Oblivion: Homage to Piazzolla, for Guitar

Description

OBLIVION
Notes by Luigi Attademo

The name of Astor Piazzolla is fatally linked to the Tango, although his artistic parable is much more complex than it appears to a superficial look. Many encounters influenced his musical life. Thanks to the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein, he became a pupil of Alberto Ginastera, whom Piazzolla kept acknowledging as the greatest Argentinian composer of his century. After this educational experience and that in the orchestra of Annibal Troilo, Piazzolla encountered European music through Nadia Boulanger with whom he studied. He then began an experimentation of his own, becoming – as he said in the Sixties – a vanguardista of the tango.

In those years he met Jorge Luis Borges, with whom he collaborated for the album El tango. Here we find the Canciones porteñas (three of which are recorded here), whose lyrics evoke the tanguera mythology. These two artists cooperated in order to recover the language and music of traditional tango, beyond all stereotypes. In an interview, Borges himself stated: “yo lo estoy rescatando para una música nueva”.
The relationship between Borges and Piazzolla was limited to this cooperation, and it ended due to the differences and distance among them. However, it represented for Piazzolla a great possibility to experiment and to work on his lifelong project of renewal of Argentinian music.

Horacio Ferrer, another great Uruguayan poet and a historian who authored a fundamental Book of the Tango, immediately recognized Piazzolla’s unprecedented artistic stance and innovative power. This led to another cooperation, crucial for Piazzolla’s poetics: it included Maria de Buenos Aires and many songs, comprising the five found in this album.
Piazzolla’s music is founded on the ground of the Rioplatense musical tradition, but it aims at a synthesis between folk music and experimental elements, begetting an immediate language capable of refreshing the tango’s idiom, also employing his classical education and his knowledge of jazz music.

As stated by Piazzolla, presenting Octeto Buenos Aires, his goal “es renovar el tango popular, mantener su esencia, introducir nuevos ritmos, nuevas armonías, melodías, timbres y formas y, sobre todo, no pretendemos hacer música llamada culta”. It is not a contamination, but rather a language transformation projected into the future. His avant-gardist goal to destructure all traditional models translates into a simple and immediately recognizable music. This connects him immediately to the audience, differently from what happened to other modernist composers.

Our project originates from the wish to overcome all commonplaces about Piazzolla’s music, which risk to impoverish its original content. We propose the intimate dimension of Piazzolla’s work, through a collection of his songs, juxtaposed to original works by Italian composers of various generations. Piazzolla’s style is thus related with the multiplicity of today’s languages, abandoning the tango clichés and entering into a fruitful dialogue with contemporaneity.
The album’s title, Oblivion, signifies that the stereotyped image of Piazzolla should be forgotten if we want to repropose his music today. We find his view mirrored by other composers, whose individual languages enter a dialogue with him.

NOTES REGARDING THE PIECES
IN WORLD PREMIERE
Written for Luigi Attademo
Por verme, llorar
Cosimo Carovani
Nostalgia and longing, evoking Piazzolla and his music, in an aural kaleidoscope where tango fragments and allusive gestures emerge. An interior song appears, openly or hidden through tremolos and chords, drawing the lines of this short touching threnody for the guitar.
(L. A.)

Arenile
Edoardo Dadone
Written in January 2021, this piece comes from my fascination for the early afternoon, the hottest moment of the summer days, when nothing actually happens – but something might surprisingly happen. Consistently, nothing happens in my piece – but something might happen.
(E. D.)

Improvvisazione XII
Marco de Biasi
This piece belongs in a series of extemporaneous compositions. They aim at evoking, in spite of their written form, a constant predisposition to change, making music always living and mutable. To this goal, the initial thematic cell follows a path without pre-established structures. Moving the horizon of the events back, its thematic kernel germinates from the incipit of Balada para un loco, whose music is characterized by a spoken section of the lyrics. The voice’s cadence and the words’ rhythm elicited the piece’s rhythm and thematic mark, and it thus took life and “created itself”.
(M. d. B.)

Homenaje-Tombeau de Astor Piazzolla
Carlo Galante
Composing this short guitar piece, my goal was to pay homage to a great composer, as signified by the piece’s title. Almost immediately my memory recalled De Falla’s piece honouring Debussy, whose title I borrowed. I attempted to follow these coordinates when facing Piazzolla’s music: getting nearer while determinedly accentuating the specificity of my way of conceiving music. I chose and embraced the musical material from two pieces by Piazzolla and condensed it within a series of short and concise musical figurations, capable of building a dense musical fabric where these figures are superimposed and juxtaposed to each other. In the piece’s central section, a long melodic line is a “homage within the homage” to Piazzolla’s innate and felicitous disposition to singing. It is the precious gift of some god to the Argentinian composer.
(C. G.)

Acentos y deseos
Nicola Jappelli
Rhythmical inflections, half-lights and tacit tango gestures. Possibly this is what remains, a remnant of far echoes of listened and danced Tangos. A Piazzolla fragment emerges, suffocated by new allusions and sudden fissures from urban perspectives, accidentally illuminated by unhoped-for lyrical expansions.
(N. J.)

Lentamente si annulla nell’oblio
Mauro Montalbetti
This guitar “song” is inspired by a fragment from Borges’ poem El Tango. Compositionally, it develops through the technique of “deleting” (typical of the contemporary artist Emilio Isgrò), starting from one of the Cinco piezas for guitar by Piazzolla. Here, the spirit of sorrowful melancholy filters unemphatically in the harmonic colours and in the more typically “Piazzollean” gestures, leading, in the final section, to the only actual quote. It is the final haven of an allusive quest for the imaginary world of the Argentinian composer.
(L. A.)

Waiting for the Lake to sing
Elvira Muratore
This is the wait for a melody: not for a traditional song, but for natural sounds – those produced by an iced lake. The layer of ice is on the surface only, and, behind it, water keeps its liquid state. The presence of different matters at different temperatures gives a “voice” of their own to iced lakes. They produce the most diverse sounds, from creaks up to a deep and warm rumble. This piece therefore presents itself as an invitation for this unique voice to show itself. Sitting nearby, we wait and produce a few sounds inviting the lake to “sing”.
(E. M.)

Sueño… para las seis cuerdas
Marco Ramelli
This piece originates from the suggestions of two poems by J. L. Borges: the poem Sueño and the milonga collection Para las seis cuerdas. The composer explored the tango’s poetics, not by recalling its most immediate dimension, but rather evoking some of its elements in the dimension of dream, following the poet’s vision more than the musician’s. The form develops out of some rhythmical, melodic and harmonic elements, which are merely alluded to and transfigured as they reach a climax of intensity, later to dissolve once more in the dimension of dream.
(L. A.)

Preludio “zero”
Giacomo Susani
Even though it is not directly inspired by any single work by the Argentinian composer, this piece is led by my attention turned to his most intimate and fantastic output, particularly to the Preludes for solo piano. In some such works, Piazzolla entrusts himself to something akin to a flow of consciousness. Thematic elements are present and recognizable, but they are surrounded by a varied and unforeseeable mass of sound, blurring its features. Preludio zero is, in its own way, a homage to this undetermined form created by Piazzolla in a very genuine fashion. The title alludes both to the form of the Prelude and to my unavoidable distance from the composer’s aesthetics.
(G. S.)