Why Call a Piano Piece a Night Song?
Night Songs began as late-night improvisations before becoming a printed score. The passage from recorded gesture to notation makes memory part of the work’s construction.
Published edition preview, Da Vinci Publishing. Reproduced from the publisher’s own product page. Image source.
The performance came first. In his introductory note to Night Songs, Tommaso Farinetti describes seven single-take piano improvisations recorded in Munich during the night between 31 October and 1 November 2023. The pieces later reached the page through listening back to those recordings.
This order changes the familiar relation between score and performance. Instead of beginning with a text from which an event is made, the composer begins with an event that has already happened. Notation becomes a way of deciding which features of that event can be given another life.
Farinetti identifies a particular instrumental condition: a grand piano prepared with felt. The altered contact changes the sound’s attack and resonance. A note’s beginning, its continued presence and its disappearance become part of the material the later transcription has to consider.
A recording can retain the exact duration of an event. A score offers another kind of precision, setting relationships that a future performer must realise through a different instrument, room and touch. The two documents therefore preserve different things. A notation cannot simply contain every acoustic detail of a night’s playing.
The composer also recalls reading Heiner Müller’s Traumtexte. That connection belongs to his account of how the pieces emerged; it should not be turned into an invented literary programme for every phrase. It gives memory, image and language a place in the project’s history while leaving the individual music to establish its course.
The title Songs supplies another useful point of contact. An improvised line may acquire the sense of a voice through its continuations and pauses. On the printed page, those relationships become available to another musician, who must find a way of giving the line its breath again.
Night Songs consequently offers more than a general nocturnal atmosphere. It records a movement between playing, recollection and writing. The score allows a past event to become the condition for a new performance, keeping something of its origin while opening it to another person’s attention.
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