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SOLO I for basset horn

Year of composition : 2009

 

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 Berlin Tag’ class=’berlin-en-2’>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 second and the third are polyphonic-melodic études while the fourth gets back on the idea of the concise gesture but through a more extended expansion and a stronger onomatopoeical connotation. The music materials used for each of the études is of different nature: that one of the first fragment is built out of a sequence of thirteen pitches, that represents the exposition, quasi paradigmatic, of the incomplete total chromatic (the lacking F# will have a structural role in the third fragment while the repeated E is the tonal horizon of the second fragment); the intervallic profile consist of a chain composed by six seventh intervals, the last of which is interpolated with a fifth interval, and are allocated on a dynamic arch that starts with the fff and fade out into the breath. The second is made up of two opposed melodic lines that move diachronically in parallel motion at fixed distance (a twelfth interval), dialoguing with an ‘onomatopoeical’ contrasting element based on special trills through which the formal articulations develops. The chain of the melodic intervals is  divided in groups of four thirds transformed with the addition and subtraction of semitones; their rhythmic values are controlled by multiplication coefficients (2x, 3x, 4x, 5x) applied to a primary value (the quaver). The rhythmic phrasing is grounded on a iambic accent pattern (short-long) and the length of the phrases are organized with a ‘nested’ distribution in which every component is grafted into the other. The dynamic plan is fixed on a general p ended with a final burst that relieves the ‘onomatopoeical’ element. The structure of the third fragment is symmetrical to the previous ones: here the there are two lines that move in parallel motion but in this case synchronically, with variable distance and with a intervallic profile different for each (the lower line through neighbouring intervals while the upper one in wider leaps with microtonal inflections). The melodic material is composed of a series of multiphonics of two sounds allocated in three melodic ‘phrases’ followed by an ending desinence and articulated by a contrasting element built on a F# and its fourth B. In this case too the rhythmical level is controlled by a ‘iambic’ foot based on the crotchet and multiplied with the coefficients 2x and 3x while the dynamic one is again established on shades of p, but now with a slight reduction of the intensity, as if the sound comes from a ‘outer’ space. The fourth, as said before, gets back on the idea of the stylized gesture of the beginning and broadens it: the model is the alternation of very fast sections of the chromatic scale arranged in all the registers of the instrument in which other elements of very contrasting character are interpolated breaking their pace and articulating their development.