G.O.M.P. – Four Cinematic Voices for Solo Cello

Description

A unifying thread courses through the programme, binding it without constricting it: the interval between persons and between sounds, that tract of silence freighted with resonance wherein the nuances of affection, anticipation and memory surface. The premise, as articulated by the authors of the two previously unpublished pages presented here, is that it is precisely the ‘in-between’ that safeguards the density of meaning, and that the cello, with a voice akin to human breath, can transmute it into sonic matter. From this premise there unfolds a dramaturgical arc that leads from the austere concentration of Philip Glass’s Songs and Poems to the rarefied luminosity of Michiru Ōshima in The Space Between, from the timbral and processual enquiry of Ennio Morricone in Proibito to the introverted leave-taking of Luca Pincini in Au Revoir. Not an anthology, but a single panelled form, fashioned through the interplay of distances and proximities.
With Songs and Poems Glass entrusts to the solo cello a sequence of seven pieces that wed constructive discipline to the freedom of the voice. Dedicated to Wendy Sutter, the cycle was presented in 2007 in New York and marks one of those junctures at which the composer, renowned for monumental theatrical and symphonic architectures, elects the most intimate acoustic chamber in which to let his grammar resound. The weave is familiar: rhythmic modules, chordal fields that shift, obstinate figures that transform before our ears; yet here the inscription of gesture becomes narration, and narration becomes song. The objectivity of the design allows a contained pathos to filter through, an interior lyricism which the cello’s timbre articulates with natural ease. An editorial note links the work’s genesis to materials originally conceived for the cinema, reworked and recast in an autonomous context; the outcome, however, is wholly instrumental, capable of turning narrative residues into self-sufficient, scrupulously exact forms. Glass’s lexicon, proceeding by accumulation and subtraction, here bends its fluvial continuity into a series of communicating ‘rooms’: each Song opens a perspective, and each Poem suspends its echo, with unbroken continuity yet a temporal tact that demands attention over the long arc of listening. Unsurprisingly, reception has emphasised the cycle’s doubleness – confessional and architectural at once – and the centrality of the relationship with its dedicatee, who helped to shape its vocal delivery and the breathing of its phrases. From a technical standpoint Songs and Poems draws on a rich repertory of inner dynamics: double-stopping treated as implicit polyphony, open strings left to vibrate to create a harmonic halo, moto perpetuo patterns that come to rest in almost sudden melodic points of repose. In filigree one discerns the long shadow of Bach, not as an imitated model but as an idea of form that breathes and renews itself.
Ōshima’s piece shifts the focus to the boundary between sound and silence. The Space Between interrogates the threshold: energy resides not in peaks but at the margins, in soft attacks, finely governed decay, and reverberations that converse with one another. The melodic profile, often sustained over long spans, seeks a clarity shorn of rhetoric – a line that does not put itself forward as protagonist but serves as a vector traversing a field of resonance. This is hospitable music, placing the listener in a position to choose a personal vantage-point. In her statement of intent, the composer dwells precisely on that intermediate zone, wherein each person is called to find their meaning, and wherein the performer, assuming responsibility for time, becomes the director of the air between the sounds. Ōshima’s profile, with a catalogue spanning cinema, anime, television and the concert hall, attests to a rare continuity of craft between deft orchestration and cultivated attention to melody. Her work for ensembles and orchestra, her chamber output and her leadership of international projects confirm a figure in whom classical grammar and visual imagination fructify one another. In this piece such dual competence is distilled into an essential writing of meticulous timbral control, where apparent simplicity overlays a finely chiselled labour on detail and resonance.
With Morricone the scene alters. Proibito emerged in the early Seventies in dialogue with the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza: not a score, but an operational scheme; not a text in the traditional sense, but a grid devised to govern an ensemble practice that holds together design and alea. The publisher’s materials attest to a dual performance destination: for trumpet and sixteen-track magnetic tape in the studio; or for eight amplified trumpets in the concert hall. The dedication ‘to the friends of the Group’ makes the horizon explicit: a European laboratory in which composers pursued non-jazz improvisation wrought from concrete materials, noises, frictions, feedback. It is the same frontier that criticism has often approached with categories poised between gesture and form, constraint and freedom.
The version for cello and pre-recorded tracks heard here arose from an explicit wish expressed directly by Morricone to Pincini. It was his last request: he encouraged him to undertake a new realisation of Proibito for cello, relying on his interpretative sensibility, and expressed great enthusiasm for the idea. He also asked him to add a ninth, personal line of improvisation, which is now present in the first voice of the master.
The transfer from an idea conceived for a wind instrument to a string instrument is no mere timbral adaptation: it constitutes a change of status. The multiplied trumpet creates an architecture of signals; the cello, wrapped in a cloud of layers, produces a single, continuous body in which gesture and resonance coincide. It is a rare instance of how an ‘improvisation scheme’ can be realised as a fully-fledged form in a different medium without relinquishing its processual charge.
Au Revoir closes the circle and reformulates its trajectory: not a definitive epilogue, but a threshold between a greeting and a farewell. The page unfolds through emergences and returns, figures that reappear transfigured, as though the work’s inner memory were interrogating its own time. The tension lies entirely in suspension: the line eschews emphasis, preferring a modest declamation and entrusting the gravest accents to silence. This is borderland music; wherein sonic matter becomes a metaphor for a restrained affetto and form a grammar of fertile uncertainty. The composer himself speaks of that unstable point at which hope and separation coexist; the cello, like a bridge, holds the two banks together.
Taken as a whole, the disc functions as an imaginary anechoic chamber in which each piece reveals not only its own figure but also the shadow of the others. In Songs and Poems repetition becomes a threshold of consciousness: the ostinato does not hypnotise but clarifies, allowing detail to surface. In The Space Between resonance becomes semantic space: what remains suspended speaks as eloquently as the sign. In Proibito energy lies in process, in the making and unmaking of surfaces, in the dialectic between rule and risk; and the cello’s grafting, with its percussive gestures and metallic haloes, relaunches that dialectic in a new guise. In Au Revoir time becomes memory and memory a project: leave-taking becomes expectation, like a bowstring that does not snap but slackens, in the last restrained touch.
At the centre of this journey stands the performer’s responsibility. Pincini acts as a director of sound, in the sense of dramaturgical lucidity: resonance is treated as material, silence as a place of meaning, virtuosity as an instrument of musical speech. His long partnership with Morricone’s world and his cultivation of disparate repertories have honed a specific competence in the management of time and air, indispensable to music that lives ‘between’ sounds even before it lives ‘within’ them. It is an interpretative stance that holds together control and abandon, page and gesture, analysis and listening.
Reheard thus, the programme does not appear as the sum of four chapters, but as a single meditation on the time of sounds and the time of human beings. There, in the interstices, the pieces speak to one another. Glass’s repetition clarifies Ōshima’s suspension; Morricone’s governed alea illuminates Pincini’s emotional grammar; and the latter points back to the beginning, returning to the listener a space to inhabit. It is in this theatre of distances that, in the secrecy of silences, music returns to proximity.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2025