Orchestral Music

Cristalli di Tempo (2018, for Symphonic Orchestra)

Cristalli di Tempo is in the form of a fantasia. It presents a succession of musical tableaux, thematically and tonally interrelated. 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 present into future and past. He observed, like Henri Bergson, that the present splits in two heterogeneous directions, one which 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 everchanging individual and collective memory. Cristalli di Tempo is a musical reflection on this aspect of time passing, to which the music is inextricably bound, since, after ephemeral instances of sound are heard, they continue to exist only in the thoughts and memories of listeners. Following Deleuze, I conceived crystal-images as symbolizing refractions of concentrated, musically expanded moments. Each one of them is one of my tableaux. Obviously, the concept of crystal, beyond the reference to the reflection of sound-light-time, entails in itself also the idea of fragility, that for example of a nascent future. As concerns the musical material, the principal thematic source is derived from a re-elaboration of a gregorian chant (a portion of a Credo), whose fragments permeate the composition. The principal theme can be heard in its entirety, played by the horn solo, circa two minutes into the piece.

Downloadable Score: Cristalli – SCORE