The recording project {SUONO} Con[TEMPO]raneo was developed as a collaboration between the Composition and Percussion Schools of the Conservatory of Vibo Valentia. The need of composers to have feedback and confirmation of the imaginative work that led to the drafting of their scores, found a ready willingness to collaborate among the young percussionists involved, all animated by a sincere vocation for constructive confrontation and aimed at improving the final result as much as possible: a partnership that stands as an ideal model of interdisciplinarity in the field of higher musical education.
The meditation on the passing of time is perhaps the topic that has most inspired philosophers and artists of every age. No wonder, then, that a predominantly temporal art such as music insists, especially today, on the declination of the concept of Time. And I say especially today because Tempus fugit has become an obsession for contemporary man: we can observe the consequences at all (musical) levels, macroscopic and microscopic. The eluded expectation of time passing is the basis of Luigi Sassone’s piece, Unsolved precisely, written for marimba and piano in ternary form A-B-A’. The initial intention of the piece is to arouse the same tension as when listening to the Shepard tone, that is to say a scale that seems to go up or down infinitely. The restlessness that exudes from our hyper-measured societies, where we believe we are absolute masters of time, informs the subtle minimalism of Contemporary Times written by Michele Arena, as well as the piece Re-percussion composed by Antonio Talesa: different nuances of the same need to mark time, to bring out the immanent digitalisation of every phenomenon. The hypnotic effect of the passage of time is sublimated in the piece Two for Two created by Domenico Giannetta, which features four percussionists working in pairs on vibraphone and marimba: the interaction of the performers gives rise to a tight play of connections, also gestural, that enhances the effect and theatricality. Gestures prove to be a fundamental resource for the interpretation of the piece Praeludium in D composed by Ferruccio Messinese. The resulting sonic magma derives its form from the analogy existing between musical logic and the logic of discursive thought connected to the dictates of the Ars Dicendi, theorised in the ancient treatises on rhetoric. ‘Time is a game, splendidly played by children’ said Heraclitus: a thought that is well suited to the playful character of the Scherzo a tre composed by Umberto Scaramuzzino, inspired by the atmospheres of the patronal festivals of southern Italy, or to the play of light that inspires Salvatore Mirenda’s Christmas Tree Lights, which gives rise to a polyrhythmic and polymetric musical universe; and the approach to the composition by Fortunato Mandaradoni, whose Studio reveals an acid hilarity transfigured through the continuous chasing of the parts, is also substantially playful. At last, the attempt to communicate the perception of the dilated time of love animates the piece Circles V by Luigi Mogrovejo, through a pure circular and metatemporal melody that crystallises that infinite instant of bliss and leads to the meta-finite: ‘the only good that for the philosopher is capable of curing the anxieties of the soul’. Spinoza docet.
Maria Luisa Grillone © 2025