| Artist(s) | Sergio Armaroli, Francesca Gemmo, Gianni Trovalusci, Rib Trio |
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| Composer(s) | Domenico Guaccero, Franco Evangelisti, Giacinto Scelsi, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Marcello Panni, Walter Branchi |
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ROME: not only the capital city of Italy, but also an acronym standing for Roman Aleatoric Music Experience. The three musicians of the Rib Trio, featured in this Da Vinci Classics album are all among the leading experts in the field, and they decided to explore a quintessentially Roman phenomenon, i.e. the fertile ground found by aleatoric music in the Roman area, from the post-World-War II years until present-day.
Aleatoric music is music whose notational parameters (such as pitch, duration, order of the notes, or also instrumentation, dynamics, articulation etc.) are not entirely defined, in a greater or lesser proportion. They are left to “alea”, to chance; and this can mean either that the interpreters must actively involve chance processes (such as throwing dice or similar) for finding the version they will actually play, or that they are called to improvise following certain given data or rules, but without anyone being able to predict what the actual sound result will be.
Aleatoric music was, in some way, a direct and opposing response to the hyper-detailedness of serial and post-serial music, which, on the contrary, tended to increasingly specify all minimum details of performance. At times, avantgarde scores are so complex to read and to play that it is nearly impossible to respect each and all indications; thus, the hyper-detailedness fatally becomes its opposite, i.e., chance. This compositional stance, partially in polemics with the very systematized compositional techniques of the post-War years, was adopted by many composers worldwide (John Cage is the first name coming to mind), but was slow in gaining a foothold in Italy. Indeed, with the exception of two very original personalities such as those of Bruno Maderna and Sylvano Bussotti, who received the torch of these compositional experiences in a very personal fashion, Italy was rather impermeable to this kind of experiments. Rome, therefore, was a notable exception, with a whole bunch of great composers who chose to engage in this field. It is a field which also requires an important degree of cooperation with the performers (whereas some modernist composers would have easily renounced the performer’s figure tout court), who are called to a role of co-authorship with the composer.
At the forefront of the Roman aleatoric movement stood Franco Evangelisti, a visionary composer and proponent of aleatoric music. Evangelisti’s journey from engineering studies to musical pursuits culminated in his embrace of aleatoric techniques, influenced by luminaries such as Harald Gezmer and Werner Meyer-Eppler. The transformative experience at the Ferienkurse of Darmstadt marked a turning point, propelling Evangelisti towards electronic music and aleatoric exploration. Freed from the constraints of serialism, Evangelisti championed improvisation and collaboration with performers, advocating for a symbiotic relationship between composer and interpreter. His collaborations with notable musicians, including Hermann Scherchen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono, highlighted his global impact.
The Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, co-founded by Evangelisti, emerged as a powerful embodiment of the synergy between performance and composition in aleatoric music. This innovative ensemble embraced a philosophy akin to John Cage’s avant-garde ideals, forging connections between the Roman aleatoric movement and the broader global context. Evangelisti’s international reach extended across the United States, Germany, and beyond, leaving an indelible mark on the trajectory of aleatoric music worldwide. His pedagogical contributions at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome solidified his influence, while his seminal work “Dal silenzio a un nuovo mondo sonoro” unveiled the depth of his artistic philosophy.
Proporzioni, a work dating from 1958 was dedicated to Severino Gazzelloni, a star-flutist who was able to draw to the flute many of his compatriots, also thanks to an efficacious communication strategy. From the same year dates the premiere of Proiezioni sonore, whose initial sketches had been conceived some time before, and which was premiered by D. Tudor in Darmstadt: this piece was meaningfully dedicated to Stockhausen.
If Evangelisti can be considered as the founding father of Italian aleatoric music, the seeds he planted kept blooming until present-day, as is demonstrated by the inclusion, in this album, of a new aletoric piece by Schiaffini, Rib Trio, purposefully composed for the interpreters of this CD.
