The concept of MINIMAL SUITE lays in the title: on one side the ‘Baroque’ and its forms while on the other the ‘drained ’ approach of the minimalism (usually the word connotes a specific musical genre but here it is conceived mainly in its broader sense: an attitude based on the economy of the music materials and the synthesis in the formal development). The portuguese word ‘barroco’ means ‘irregular’ indicating the corrugated surface of the wild pearl and was used to summarize the features of a very complex historical period in which the paradoxical, the bizarre, the ‘maraviglioso’, the transgression of the rules and the asymmetry where seen as means to express something new and free. However this is not in contrast with the ‘minimal’ nature of the musical contents which are almost ‘self evident’, without any lavishness, and the fragmentary forms that host them; like the lines of the children drawings that outline things often bearing a naïf component, they can dive, by virtue of that, to the core of those objects. This two extremes, the ‘overloaded’ baroque ‘halo’ and the dry ‘minimal word’ cohabit creating a dialectic stylistic ‘short-circuit’ that is the essence of this work. The composition is formed […]
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We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd. (Filippo Tommaso Marinetti – Manifesto del futurismo, February 5th, 1909) METROPOLI is part of a wider project commissioned by the City of Milan for FuturisMI, a series of events organized for the centennial of the foundation of the Futurist movement: it was the result of the union of ‘LUCI FUTURISTE – Maree Multicolori e Polifoniche’, a video-opera produced by the Castagna-Ravelli Studios and ‘Il suono della guerra dei suoni’, an electronic music work […]
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VISIONS is another step of my research on concise and short form; indeed is a sequence of ‘musical visions’ everyone with a specific harmonic and timbrical connotation linked together in a longer formal arch. It was premièred in Son[UT]opìas CampUSculturae 2013 in Santiago de Compostela and was commissioned by the Atlas Ensemble of Amsterdam, a unique instrumental group that includes in its line-up musicians coming from different cultures all over the world. Specifically the instrumentation of this composition calls for sho, duduk, clarinet, baritone sax, pip’a, two percussion players, erhu, violin, viola, cello and double bass. The instruments are considered mostly as sound sources and are integrated analogically in families that enlarge the usual orchestral colour palette; there is not any kind of ethnic approach towards them, even if their specific technical and functional features are taken into account. The piece has its fulcrum in the percussions and pip’a parts that are the backbone of the composition around which the ensemble exists, in a relationship ‘quasi concertante’ and of mutual influence.The music material is obtained from simple and basic elements (i.e. the chromatic scale, the fifth interval etc…) regarded as primary objects to be repeated and transformed along the development flow while the rhythmic layer […]
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QUATTRO CANZONI POPOLARI for string quartet and electronics was commissioned by the Xenia Ensemble for the Estovest Festival 2014 as part of a project dedicated to the relationship between contemporary and folk music, a theme which has always been of interest to me. Particularly it is a work inspired to the traditions of the western valleys of Piedmont towards the border with France, connected to the Occitan and Provençal traditions. Part of my family comes from there and it was an ideal opportunity for me to delve into the folk music of that area and in my roots, (re)discovering a forgotten inheritance of deep importance. The Fondazione Revelli of Cuneo, partners in the project, put their archive at my disposal, especially the recordings made in the early ‘70s by Nuto Revelli (*) in which the older members of the community recounted, in song and verse, of a mysterious and harsh world where they struggled to survive in terrible conditions and in wars, but where ‘singing’ was deemed an essential element, a relief of emotions, a cathartic ritual. There are three different semantic layers in QUATTRO CANZONI POPOLARI that move in parallel directions: the first is the direct testimony of the voices, […]
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FIVE FRAGMENTS was written for Wu Wei and Ernest Rombout during the Atlas Academy 2012 organized by the Atlas Ensemble in Amsterdam. The basic idea was to blend together the two instruments in a unique organism through the creation of a ‘meta-instrument’ in which the different timbrical features would be totally integrated. The composition is made up of five fragments, as the title says, the first and last of which constitutes the formal frame of the work; the common element is the conciseness and the research of synthesis through an economical choice of the music material and the development reduced to the bare minimum. The linguistic components I have chosen are ‘traditional’ but ‘defunctionalized’ and without any recall to their historical inheritance; they are conceived as ‘objects’, syntactical fragments, smallest building unities in relation only to themselves: the second fragment is composed by a sequence of fifth intervals duplicated on itself, the fourth on harmonic conglomerates deduced from the distribution patterns of the pipes of the sheng and on a basic chromatic scale, the first and the last are built around a multiphonic of the oboe while the third put together an element again gathered from the fingerings of the sheng and […]
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DIE LIEBESMASCHINE, litterally ‘the love machine’, is the transfiguration for string quartet of the two Tristan-Lieder by Richard Wagner ‘Im Treibhaus’ and ‘Träume’. The original musical text is kept in its integrity but transferred towards the high, in an ‘otherwordly’ dimension, unreal, imaginary, ‘ghostly’ (almost all the composition uses artificial harmonics); the voice is, however, absent, the singing is implied, only its ghost aura indeed remains. It is music that comes from an already unreachable and lost dimension, lost as are the leading actors of the events, both literal and real; it is expression of a feeling that is not more possible to stage, the expression of which lingers in a frozen state, displayed only by means of a ‘machine’ that can only simulate it. Inaudible fragments of the text are combined with the score pointing out poetic suggestions, debris that arise from a distant memory almost inaccessible: Im Treibhaus … Schwere Tropfen seh ich schweben …. … umschlinget wahnbefangen öder Leere nichtgen Graus … (‘I can see heavy drops slip’ / ‘and insanely you grasp the empty horror of the desolate nullity’) Träume … Träume, die wie hehre Strahlen … … Allvergessen, Eingedenken! ….. … und dann sinken in […]
