A Coda Di Rondine

A Coda di Rondine shows six variations on an old Italian folk melody, known as La Girometta. The organic meaning of the old melody is thus transcended by heterogeneous codes, creating unexpected outcomes and unforeseen echoes. Each variation is grafted onto the preceding one through a neutral musical element that returns five times in the piece, always identical to itself: a connection reminiscent of the craft technique known as 'dovetail'. Therefore, the term 'passages' should be understood in an 'urbanistic' sense: they are galleries connecting the squares that populate the musical journey of the Concerto, and which might seem to belong to dissimilar places, even if they are musically derived from a single melodic series. The solo clarinet leads the discourse in continuous anticipation, as if it were the only musician possessing the map of the four ideal squares that are visited, pursued or sometimes merely approached by the orchestra instruments. Then, at the end of the score, a fifth square appears, totally different from the others: a memory space where a kind of short circuit occurs in the musical memory of the work, whereby everything re-emerges and all previous explanatory criteria are overturned. Six Memos is a musical response to the values that Italo Calvino proposed in 1985 in his 'American Lessons' (Six Memos for the Next Millennium). It was not my intention to describe the six different situations, but to try to respond to Calvino's proposal. The memos follow one another without interruption, flow into each other and influence one another, and the music that emerges represents my personal inspiration in taking up the challenge to paint a possible landscape of the next millennium, with six values in the palette. Not In My Name is one of the chapters of a broader project that wishes to address the complex and contradictory relationship between contemporary artistic expression and the society around it, in response to the challenge posed by British composer Steve Martland for 'art that does not reflect reality, but confronts it; music that is a protest for human values and a prediction of change; and that offers the possibility, however distant, of affirmation'. He was born in 1970 and obtained his Composition diploma from the Milan Conservatory in 1995. He subsequently attended seminars and masterclasses with esteemed composers Paolo Castaldi, John Cage and Louis Andriessen. In 1997 he founded Sentieri Selvaggi together with Angelo Miotto and Carlo Boccadoro, a group devoted to the performance and dissemination of contemporary music. He currently teaches composition at the Milan conservatory.