“… I write music to astonish the roses “. These words are the aesthetical manifesto of Walter Branchi. “Writing music to astonish the roses” is as poetic as it is unusual. But, in Branchi’s case, it is also a rather literal statement. Branchi, in fact, is not only a professional musician with an impressive biography, but also one of the world’s leading experts in roses. He has “identified, saved, disseminated and introduced lots of old varieties of roses, understanding the importance of historical traditions”, as another expert affirms.
Roses and music do not simply constitute the two poles of Branchi’s interests; they are also two sides of the same coin. He proclaims to maintain an “ecological concept” of music, which he relates with his passion for the environment.
Musically, Branchi teaches Electroacoustic Musical compositions at Italian conservatories, and was among the co-founders, in 1967, of the legendary Studio R7, along with two other musicians represented in this recording (i.e. Evangelisti and Guaccero). A polymath in music and horticulture, introduced an ecological concept of music that intertwines artistry with environmental consciousness. An educator and co-founder of pivotal initiatives, Branchi’s compositions harmonize spatial and musical dimensions, epitomized by his graphic score “Looking South-West.”.
Its notes are integrated within geometric shapes arranged in a deliberate spatial configuration. Due to its inherently visual characteristics, this artwork offers an excellent opportunity to delve into the exploration of both spatial and musical elements, examining their interplay within the context of space and time.
A blend of compositional activity and conducting characterizes the ongoing activity of Marcello Panni, who graduated in both disciplines (along with piano) at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome, and who later continued his studies in composition with Goffredo Petrassi and in conducting with Manuel Rosenthal (in Paris).
As a conductor, his main interest has been in the field of contemporary music, as was clear already from the time of his debut, which took place at the Biennale of Venice in 1969. On the other hand, symphonic and vocal/symphonic works represent the core of his output, along with numerous operas – a genre frequently neglected by composers of his generation.
He founded an Ensemble, “Teatro-Musica”, whose primary vocation is the dissemination of new works, including pieces by Berio, Bussotti, Cage, Clementi, Donatoni, Feldman, Schnebel and many others. Some of the most important stages worldwide welcomed Panni and his works, and he also had roles as an artistic director of important musical institutions.
His talent for the stage and the concert scene is evident in works such as Déchiffrage, a surreal divertissement. The French word déchiffrage stands for “sight reading”; it consists of 12 panels, which can be variously orchestrated; performing solutions have to be found for each page. Duration, as frequently happens with aleatoric music, is not traditionally determined but rather prescribed by time slots. Panni’s Seiner edlen Freundin has a score made only of data and durations; dots indicate the rhythm. The version played here corresponds to a piano version realized and recorded by the composer himself: thus, a fascinating pattern of improvisation/composition/performance comes to the surface.
If Evangelisti was rather unimpressed by serialism, Giacinto Scelsi can be considered as one of the Italian pioneers of this language. He came from an aristocratic family, and his numerous travels put him into contact with some of the leading intellectuals of the time, including Jean Cocteau and Virginia Woolf. His musical activity encompasses a large variety of languages, in the unceasing and restless quest for a voice of his own. He digested and elaborated influences as diverse as those by Scriabin, Berg, and Baroque music: frequently, his works are characterized by dense and knowledgeable counterpoint.
One of the distinctive traits of Scelsi’s life and work is his lasting interest in spirituality, esoterism and mysticism: all of these elements come to the fore in his post-War output, where notable echoes from the music of Far East are also clearly discernible.
His spirituality is the generating force behind his compositional output, behind his making “within” and “with” sound; the spiritual and the musical aspects are indivisible. For him, sound without music could exist, but not music without sound. His interest in spirituality generated a kind of music different from that he had written previously; this “conversion” was also made visible by his choice to adopt his maternal grandfather’s name as his artistic identity. In works such as his first quartet, he began to explore the sound of the single notes or pitches, of microintervals; he was interested in sound rather than in music as a cultural production. In this, he is considered as the inspirer and pioneer of what will became the French movement of spectralism.
