Sound without Borders: Contemporary Music for Flute and Piano

Description

The works presented on this disc extend the fertile creative season that, from the 1950s onwards, has seen the flute occupy the forefront of the most advanced linguistic research. In each score, however—albeit to varying degrees—the post-war avant-garde’s experimental technicalism has been superseded. What emerges instead are highly differentiated compositional attitudes: some pieces favour rhythmic–melodic figurative play, others pursue a purely timbral investigation, while still others reclaim an exquisitely cantabile dimension.
The most recent compositions—Short Novel, Tombeau de Castiglioni and La vita nuova—were written for, and dedicated to, Giovanni Mareggini and Kumi Uchimoto. By contrast, I binari del tempo for flute and electronics was premiered at Teatro alla Scala in 1999 with Mareggini as soloist, and Dedica pays tribute to Mario Caroli.

Nicola Sani: I binari del tempo (1998)
Sani’s declared vocation is to explore the ‘peripheries of sound’, conceiving the sonic phenomenon as an ‘environment in which one dwells’. This aspiration is vividly demonstrated in I binari del tempo, whose very life depends upon the close interaction between instrument and electronics. Since the outset of his career Sani has devoted himself to electronic research and to a pervasive intermedial dimension—a term he prefers to multimedial in order to stress the dialectical relationship that is established between different media, thereby creating an implicit dramaturgy.
In the present work the flute is amplified by two microphones (one at the embouchure and one at the foot-joint) and routed through a distant reverberation unit. The audience, meanwhile, is encircled by four loudspeakers that project a tape part realised in collaboration with flautist Manuel Zurria, whose recorded heartbeat is periodically audible.
Sani’s determination to transcend the traditional frontal perspective of performance places him firmly in the lineage of the most significant post-war experiments, chief among them Luigi Nono—himself the heir to Bruno Maderna’s pioneering ideas about the interaction of disparate sonic ‘dimensions’. The score is cast in independent sections that may be performed in partially aleatory succession and are liable to repetition. Sound production techniques encompass a wide spectrum: varying quantities of excess air, vocalisations into the instrument (also hums with closed mouth), frequent chordal ‘multisonics’, and dynamics that range from whispered pianissimi to explosive fortissimi in the high and super-high registers. Of particular interest is the transformational passage from one mode of execution to another—for example, a reiterated note thickening into a flutter-tongue or trill.

Andrián Pertout: La vita nuova (2022, rev. 2023)
Gentil pensero che parla di vui (from La Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri, 1294)
Gentil pensero che parla di vui
sen vene a dimorar meco sovente,
e ragiona d’amor sì dolcemente,
che face consentir lo core in lui.
(The complete sonnet follows as in the score.)
Numerous versions of this piece exist for various solo instruments and piano in addition to the original setting for voice and piano, commissioned by the Colombian soprano Angela Inés Simbaqueba. The Dantesque text remains integral to the expressive ambience and is therefore printed in the score even in purely instrumental incarnations—a testimony to Pertout’s penchant for narrative dimensions, repeatedly asserted in his own statements of compositional poetics:
‘As a composer, my curiosity for the “novel” has always led me on a path of discovery, seeking the unusual and the unconventional in order to nurture not only my artistic practice but my personal growth—remaining always true to myself and completely open to possibilities.’
The elegiac character of the work, consonant with the sonnet’s amorous content, finds musical realisation in an unbroken, sinuously unfolding alto-flute melisma set against a backdrop of crystalline piano arabesques. The darker, veiled timbre of the G-flute fashions a mood that is at once tender and melancholy, perfectly aligned with Dante’s poetry. The repetitive piano figurations betray the influence of minimalism, with which the composer engaged during his formative years. The apparently hypnotic, timeless flow is periodically interrupted by flashing, rapid ascents and descents in the flute, echoed by the piano, and by sigh-like glissandi. The ceaseless exchange of figural elements between the two instruments may be read as an allusion to the dialogue between soul and heart upon which the sonnet is constructed.

