The aesthetics of Mario Totaro’s oeuvre tends to subsume the great Western musical tradition, in its actual manifestations and in its structures; however, this tradition is not passively and uncritically adopted, but rather appropriated and reshaped for personal expressive purposes.
Totaro aims at finding a balance between conceptual complexity and immediacy, between a rigorous compositional process and a communicative attitude; he is proudly distant from both constructivism and neo-Romanticism.
Critics have appreciated his “surprising musicality”, which “amazes for its inventiveness, originality and spontaneity”; the music seems to flow freely and effortlessly, and his complex technique tends to efface itself rather than displaying its achievements.
For him, artistic research is never an end in itself; it is always functional to a higher, aesthetic and communicative experience.
Totaro frequently adopts a playful attitude, with plenty of irony, and refusing to consider music history as a one-way trajectory. This leads him to incorporate various styles (such as modality, tonality, atonality) within a single piece, to experiment with such diverse angles as exotericism and popular music, but always with a fundamental consistency and a deep artistic awareness.
When asked to define his style, in fact, Totaro hesitates, in his dislike for labels in art. His music cannot be defined as “neo-tonal”, since, as we just saw, he admits the copresence of various musical languages within a same piece; structuralism is no more adequate, even though, as a composer, Totaro aims at constructional consistency; “post-modern” is in turn an imprecise term, being employed, in music, in order to indicate an omnivorous attitude toward the musical past.
Indeed, he does adopt some individual stances of postmodernism, such as, for instance, its connection with history, its irony, its eclecticism, its refusal of the diktats of the modernist and avant-gardist “orthodoxy”, and its rejection of an aesthetic model based on the belief that musical language must constantly renew itself. Still, in spite of these points in common, Totaro does not wish to be classified as a simply postmodernist composer.
His working procedures are rather structured. He begins by a skeleton, which may be more or less rigid, but is always on the complex side. However, he believes that the logical and rational elaboration at the foundation of the piece should not be discernible by the listener; music should maintain its crucially communicative dimension.
Totaro wonders at one of today’s beliefs in the musical field: for him, it is not at all straightforward that a painstakingly constructed piece cannot also be a piece with a pronounced expressive dimension, and a style capable of conquering a vast audience, including not only specialists. The avant-garde’s attitude can be summarized as a systematic suspicion against all musical works which could be “liked” by nonprofessionals; of course, such an attitude automatically denies aesthetical validity to numerous masterpieces of the past, where both complexity and immediacy happily coexist.
In his view, today’s composers enjoy an unprecedented creative freedom, where a virtually infinite number of aesthetic attitudes, styles and stances concur. However, this rich panorama is somewhat limited by one of the avant-garde’s unquestioned beliefs, i.e. that art must speak about the present and anticipate the future. Twentieth-century composers therefore had the self-imposed task of always creating something new, by employing constantly new compositional means and systems.
However, Totaro believes that new techniques and systems cannot be infinitely created; possibly, after such a century as the twentieth, all possible experimentations have already been tried. In the eyes of many, indeed, it is impossible, today, to write a musical piece entirely devoid of links and connections with the past.
This impasse, however, is only seeming. Indeed, it is an impasse only if the twentieth-century attitude is passively adopted. Many composers, by way of contrast, have chosen a different perspective. Finding new means and systems is not as important as another purpose: to shed new light on the past, to move within pre-existing systems and techniques but enriching them through one’s personality. It all depends, therefore, on the strength of the composer’s personality: a weak personality will result in passive imitation and reproduction, whereas a powerful personality will make history. As Totaro puts it, “in the twenty-first century, what ultimately counts is to have excellent ideas within pre-existing, given systems”.
In spite of this, Totaro realizes that the twentieth-century musician’s mentality is not easily abandoned, though – if one considers history’s habits – each century should naturally be inclined to position itself on a different stance from the one which preceded it. For Totaro, the moment has come to leave behind the twentieth century, to historicize and to objectively evaluate it. “In other words”, as he maintains, “we must be post-ideological”.
For him, this means to overcome the dialectic between tonal and non-tonal music, between simple and complex music, between music perceived as “up-to-date” and music perceived as outdated. This also implies being afraid no more of the past, and give priority to ideas and narratives with respect to the demonstration of “new” techniques and systems. Both excellency and communication must be actively and contemporaneously pursued, overcoming the artificial dichotomy between tradition and avant-garde. Still, Totaro wishes to complement this manifesto in order to avoid misunderstandings: a need for communication does not imply an acceptance of trivial, amateurish, or banal kinds of music. Music of a high quality, with depth and profundity, with conceptual complexity and structural rigour can be created while maintaining an “audience-friendly” attitude. As he believes, “the twenty-first century is by now ready for a ‘new’ music, with respect to what was ‘new’ in the past century”.
Chiara Bertoglio © 2022
Mario Totaro: Chamber Works
