The pairing of baroque violin and double bass might seem an encounter of opposites, yet in these works by Francesca Gemmo and Sergio Armaroli the two instruments meet on common ground where notation and freedom, history and experiment, trace a single arc. The violin gut strings and the luminous pliancy afforded by a baroque setup, invites a listening that is close to the wood; the bass, with its cavernous breath, folds time from within. Around that meeting point the programme turns and returns – like a compass drawing – so that solo and duo, page and improvisation, echo and silence become facets of a single enquiry into how sound is placed, remembered and renewed.
Francesca Gemmo conceived Towards the Circle in spring 2023 as a deliberate return to a closed form, to traditional notation and to a composer’s precise oversight of pacing, articulation and timbre. The work stands in two complementary versions: a self-sufficient page for solo violin, and a duo incarnation in which a monodic partner improvises in dialogue with the written line. The dedicatees are the baroque violinist Maya Homburger and the double bassist and composer Barry Guy, and their long-standing artistic partnership illuminates the score from within: the violin carries a nervous, quick-silver opening that settles upon a held note and then opens into calm lyric spans, before a final region of circular, almost hypnotic alternation where fragments rise and fall as if breathing. The duo version does not overwrite the page; it frames it, giving to the second voice a set of essential cues so that the improvisation moves as heterophony or shadow, never compromising the integrity of the written melody. In both forms, the narrative tends towards equilibrium – not stasis, but a poise in which gesture and repose are held in tension. That attention connects naturally with period performance practice. Tuned a little lower than modern pitch – one hears the warmth and elasticity of a violin around 432Hz – and balanced by a bow whose articulation favours speech-like attack and release, the instrument allows Gemmo’s slow tempos and hovering fermatas to acquire physical meaning. The tone may bloom at the bridge and retreat towards the fingerboard, the bow hair alternating with the wood in a delicate chiaroscuro; the result is not a stylised archaism but an acoustic ecology in which the piece breaths are audible. The performer’s restraint becomes structural: the held tone that steadies the second movement must be nursed rather than asserted, and the final circular motion of the third movement is less a device than a way of letting resonance speak. In the duo version the improvising partner joins as a listener first, answering in the register that keeps the line of the violin legible while colouring it from below or afar. The piece is neither cadenza nor étude; it is a study in sonorous duration, in the contour of a sustained note as it gathers harmonics and decay. Under the hand of an improviser-composer the instrument behaves like a small orchestra – a fact listeners may recognise from the solo bass tradition that reframed the instrument in the later twentieth century – yet here the theatricality is tempered by a chamber scale of attention. The circle invoked by the title becomes a metaphor of recurrence and of ethical listening: material is not expended, it is revisited.
Sergio Armaroli’s Bicinium plus x adopts a different angle on the same constellation of questions. The title reaches back to the Renaissance bicinium, the pedagogical duet for two equal voices, and adds an unknown. Here the violin part is fully notated in pitch and dynamics but leaves rhythm to the performer’s discretion; the double-bass part is open, stipulating islands of material within time brackets and inviting free improvisation as the variable X. The premise is simple and fertile: for every parameter x chosen, e.g. change of pitch, if the bass proposes B(arry)X then the violin replies M(A)yaX – not as mirror then, but as consequence. The violin page includes microtonal inflections and, at times, a deliberately lowered pitch standard appropriate to a baroque setup; its material can be elaborated, shaped and breathed, but not invented. By contrast, the bass is licensed to improvise within defined windows, sometimes silent, sometimes eruptive, as if the unknown were being solved in public. In this sense Bicinium plus x is both ancient and modern: a strict two-voice discipline that admits contingency not as accident but as method. Armaroli has long explored the structuring of improvisation in time. In a series devoted to structuring silence he adopted bracketed windows – durations within which sounds must occur – so that form emerges not from thematic development but from measured placement, from the relation between sounding and not-sounding. Bicinium plus x inherits that attention while reclaiming the old discipline of mutual accountability: each voice acts in awareness of the other. The score even contemplates echo and circular return, repeating at the end an earlier fragment so as to close the form with a bow to beginnings. The violin part hints at a scordatura designed to release particular harmonics and to push against equal temperament; harmonics may be used as an alternative tuning logic rather than as mere colour. The intention is not to imitate historical tuning systems, but to let resonance propose a possible intonation that the baroque instrument, with its light build and gut strings, can sustain without strain.
These pieces are also portraits of their dedicatees. Homburger’s artistry stands at the confluence of historically informed practice and a taste for new music that listens to the past; the grain of her instrument makes sense of Gemmo’s long, calm spans and of Armaroli’s refined constraints. Guy brings to the bass a composer’s imagination and an improviser’s alertness to situation; in Gemmo’s duo he becomes a second narrator who never obscures the page, and in Armaroli’s score he is the bearer of x, the living unknown that must remain responsive to another voice. The programme’s inner kinships invite wider reflections. The double-authored path – from a defined form that courts a second voice, to a solo response that re-hears the first, to a bicinium that grants improvisation a formal role – recalls the way a ground bass is elaborated across variations, or the way seventeenth-century diminutions reframed polyphony as ornamented line. In each case, a given becomes the condition for invention. The baroque bow, with its capacity for jeté and for quick chiaroscuro of attack, makes these relations tactile; the double bass, with its capacity to sustain and to blur, offers the counter-image of duration. Their combination suggests not contrast but complement. Armaroli’s earlier EWC51 Per due plus x already posed the calculated openness that Bicinium plus x refines, while his wider practice – rooted in composition, jazz and sound art – treats improvisation as a mode of enquiry rather than accident. The present score adds the classical severity of the bicinium to that enquiry, asking the improviser to remain answerable to another line. Gemmo’s return to traditional notation does not renounce experiment; it shifts the locus of risk to touch, to bow speed and contact point, to decisions about where to place sound in a field of silences. In both cases there is a quiet polemic against tired dichotomies: early versus new, written versus improvised. The supposed opposites turn out to be tools.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2025
Gemmo, Armaroli: Duo & Solo
