Contemporary Music Book II

This second album exploring the relationship between contemporary music and the past has roots that reach further back than its predecessor, Contemporary Music Book (Da Vinci Classics, 2022). It brings together two projects, conceived in 2010 and 2019. The works commissioned in 2010 grew out of Icarus Junior, an ensemble established to introduce young instrumentalists to contemporary techniques. After initial explorations of electronics and new technologies, its programme Soli Deo Gloria, created for the festival of the same name in Reggio Emilia, turned to the connections between musical history and the present.

The 2019 works were likewise intended for a young ensemble, Icarus vs Muzak, whose technical and interpretative experience was by then considerably more advanced. Our thanks go to all the composers who devoted their time to this musical adventure. The programme broadly follows the chronology of its historical points of reference, from Pérotin in Guarnieri’s opening work to the music of Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms in Colardo’s closing triptych. The composers were given considerable freedom: some stayed close to transcription, while others used their historical models as starting points for independent works.

Interwoven here, the two projects reflect an engagement with history that has remained central to Icarus throughout its life. Adriano Guarnieri’s Organum opens the programme, drawing on Pérotin’s Sederunt principes. The cyclical, recurring patterns of Pérotin’s hocket lend themselves to an instrumental treatment of the individual lines. Rather than evoke period instruments, Guarnieri brings this circular motion to the fore.

Added pedal tones and, above all, percussion intensify the original’s austere sonority. He approaches it as he would a composition of his own, unconstrained by questions of historical reconstruction. Massimiliano Viel’s Variazioni sul fumo, for five instruments, was written in 2019 as three variations on Fumeux fume par fumée by the late fourteenth-century composer Solage. The ‘smoke’ of the title also evokes the cultural haze of mannerism that permeates so much music today, including contemporary classical music: the work offers a gently satirical response.

Ruggero Laganà reworks the Kyrie from Ockeghem’s Missa L’homme armé, preserved in Vatican manuscript Chigi C.VIII.234, retaining its three-part structure. He is drawn to the archaic quality of the open fifth, an interval closely associated with the music of that distant age. In the final Kyrie, played pianissimo, harmonies overlap as pairs of instruments emerge in turn, tracing the harmonic course of the original. Chords gradually fall away until only the bare final G remains.

Del tempo che verrà la nostalgia is Silvia Colasanti’s homage to Josquin Desprez, the great Renaissance polyphonist who also worked extensively in Italy. As she explains, her concern is never quotation for its own sake, but the recollection of something deeply loved and experienced. It is this emotional dimension of earlier music that draws her to it. The original version, performed at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, included a voice; the version prepared for this project is entirely instrumental.

Stefano Bonilauri’s Consumato lume takes its inspiration from Tintoretto’s painting The Finding of the Body of Saint Mark. In the first half, the listener is caught within the painting’s extraordinary visual mechanism, which compels the eye to move ceaselessly. The second half imagines its light gradually fading into shadow, progressively loosening the hold of that mechanism. Luca Antignani’s Contrafactum draws on an anonymous Sephardic melody dating from around 1500.

He writes: ‘To transcribe a folk song is, in a sense, to recreate it, allowing a melody and rhythm from a centuries-old tradition to live in a new light. Orchestration becomes a means of examining this archetype. Invention lies in recontextualising its fertile aura of characteristic sounds, colours and noises, an expression of an authentic folk tradition, through the resources of Western classical music.’ In Alessandra Bellino’s Esurientes, the verse from Palestrina’s Magnificat, originally for three female voices, is recast for three principal instruments: violin, guitar and cello. They pass the melodic line between them, while percussion catches its movement in a continuous interplay of echoes and repetitions.

Brief impulses carry an idea from one ‘voice’ to another and out in different directions, gradually revealing it within an evocative, meditative atmosphere. For Le sette parole senza parole, Luciano Chessa takes a deeply emotional approach: ‘I cannot quite put into words how exalting, in the word’s original sense, it was to prepare a purely instrumental transcription of Schütz’s Seven Last Words. With the prologues and epilogues, the preliminaries and padding stripped away, only the music of these seven essential words remains. Yet, as in Mendelssohn, when the cutting truth of the Name disappears, the roses remain to set us dreaming.’ Gilberto Bosco’s Remember me derives from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

In Bosco’s music, the distance between present and past, whether remote or recent, is bridged by a search for intense emotional expression, poised between reason and feeling and touched by pessimism. Composition is a demanding commitment: the past must be approached with pietas, understood and absorbed. The connection with the listener is fundamental to his poetics. Communication is, above all, emotion.

Carlo Forlivesi’s Joy Angels is an aphorism lasting less than a minute: as fleeting as a memory, a short circuit of Proustian association. As with Bonilauri, its connection to the past is visual rather than musical. Three angels in a painting take the composer back to his childhood. Dating from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, the picture binds him to the archaic, dust-laden world of a past not so distant, yet irretrievably lost.

Sonia Bo’s Cantate consists of two short, freely conceived transcriptions from Bach’s cantatas BWV 147 (‘Jesus bleibet’) and BWV 140 (‘Wachet auf’). Drawing a broad palette of colours from modest resources, they serve a dual purpose: to introduce young performers to landmarks of the repertoire and to familiarise them with instrumental techniques now firmly established in contemporary music. Giuseppe Colardo’s Filigrane comprises three short pieces of contrasting character. The first and third draw melodic and harmonic fragments from Chopin’s Mazurka, Op. 17 No. 4, and Brahms’s Intermezzo, Op. 116 No. 2.

The central piece takes its material from the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Rhythm governs its course: an opening built entirely from percussive sounds gradually reveals its source, until unmistakable quotations from Beethoven emerge.