Cesare Saldicco: Spira Mirabilis

Description

English
Spira Mirabilis is a research and writing project started in 2009 and dedicated to the solo instrument with or without electronics. All aspects – from formal processes to syntax elements, through the idiomatic language – revolving around the concept of spiral, both as a mathematical representation as well as inspiration and aesthetic speculation.
Spirals become formal metaphors of different musical gestures, especially in terms of timbre and directionality, that through reading and re-reading of the sound material lead the listener in a dimension of incessant research, as suggested by the Latin phrase eadem mutata resurgo, exploring the multiple labyrinths of the psyche, ego, consciousness, spirit, selfness.
Cesare Saldicco © 2022

Between time and eternity
Giacomo Fronzi
«He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them». Jorge Luis Borges, in the dazzling tale The garden of forking paths (1941), does not just provide yet another proof of his architectural and stylistic mastery nor just a thrilling detective story, but he forces us to reflect on time and its inextricable and labyrinthine plot. Circular, linear or, perhaps, spiral? Time, history, individual and collective existence unfold through paths, sometimes interrupted, whose shape and direction escape even our imagination.
Cesare Saldicco is a composer, multimedia artist and film-maker; with this recording he enters this complex plot, building a path divided into seven stages, at the same time investigative and speculative. The seven “spirals”, composed between 2009 and 2022, investigate the qualities and tonal possibilities of as many instruments (bass clarinet, piano, violin, trombone, flute, electric guitar, soprano saxophone), in their specific potential as well in the dialogue with the electronic dimension. It is an analytical, technical and electronic digging of considerable interest, which does not simply present itself as an essay of skill (of which Saldicco has already given countless proofs during his already rich career), but, in a broader sense, as a solid and convincing research on sound, captured in its materiality, sensuality, complexity. Challenging himself with a consolidated tradition and with very different instrumental techniques, Saldicco condenses his reflection on “spirality” into these seven “sound places”, within a movement that is both progressive and regressive, on the possibilities of something new and on the return of the previous, which is the same only in appearance. Playing with the time, expanding and contracting the silence, the composer unveils, step by step, a multidimensional and very historical landscape, despite its transitory drownings in a certain impalpable abstraction.
It is here, in this ideal point of convergence between time and eternity, that musical research and speculative research are combined. Saldicco’s musical thought appears, in this work, like a conceptual exploration that turns its gaze to some of the most disturbing and uncomfortable questions: what and where is the time? Time and temporality constitute the deep heart of any experience, as well as the only framework within which music exists. Everything exists in the time, and our existence, our identity, are inextricably linked to the perception of its flow. As Paul Davies wrote, this last one is «an interior experience, rather than corporeal”. And in particular we perceive the passing of time – a sensation so distinct and pronounced that it constitutes the most elementary aspect of our experience».
Saldicco takes the question of time and movement very seriously, focusing his attention on the “spiral”, a symbol of an unfinished circularity, of a productive imperfection, of a disturbing directionality. The spiral is also a labyrinth, which Saldicco translates into musical compositions, like in the ancient Greek culture, between the III and II centuries b.C., where the image of the labyrinth was associated with dance, as well as, symbolically, with initiatory paths oriented towards knowledge. «The experiences of the initiates to the Mysteries of Eleusis – writes Karl Kerényi in his Dionysus – are merged together in literature with a labyrinthine journey into the underworld. In the sanctuary of Eleusis there was not enough space for such convolutions; at most, there was space to dance in a circle in front of the sanctuary during the archaic period […] Sophocles, in a lost tragedy, named the labyrinth achanés. Later the word was explained, attributing to it the meaning of “roofless”, which perhaps is to be related to the fact that, in Knossos, a space for dance without a roof was shown with the name of “Labyrinth”. But the philosopher Parmenides, a contemporary of Sophocles, defines with that term an entrance with open doors. The meander and the spiral line allude to an open labyrinth which, if the conversion took place in the center, was a passage path leading towards the light ». 　In conclusion, in Saldicco’s seven stages there were condensed traces of the history that marks the development of concepts, categories, symbols and questions. A settled story, from Spire I to Spire VII, that we find in the form of sounds, expectations and electronic articulations, within a refined narrative that is, at the same time, highly technical and profoundly speculative.