Rino Trasi: Between Idiom and Abstraction in Contemporary Guitar Music
Within the field of guitar composition two broad lineages may be discerned: composers who are themselves guitarists, and those who address the instrument from without. The former typically produce highly idiomatic works, exploiting the instrument’s tactile and gestural resources; the latter often tread more exploratory—and at times oblique—paths which, though occasionally forbidding, can yield striking originality. Either approach is capable of generating music of lasting substance or, conversely, works that merely satisfy transient fashions.
Yet a number of compositions manage to remain idiomatic whilst displaying notable compositional ambition. Leo Brouwer’s La Espiral Eterna (1971) stands as a quintessentially “material” score, testing the guitar’s resources to their limits, while Dušan Bogdanović’s Sonata No. 1 (1978) is a compact masterpiece clearly indebted to Béla Bartók. It is against such exemplars that the music of Rino Trasi (b. 1960) should be set.
A graduate of Mauro Storti’s distinguished guitar class at the G. Nicolini Conservatoire in Piacenza (1985), Trasi subsequently pursued composition at the G. Verdi Conservatoire in Milan and at the Civica Scuola di Musica’s Department of Contemporary Music. Although a guitarist by formation, he eschews the facile idiomatic devices frequently encountered in the repertoire—most notably the practice of transposing a stock gesture along the fretboard to generate ostensibly new material.
Il Compagno di Viaggio
The album opens with Il Compagno di Viaggio, its title borrowed from Hans Christian Andersen. Here the “travelling companion” serves both as a metaphor for the instrument and as a tribute to Trasi’s former duo with Guido Fichtner, for whom the work was conceived in the 1980s. In the present recording Fichtner overdubs both guitar parts. Cast in three movements—Preludio, Adagiante, and Toccata—the score bears the subtitle “cyclical sonata”, signalling the dense network of thematic cross-references that secures its unity.
The entire work is forged from superimposed fifths, presented at the outset and developed through myriad inversions. These intervals underpin recurring figurations that resurface in varied or identical guise, culminating in a literal reprise within the final Toccata. The harmonic language is diatonic, though consciously an-tonal; much of the writing, clearly tailored for the concert platform, reflects the duo’s erstwhile activity. Repetition and micro-figuration generate a kind of diatonic materiality, often closing in hypnotic polyrhythmic codas. The voice is complex yet youthful, characterised by exploratory zest unmarred by diffuseness.
Anhelitus
A markedly different aesthetic prevails in Anhelitus, composed for a project in which several composers responded to John Dowland’s Fortune (1596). For Trasi the word “Fortune” assumes the darker connotation of fate: Dowland’s melody, radically contorted yet still discernible, acquires an almost apocalyptic hue.
The piece unfolds as an unremitting series of permutations that tear at and reform the thematic material through rhythmic and expressive intensification. The concluding restatement is inward-looking, verging on resignation. While idiomatic, the writing is virtuosic not in digital bravura but in its avoidance of habitual motor patterns, demanding a freshly conceived physical vocabulary. A distant kinship with Britten’s Nocturnal after John Dowland (1963) is unmistakable, though Trasi’s language is more abrasive and angular, where Britten’s tends toward evaporation.
Boxes
With Boxes the listener enters an overtly materialist idiom. Each notated rectangle contains a group of pitches the performer may deploy freely with respect to order, duration, and articulation. Eschewing the stopwatch precision favoured by some exponents of indeterminacy, Trasi permits the material to reveal its own trajectory. Fichtner occasionally elects rapid execution, heightening the music’s monolithic cast. The resulting sound world hovers between Brouwer’s La Espiral Eterna and Arvo Pärt’s Fratres (1977), marrying gestural density to a narrative impulse.
Linea d’ombra
The album’s title work ventures into dodecaphony. Organised as three tableaux—Piani, Filigrana, and Dramma—the piece is governed by a single twelve-note row that appears twice in its entirety: once at the climactic close of Filigrana and again, fragmentarily, as a quasi-passacaglia in Dramma.
Piani constructs layered sonorities from low, near-clustered chords set against isolated pitches, forming a stratified, centreless space. Filigrana presents a torrent of rapid notes, initially punctuated by rests, then increasingly continuous, culminating in a three-octave proclamation of the row. The movement calls to mind the second of Henze’s Drei Tentos (1958) in its tensile, dance-like energy. Dramma adopts a more overtly narrative stance; although twelve-tone, its lyricism sometimes evokes late Scriabin rather than Schoenberg. As elsewhere, Trasi draws the work to a close with a polyrhythmic ostinato that recedes into silence, a signature gesture.
Sonatina
The four-movement Sonatina—Do You Like Brouwer? Stellae Inerrantes · Continuum · A Postcard from Istanbul—betrays a didactic bent. Technical and harmonic means are pared back, suggesting a readership of advanced students. The opening movement pays discreet homage to Brouwer’s Pieza sin título (1954). Stellae Inerrantes elaborates a mediaeval modal melody with two contrapuntal voices in historically informed style. Continuum adopts a minimalist stance, anchoring a bass motif beneath obsessively reiterated upper notes. A Postcard from Istanbul exploits Middle-Eastern scales and colours—at times unabashedly so—perhaps the residue of actual travel.
Wanderer Lied
The programme culminates in Wanderer Lied, an ambitious scena for two guitars and soprano, realised by Fichtner’s overdubs and Federica Napoletani’s layered vocal track. Unlike the preceding works, it possesses a pronounced theatrical character, rooted in a text by the Italian poet Bartolo Cattafi (1922–79).
From an old live recording in which Trasi himself speaks about the piece, we learn that the text is interpreted as the narration of a suicide, committed in a state of drunkenness in a hypothetical post-war Paris. The emotional state evoked is one in which past and present, real and imagined memories intermingle, forming a poignant narrative of mental images. Compared to the original poem, Trasi inverts certain sections, translates others, and blends them across various European languages, symbolising the chaos of the Second World War.
Soprano Federica Napoletani is called upon to navigate a vocal range that shifts fluidly between lyricism, natural speech, and dramatic recitative, often venturing into extreme registers with a theatrical ease. The guitarists take part in the narrative by declaiming fragments of text that reinforce concepts just expressed by the singer. The exploration of timbre is pushed to its very limits, notably through the use of the bow to evoke the ‘coldness’ conveyed by the voice.
Once again, the work culminates in a minimalist, polyrhythmic finale, where a process of micro-repetition moves from the guitars to the reciting voices, gradually dissolving into dissonance and finally into nothingness. The piece draws upon the expressive potential of every available musical and verbal language, unreservedly, only to condense it into a heartrending melodic line which emerges as Cattafi evokes the image of a pack of clouds reflected in the sky. Livio de Rossi © 2025