Scelsi was one of the reference points of Giancarlo Schiaffini, who is also featured here as a composer. Schiaffini, a versatile composer, trombonist, and tubist born in Rome in 1942, has left an enduring impact on contemporary music and jazz. Graduating in Physics in 1965, he ventured into self-taught free jazz performances. Like other composers represented in this recording, in 1970 he studied with Stockhausen and Ligeti at Darmstadt, forming Nuove Forme Sonore, a chamber music ensemble. His collaborations with influential artists like Nono and Scelsi showcased his talent globally. Schiaffini founded the Gruppo Romano di Ottoni in 1975, and he remains a member of the renowned Italian Instabile Orchestra. A dedicated educator, he has taught at prestigious institutions worldwide and authored works on contemporary trombone techniques. His multimedia events inspired by literature and visual arts, alongside Silvia Schiavoni, highlight his artistic range.
Domenico Guaccero (1927-1984) was an Italian composer and musician known for his experimental and avant-garde contributions to contemporary music. He studied composition with Barbara Giuranna and Goffredo Petrassi in Rome, exploring serial techniques before embracing American experimentalism and aleatory music. Guaccero actively promoted contemporary music and, in turn, was among the co-founders of Nuova Consonanza. He taught at various conservatories and wrote extensively on music. His compositions incorporated theatrical elements and innovative sound production techniques. Guaccero’s enduring legacy lies in his pioneering approach to musical experimentation and his vision for the communicative role of contemporary music. He was also a zealous apostle of new approaches to teaching. His Luz is inspired by some core areas of the human body, conceived as poles around which our biological and psychical life can revolve. Luz is an aleatoric piece, played by the flute alone. The composer gives a series of very detailed indications on the effects which should be produced by the low-pitched instrument chosen by the performer. The only fixed element is its articulation into “bars” lasting five seconds each, and comprising both traditionally notated fragments and unconventional indications; its aleatoric dimension is also found in the possibility to stop it at a given point, and to restart canonically, by contrary motion.
Together, the pieces recorded in this album represent a valuable insight into the quintessentially Roman contribution to aleatoric music.
Chiara Bertoglio © 2023
Francesca Gemmo: Francesca Gemmo is an italian pianist and composer. Her focus on experimentation and improvisation has encouraged collaboration with influential artists such as Alvin Curran, Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari, Steve Piccolo, Walter Prati, Giancarlo Schiaffini and Elliott Sharp. She has performed in Italy and Europe (Sale Apollinee di Venezia, Centre Le Phenix di Friburgo, Konzerthaus di Weimar, Fondazione Mudima di Milano, Museo del Novecento di Milano, Teatro Arsenale di Milano). Her compositions have been performed by Divertimento Ensemble, Irvine Arditti, Trio Matisse, Luca Avanzi, Sergio Armaroli and Sergio Scappini; moreover, works have been commissioned by prestigious instrumentalists such as guitarist Magnus Andersson and saxophonist Daniel Kientzy. In 2017 for Ars Publica she recorded the unpublished work (1a execution absolute) "Grandi Numeri" by Sylvano Bussotti with Improvviso Fantasia directed by Giuseppe Giuliano and aboutCage Vol. 3 for Da Vinci Classics. In April 2019 will be released a recording project for solo piano improvisation published by Dodicilune. She has published several scores (Salatino Edizioni and Berbèn), and essays on musical and didactic subjects (Tangram Edizioni Scientifiche, Padus Edizioni).