Akira Kobayashi: Short Novel (2023)
It has often been observed that the artistic revolutions of the twentieth century converge, in striking fashion, with fundamental features of extra-European cultural models—above all those of China and Japan. In Oriental musics the absence of temporal dialectic, the differing conception of metre, and the refined aural sensitivity that embraces micro-intervals and privileges timbre over pitch—traits central to Western experimental music since the mid-century—are long-established givens.
In Japan, the works of Kazuo Fukushima and Yoritsuné Matsudaira inaugurated in the 1950s a current that mediated between European avant-garde techniques and indigenous traditions. Kobayashi’s Short Novel stands within this lineage, albeit transformed by more than fifty years of subsequent stylistic evolution. Fascinated by the traditional noh-kan (the bamboo flute employed in Noh theatre), the composer occasionally asks the performer to imitate its distinctive, breath-laden timbre and dwells on glissandi and whistle-like sonorities.
The piece opens in near silence, punctuated by terse, pungent flute interjections in a faintly enigmatic atmosphere. With the entry of the piano a continuous figurative interplay is launched that persists throughout, oscillating between zones of suspended time and tightly wrought accelerandi that culminate in the finale. In its relentless recombination of motives focused upon privileged pitch areas one may glimpse points of contact with the thought of Franco Donatoni, under whose guidance Kobayashi studied during the Italian master’s residencies as visiting professor at the University of Tokyo.

Ivan Fedele: Dedica (2000)
Together with Apostrofe, Dedica forms a diptych in homage to the flautist Mario Caroli. Though written only months apart, both pieces consciously distance themselves from the overt experimentalism that characterised so much flute literature of the 1950s and ’60s. This expressive stance reflects the dedicatee’s interpretative profile—averse to any form of specialism and equally at home in early and contemporary repertoires—but it also anticipates new facets of Fedele’s own poetics. In the following decade these facets would manifest themselves in a progressive relaxation of structural rigour in favour of greater immediacy of perception, heightened timbral sensitivity, and an integration of musical realities drawn from diverse cultures.
As a birthday gift, Dedica naturally inhabits, like its counterpart Apostrofe, an intimate, friendly sphere akin to what Claudio Proietti has called ‘musica anodina’. The reference is inevitably to Rossini’s late Péchés de vieillesse, those ostensibly light, convivial pieces that nonetheless conceal priceless treasures. Fedele writes:
‘Dedica originates from material devised for pedagogical-demonstrative purposes during a composition lesson. Over the course of a single night that small “exercise in style” was transformed into a poetic gesture.’
As in the Romantic étude tradition, a technical detail—here a rapid arpeggio, a rhythmic pattern and a melodic cell—becomes the very nucleus of structural and semantic meaning.

Juan Trigos: Tombeau de Castiglioni (2023)
Conceived in the venerable tombeau genre, the piece honours the memory of Niccolò Castiglioni, who, alongside Franco Donatoni, was Trigos’s mentor during his multifaceted Italian training. Immediately recognisable as belonging to the genre are certain rhetorical devices: foremost among them the reiterated note, which in Baroque rhetoric signifies death’s inexorable knocking at the door. The persistent percussive use of the flute keys serves a similar symbolic purpose, whilst also aligning with Trigos’s own poetic inclinations towards primary pulsation, resonance and the obsessive deployment of musical events:
‘I am more interested in principles such as the primary pulsation, resonance, and the obsessive use of polyrhythmic and polyphonic interlocking musical events and segments of different density and duration.’
Throughout the composition figurative play—echoes and repetitions within restricted pitch fields—predominates. Rhythmic vitality and timbral focus assert themselves from the outset in the flute’s detached notes, almost reminiscent of guitar pizzicato. Muted, muffled sonorities prevail, achieved by preparing the piano with a piece of rubber between the strings and, on the flute, by key-percussion, forceful tongue-slaps, excess breath, spoken sounds, and flutter-tongue. Frequent tempo changes and asymmetrical accentuation further enhance rhythmic interest.
An opening section of dry, isolated sounds yields to a more agitated zone where dialogue between the instruments intensifies through echo-figures and motivic reprises. Following a super-acute flute trill, the work returns to a rarefied, motionless sonorous space. A long low pedal in the piano and the gradual relaxation of tension close the piece in the true spirit of a tombeau.

Daniela Iotti
Musicologist, Lecturer in Music History
Conservatorio di Musica ‘Arrigo Boito’, Parma

Francesca Magnani
Musicologist, Lecturer in Music Theory
Conservatorio di Musica ‘Peri-Merulo’, Reggio Emilia