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DUO I for basset horn and percussions was composed for MITO Settembre Musica 2009 and premièred there by Michele Marelli and Riccardo Balbinutti; the composition receives its origin from SOLO I for basset horn carrying on its path and broadening it. The idea of the ‘archipelago’ constellation that branches out from a central core and expands in different directions is the basis of the conception of this composition; DUO I is a ‘microcosm’, ‘an irregular grouping of similar things’ (according to one of the possible definition of the word ‘archipelago’), a ‘galactic’ system linked together by a deep but not immediately perceptible musical bond, a maze where it doesn’t exist a single path of interpretation given once for all. The fragments that form it are seven, the four from SOLO I to which the percussions were added together with other three new ones, to build the new jointed configuration that follows: I – II – (new) – III – (new) – IV – (new) The musical connection of this microstructures is given by the materials used to assemble them, primarily the semitone and fourth intervals which, beyond their immanent value, are conceived as two ways to arrange the chromatic universe […]
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V somrak zvoni, na gozdove pala je tema; tiha pesem, ko da hoče od sveta.. Proč… in tam bi onemela tam bi ugasnila in to sivo, težko žalost v večnost potopila… (Srečko Kosovel) Tolling in twilight, on the woods darkness has fallen; a silent chant, as if it would detach from the world. Far… and there it yearns to fall silent, there, to die out and sink into eternity this grey, heavy sadness… (Translation from italian by Stefano Pierini) V SOMRAK ZVONI is a composition for choir with accompaniment of lithopone, particularly a model built by the slovene sculptor Pavel Hrovatin; the instrument is made of eight stone discs tuned to different pitches with very differentiated timbres, they were hit by two percussion players with big mallets producing a unique and magic sonority. The language of this piece is much in debt with the great vocal tradition of the second half of Twentieth Century, especially connected to György Ligeti’s and Luigi Nono’s works; the polyphonic texture of the piece is very dense and the lines are highly chromatic, resulting in a thick and moving mass punctuated by the lithopone colours. The text […]
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The composition is inspired to the music I had the opportunity to listen to during a sema in Konya in Cappadocia; the sema is a musical sufi ceremony that represents the individual journey towards the Perfection and it is a specific version of the dikhr (the worship meditation prayer similar to the catholic Rosary or the jewish Tefillin) attributed directly to Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, the founder of the Order. It is music with a strong spiritual impact, performed during the dances of the whirling dervishes; the musical time is suspended, circular, the percussions pulsation is very slow and support the long and complex melodic line of the ney (the most important type of middle eastern flute), usually in heterophony. The ritual is divided in four sections of which the first has an introductory function and is made up of one or several Taksim (literally ‘improvisation’) that symbolizes the detachment from God. TAKSIMLER is subdivided into two connected movements conceived as a singular symmetrical three-parts form (the formal ratio is roughly 3:2:1). The role of the flute is essentially melodic: a very slow melos is developed, modulating in fifths and containing inside ‘flaking’ elements of the linear contour like grace notes, harmonics […]
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ZU FLÄCHE is inspired by ‘Punkt und Linie zu Fläche’ (‘Point and line on plain’) by Vassilij Kandinskij, the essential properties described by the russian painter are rethought in musical terms and give life to an étude on the timbre and on the syntax of sound. The two instruments are in dialogue and merge in a unique ‘abstract’ entity, a ‘composition’ in a Kandinskian sense, through a movement that from the music goes to the painting and come back to music. The composition was composed for the Cseallox Duo to whom is dedicated.
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This composition was realized as the last test for the Composition Diploma at the Conservatory ‘G. Verdi’ of Turin; it is the last scene of ‘Mariana Pineda’ from the same name folk ballad by Federico Garçia Lorca the subject of which is the affair of Mariana de Pineda Muñoz, a liberal heroin lived in Spain at the beginning of the XIX century and who was executed for her opposition to Ferdinand VII and her belonging to the connected revolutionary movement. The orchestration involves a very large orchestra, a female choir located on the sides of the stage, one children choir and five soloist voices (three sopranos, alto, basso profondo).
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Japanese Gagaku music, which is the inspirational source for this composition, is a music world which has attracted me from a long time. I felt the urge at some point of my music research to explore it and ‘translate’ some of it into my language deeply rooted in the western music tradition, with all the critical distance I think is necessary in such a process. Hence this occasion to compose a new work for the Seainx Project was the right one I was looking for and is the continuation of a work I started with Naomi and Ernest some years ago. The idea behind the conception of ‘Kyoshin no yuragi’ is the fusion of the horizontal (melodic) dimension with the vertical one (harmonic) which gives birth to a complex sound entity through a process where the sound resonance is developed with the electronics and start to oscillate and vibrate transforming itself progressively. The form of the piece is conceived keeping in mind peculiar aspects of Gagaku music concerning the harmonic-melodic approach and its structure is built upon the exposition of the eleven traditional aitake (chords) used to support the traditional melodies. Once they all have been presented the piece ends […]
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MINIMAL SUITE for alto sax and percussions
METROPOLI for electronics
VISIONS per ensemble misto
QUATTRO CANZONI POPOLARI for string quartet and electronics
FIVE FRAGMENTS for oboe and sheng
DIE LIEBESMASCHINE for string quartet
DUO I for basset horn and percussions
V SOMRAK ZVONI for mixed choir
TAKSIMLER for flute and prepared piano
ZU FLÄCHE for baritone sax and cello
SCENA LIRICA da Garcia Lorca for two sopranos, alto, bass, children choir, female choir and largee orchestra