Roberto Laneri: Winterträume, de-compositions & re-compositions

De-Compositions & Re-Compositions

The music in this CD falls into a category which, although widely represented, does not seem to exist in composition textbooks or in record catalogs.
And yet, the practice of re-composing an existent piece of music is probably as old as music itself.
To begin with, composing adding lines to a cantus firmus was the standard compositional practice in the West from the Notre-Dame school to the XVIIth century. By the time the well-known Gregorian Chants had lost their organizing power, composers went to the trouble of copying down and variously re-writing (re-orchestrating) whole works by other composers. The Bach-Vivaldi transcriptions are well-known and widely performed.
Once this process of musical re.elaboration started, it also started developing, both in the procedures applied and in the choice and length of a cantus firmus.
In other words, if a substantial part of Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique is built on the Dies Irae as cantus firmus, we might conceive the next step as taking a whole movement or even the whole symphony (or any other work for that matter) as a cantus firmus, initiating a process of change and accretion of the original information, which is exactly what composers have been doing.
Even when the re-composition seems limited to a re-orchestration, outstanding examples such as Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition or Webern’s re-creation of Bach’s Ricercare a 6 from the Musical Offering prove that orchestrating goes way beyond the relatively simple process of assigning lines to suitable instruments in order to achieve a pleasant acoustic result.
Other successful examples include Strauss/Schoenberg, Berio-Maderna/Weill, Berio/Schubert. In some cases re-composition is like a collage, as with Lukas Foss’ Baroque Variations.
Having established the fact that everybody does it, it follows that everybody does it his/her own way. As to my own motives and procedures, read on.
My main motive behind all this remains hearing things in addition to the printed text and being curious as to how they would sound together.
Next, the desire to develop my love for western classical music into a stable, intimate relationship. This means feeling entitled to take a piece not originally written for the instruments I play, and making a version of it that I can record and perform. I need scarcely remind my readers and listeners that unless a musician works regularly in an orchestra or chamber group, the habit of working daily with the classical tradition at its best soon fades into fond memories from his/her student days.
This is not what happens in the other professions: for instance a physician in his daily life gets to practice and further develop the things he learned at the university, while many musicians end up like Ludwig Wittgenstein, who apparently used to play on the flute orchestral excerpts from Wagner’s operas…
In my case, the process of re-composition starts with the acquisition of whatever music I intend to work on into the computer with an advanced notation software, and speaking for myself I can say even this preparatory step affords an intense musical experience, like getting into Schubert’s or Schumann’s head by physically writing their notes.
Having done this, the next step consists in adding parts to the transcribed text. Such additions may go from simple harmonic thickening to elaborate counterpoint, and continue in a theoretically unending process, sometimes each addition further adding to the original text.
The scoring employs the instruments I know how to play in a satisfactory manner: clarinet, bass clarinet, saxophones (sopranino, soprano and alto), occasionally small percussion, the Indian tanpura or the Australian didjeridoo. If necessary, or for added value, I may ask a friend to add vocal or instrumental lines that lie beyond my abilities.
After completing a score, I record all the parts into a recording and editing software (I use Pro-tools). This allows me to add improvised parts, which for me is a very important step, since I believe in improvisation not as an absolute process, but something that can work, if desired, in almost any context, provided there is a context. In fact in these pieces you will not hear standard jazz solos, rather textures and dialogs that fade in and out the way things happen in dreams. Often a piece seems to develop from improvisation, rather than the standard way, in which improvisation develops from a theme.
The rest, unlike for Hamlet, is not silence but editing.
This means that the studio becomes an instrument on its own right, not only for by now standard sound treatments (compression, equalization and so on), but also for digital effects that add further information to the score in more drastic ways.
The final result, considering that such processes may in theory be continued indefinitely, is the creation of superimposed layers, as what happens in painting from Rembrandt to Pollock. Jon Hassell, in the liner notes of his CD titled Listening to Pictures, speaks of “pentimento” as a pictorial process that can be applied to music as well, as digital technology becomes a determinant of style:

(…) I started hearing the music that we were working on as layers showing through other layers-in both pictorial and temporal ways.
(…) the stunning new reality that music can now be moved around digitally as never before. A fact that opens the door to an endless flow of new possibilities.

Well, that’s it for now. Other bits and pieces that may remain after listening are my predilection for certain sounds and atmospheres, especially textures reminiscent of the great sax sections from the jazz orchestras of the Swing period (Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Lunceford, Duke Ellington), sometimes with an added clarinet trio-or even sopranino saxophones-on top. But that is personal. In fact these musics might be re-written and re-orchestrated for strings and all kinds of other instruments for live performance.
Another thread I would call a sort of puzzle-esthetics, the aural equivalent to the tri-dimensional computer-generated images which suddenly pop-up by staring in a fixed way.
Finally, something similar to cooking with leftovers, adding musical bits and pieces which by themselves may be anonymus, but that in the end create mirror games which transform a well-known familiar picture into a psychedelic experience.
Roberto Laneri © 2022