Gianni Trovalusci
As a flautist and performer, Gianni Trovalusci, has worked with artists such as Roscoe Mitchell, Thomas Buckner, Hubert Howe, Hamid Drake, Ken Vandemark, Evan Parker, Walter Prati, Alvin Curran, Giorgio Nottoli, Luigi Ceccarelli, Daniel Teruggi, Marc Battier, Ilan Volkov, Steed Cowart, Marcello Panni, Giorgio Battistelli, Nicola Sani, Martin Daske, Maggie Menjie Qi, Fabrizio Ottaviucci, Ars Ludi - Antonio Caggiano, Rodolfo Rossi, Gianluca Ruggeri, and many others. He has been invited as a soloist in new music compositions with major orchestras such as the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Roscoe Mitchell Orchestra, Opera di Nancy, Flanders Opera, Opera di Strasburgo, and more. He has participated in concerts and performances at major festivals and events, such as the NYCEMF New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Musicoustica Beijing, Tectonics Festival Glasgow, AngelicA festival Bologna, De Young Museum San Francisco, Unerhoerte Musik Berlin, Munich Biennale, Ravenna Festival, Centro Tempo Reale Florence, Nuova Consonanza Rome, Fondazione Scelsi Rome, Parade électronique Milan, Area Sismica Forlì, Curva Minore Palermo, Cafè Oto London, Ars Electronica Linz, Toronto University, and Centro Reina Sofia Madrid. He has held masterclasses and workshops in numerous Italian and European conservatories, as well as in the US and China, and has recorded for Wide Hive Records, BBC 3, Auditorium Edizioni, Rai Radio 3, National Swedish Radio, West Deutscher Rundfunk, and Sud West Rundfunk, among others.
Gianni Trovalusci
Flute
Francesca Gemmo
Piano
Sergio Armaroli
Percussion
Domenico Guaccero
(b Palo del Colle, nr Bari, 11 April 1927; d Rome, 24 April 1984). Italian composer and writer on music. Following his piano diploma and classical literature degree (1949) in Bari, he studied composition with Petrassi at the Conservatorio di S Cecilia in Rome (diploma 1956). In 1957 and 1959 he attended the summer courses in Darmstadt. With others (including Evangelisti and Egisto Macchi), he was very involved in Rome with the promotion and development of electronic music (he helped to found the studio of the Accademia Filarmonica Romana, 1957, and the R7 studio, 1968), with contemporary music associations (in particular Nuova Consonanza from 1960) and with music-theatre groups and other initiatives. He was the co-founder (1959) and chief editor of the journal Ordini-Studi sulla Nuova Musica and editor of Collage (1963–8). He also taught composition at the conservatories of Pesaro, L'Aquila, Frosinone and Rome.
Franco Evangelisti
(b Rome, 26 Jan 1926; d Rome, 28 Jan 1980). Italian composer and theorist. In 1948 he abandoned his engineering studies for music, taking lessons in composition with Daniele Paris and the piano with Erich Arndt. His move to Freiburg in 1952 led him to complete his cultural and musical education in a German context at the city’s university under Genzmer, to attend the Darmstadt summer courses until 1962, to work in the WDR studio in Cologne (1956–7) and, above all, to become a point of contact between new German music and musical life in Rome. On his return to Italy, he became a key figure in the Rome-based group Nuova Consonanza, whose stated aim at its inception in 1960 was to ‘revive’ contemporary music. He also contributed to the organization of the Settimane Internazionali di Nuova Musica in Palermo (1960–68), founded the Gruppo d’Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza in 1964 and helped to set up both Studio 7 for electronic music in Rome (1968–73) and, in 1970, a study group on ‘sound phenomenon’, co-ordinated by the engineer Lorenzo Viesi. He taught an experimental course in electronic music first at the Accademia di S Cecilia (1969) and then, on a permanent basis, at the Rome Conservatory (from 1974), where, at the time of his death, in 1980, he was a lecturer in composition.
Giacinto Scelsi (b La Spezia, 8 Jan 1905; d Rome, 9 Aug 1988). Italian composer. Scelsi's extraordinary life encompassed many aspects of the intellectual, spiritual, social and musical life of the 20th century. He was born into southern Italian aristocracy, inheriting the title Count D'Alaya Valva, and as a young man travelled extensively, moving within Europe's most elevated social circles. His English wife, Dorothy (whose nickname ‘Ty’ figures in the titles of two of Scelsi's works) was a distant relative of the British royal family; their wedding reception was held at Buckingham Palace. His music attracted a number of prestigious performances, particularly in Paris where Pierre Monteux conducted the première of Rotative in 1930. During World War II he lived in Switzerland; after the war his wife returned to England, never to contact him again. He spent the latter part of his life in Rome, where his apartment overlooked the Forum.
