements. Two have a ‘gestural’ character while the others a melodic-harmonic one, following a very simple model of formal symmetry. The first fragment particularly is a very short chromatic gesture, a kind of ‘stylized scream’, to define it through a metaphor, the […]
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INVENZIONI (Solo V) for piano and its synthetic double
FRAGMENTE VON DER VOLLKOMMENHEIT DES UNVOLLENDETEN for clarinet and cello
CLOCKWORKS for large ensemble
LUDWIGS ZORN for large orchestra
ULTRAVOX I for doublebass and electronics
DREI SZENEN for countertenor and cello
RIZOMA I for soprano, ensemble and electronics
CANTAI UN TEMPO (dopo una lettura di Monteverdi) for soprano and string quartet
SOLO IV (THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST) for oboe and electronic device
QUADERNO KOSOVEL for piano, violin and cello
CANZONI AL SOL for voice and doublebass
PRELUDI for basset horn and string orchestra
PARAFRASI DEL NERO for six instruments
SKETCHBOOK for ensemble
KAIROS for string quartet
(DE)CADENZE per clarinetto e quartetto d’archi
SCENA D’AUTUNNO for piano
SOLO III for sheng solo
SOLO II for piano