Cristalli di Tempo (2018, for Symphonic Orchestra)
Cristalli di Tempo is written in the form of a fantasia. It presents a succession of thematically and tonally interrelated musical tableaux. The title is borrowed from an idea by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who forged the concept of crystal-image to describe “the most fundamental operation of time,” that is to say the splitting of the present into future and past. He observes, similarly to Henri Bergson, that the present splits in two heterogeneous directions, one that determines the future and the other that infinitely, recursively, bears the past into the new present. The present is, therefore, a ‘hole’ in which the past and the future coexist; the past exists only as an ever-changing individual and collective memory. Cristalli di Tempo is a musical reflection on this aspect of time passing, to which the very essence of music is inextricably bound, since in music, after ephemeral instances of sound are heard, they continue to exist only in the thoughts and memories of listeners. I then conceived the tableaux that form the piece as crystal-images that symbolize refractions of concentrated yet musically expanded moments. Obviously, the concept of crystal, beyond the reference to the reflection of time (in this case expressed in the form of sound), entails in itself also the idea of fragility—the one, for example, of a nascent future. As regards the musical material, the principal thematic source is derived from a re-elaboration of a plain chant (a portion of a Credo), whose fragments permeate the composition. The principal theme can be heard in its entirety, played by a horn solo over an accompaniment of strings, circa two minutes into the piece.
Downloadable Score: Cristalli – SCORE
Flowing (2014, for Symphonic Orchestra) .
Recorded by the OSN – RAI, Turin, July 23rd to 25th, 2014 (Conductor: Yoichi Sugiyama).
Flowing is conceived as an auditory transfiguration, from noise to pure sinusoidal sound. Musical superstructures that represent changing emotional states counterpoint this gradual and constant passage.
In this piece, the fruit of the encounter of different musical languages, I explored the possible coexistence of different aesthetics. Some concepts and approaches typical of electronic avant-garde music, such as granular synthesis or a texture-based approach to composition, inspire part of the composition, while other layers are based on (poly)triadic harmonies and are developed by means of traditional thematic and contrapuntal techniques.
Divided into five main parts, the piece presents a structure not unlike that of a sonata. A slow introduction uses an aleatoric technique of accumulation to pass from an initial rumble to full-fledged orchestral chords. The subsequent exposition presents the main motivic material of the composition, which is also used during the two following developments. The first of these is a sonic orchestral flow (which gives the name to the composition), while the second, more varied, presents successive musical textures. In these developments, spectrally conceived pointillistic harmonies and more traditional contrapuntal developments are superimposed and enter into dialogue. Textures and thematic material then balance out and lead to a varied recapitulation of the exposition, which also includes traces of the textures previously heard, thus synthesizing the various facets of the composition. The conclusion is entrusted to a single Tibetan bell, the sound of which gently fades into silence.
Audio Excerpts:
Maximiliano Amici 