Much of the detail of Scelsi's life is shrouded in mystery, something he himself did much to encourage. It seems, however, that after some initial successes as a composer, he suffered a devastating mental breakdown between the composition of La nascita del verbo (1947–8) and the Suite no.8 ‘Bot-ba’ (1952). Scelsi's early compositional career had been a progression through some of the principal aesthetic tendencies of 20th-century music – futurism, neo-classicism, dodecaphony, surrealism – preoccupations fed variously by periods of private study with Respighi and pupils of Skryabin and Schoenberg, and by his friendships with Henri Michaux, Pierre Jean Jouve, Paul Eluard and Salvador Dalí. The later works reveal a new preoccupation with an obsessive reiteration of individual sounds, a legacy of the lengthy period of rehabilitation from his illness. Scelsi described how he would spend days repeatedly playing single notes on the piano, developing a new, intensely focussed mode of listening. The multi-movement form of many subsequent pieces can also be heard as an extension of this reiterative exploration – sequences of movements are intended not to provide contrast but to offer a repeated re-examination of the same sound object.
Although Scelsi's music continued to attract occasional performances in the 1950s and 60s, his career was eclipsed by the emerging Italian composers of the post-war period, and his compositional concerns, as far as they were known, were regarded as of marginal interest. It was not until the 1970s that the significance of his work began to be recognized by a new generation. Younger composers, including the American Alvin Curran, the Prix de Rome guests Grisey and Murail, and the Romanian exile Radulescu, discovered in Scelsi's work aspects of the musical world which interested them, struck particularly by the concentration on gradual timbral transformations.
At the beginning of the 1960s many avant-garde composers had begun to explore the inner life of sounds, writing music which focussed on small fluctuations within sustained sonic bands. What distinguished Scelsi's work from Ligeti or Cerha's scores of the period was the profound subjectivity of Scelsi's engagement with his material, an engagement in which abstraction seemed to play no part. In his most wholly characteristic works pitch, timbre, register and dynamics are heard as the inherent expressive potentialities of each sound, rather than as separate parameters to be controlled more or less independently. The Quattro pezzi (su una nota sola) (1959), for example, use microtonal pitch inflection, timbral transformation and rhythmic reiterations to animate the ‘note’ on which each movement is based, stretching its identity far beyond that of a mere frequency.
Subsequent works explore this plasticity of sound yet further, drawing a handful of musical strands out of an initial tone and allowing them to diverge. Usually such divergence covers an interval of no more than a third, but it makes possible a beguilingly unpredictable harmonic architecture in works of the mid-1960s such as Ohoi (1966) and the Fourth String Quartet (1964), arguably Scelsi's finest music. Inevitably, given his microscopic examination of instrumental sound, intervals derived from the harmonic series predominate. His intuitively composed work can therefore be heard to anticipate later, more systematic developments: not only the ‘spectral’ music of the Itinéraire group but also the exploration of the pitch-timbre continuum in computer music.
As word about this extraordinary, neglected music spread, performances and then recordings began to multiply. The critic Harry Halbreich was a persuasive advocate; promoters such as Adrian Jack at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Wolfgang Becker at WDR and Ernstalbrecht Stiebler at Hessische Rundfunk organized portrait concerts of Scelsi's work. The Arditti Quartet took up the string quartets, Marianne Schroeder and Yvar Mikhashoff the piano music, and conductors such as Jürg Wyttenbach the orchestral works. This period of rediscovery culminated in the mid-1980s with belated first performances of many of Scelsi's largest scores, and triumphantly acclaimed presentations of Scelsi's work during the 1986 Holland Festival and the 1987 ISCM World Music Days in Cologne.
The spiritual world of Scelsi's mature works is rooted in an exotic mix of pantheism and theosophy, derived from Gurdjieff, Blavatsky and Sri Aurobindo, but also stimulated by Scelsi's own visits to India and Nepal. Scelsi saw his work as straddling the aesthetic worlds of East and West, using the instrumental resources of the West in music whose meditative focus on individual tones has obvious links to both the monastic traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and the ison principle of Byzantine Orthodox worship. Elsewhere, particularly in the works of the late 1950s, there are elements of arabesque reminiscent of the folk music of the eastern Mediterranean. Scelsi claimed that ‘Rome is the boundary between East and West. South of Rome the East begins, and north of Rome the West begins. This borderline runs exactly over the Forum Romanum. It runs right here, through my drawing-room’. His titles offer further evidence: Aiôn (1961) is subtitled ‘Four Episodes in a day of Brahma’, Anahit (1965) is ‘A Lyric Poem dedicated to Venus’, Pwyll (1954) is a Welsh druidic term, while the title of Konx-om-pax (1969) brings together the ancient Assyrian, Sanskrit and Latin words for ‘peace’.
Scelsi's approach to composition was itself hybrid: for him music was not a communicative medium but something immanent, revealed through the creative process. His reluctance to describe his working methods as ‘composing’ stemmed from the belief that music passed through him; it was not something ‘put together’ by him. Indeed the working method of his mature years was unusual, depending primarily on the selective transcription of improvisations made in a quasi-meditative state. He would perform these improvisations generally at the keyboard, either the piano or, in later years, the Ondiola, a three-octave electronic instrument with a rotary attachment for producing microtonal inflections. Scelsi would also invite performing musicians who showed a particular affinity for his work to improvise for him, painstakingly refining their instrumental resources for the sound-world he wanted, so that works such as the Canti del capricorno (1962–72) or the cello Trilogy (1956–65) became intimately associated with their first interpreters, the singer Michiko Hirayama and the cellist Frances-Marie Uitti.
Each improvisation was recorded (the process of cataloguing the tapes was begun after Scelsi's death) and the most successful improvisations were then transcribed and realized as instrumental scores. Exceptionally, some improvisations were used more than once: the Fifth String Quartet (1984) and the amplified piano work Aitsi (1974) are both transcriptions of the same tape. The actual writing of the scores was undertaken by an assistant, working under Scelsi's direction. After Scelsi's death his most frequent collaborator, Vieri Tosatti, revealed the extent of his involvement in the making of Scelsi's scores, claiming that he had worked with Scelsi since 1947 and had written out all his major works since then. The discovery that Scelsi was not the sole author of his scores has troubled some critics who, associating it with his lack of a conventional compositional apprenticeship, have accused him of dilettantism, even of a sort of artistic fraud. Scelsi's collaborative approach was, however, consistent with his compositional philosophy, as was his reluctance to make public appearances at performances of his work, and his refusal to be photographed. By the time of his death his music had achieved an eminence which its composer resolutely rejected for himself.
Marcello, Panni
(b Rome, 24 Jan 1940). Italian conductor and composer. He studied at the Rome Conservatory (conducting with Ferrara, 1963; composition with Petrassi, 1964), and then studied conducting with Manuel Rosenthal at the Paris Conservatoire (1965–8). In 1971 he founded the Ensemble Teatromusica, with whom he performed his musical pantomime, Klangfarbenspiel, at the Piccola Scala, Milan (1972), and the ‘azione scenica’ La partenza dell’Argonauta at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. He has conducted rarely performed works, such as Pergolesi's Il Flaminio (Naples, 1982), for which he also provided a new critical edition, and has given the European premières of works by Berio, Bussotti, Cage, Feldman, Glass and others. He has also appeared as a guest conductor at La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera, the Vienna Staatsoper, the Paris Opéra and elsewhere. Panni held the Milhaud Chair in Composition at Mills College, Oakland, California (1980–84), and in 1993 was appointed principal conductor of the Bonn Opera, becoming musical director in 1995. In 1994 he was appointed artistic director of the Pomeriggi Musicali in Milan. He has recorded Pergolesi's opera Adriano in Siria and oratorio La morte di San Giuseppe, Paisiello's Nina, pazza per amore, Handel's Giulio Cesare, Donizetti's La fille du régiment, Petrassi's Il Cordovano and Berio's Passaggio.
13.55€
