April 2017, 13rd Rakvere, 23rd Tallinn (Estonia)
Lossimuusika Kadriorus
klavierduo KeAmo – Faristamo Eller and Merike Poom
The idea of developing a creative project came during the reading of an article by Eero Tarasti, a philosopher and musicologist from Finland, Semiotics of Resistance (2008), about globalization and transcendence. The aspect that struck me was the reflection between spirit and matter. I develop this idea in Sound’s Transcendence (2012) for piano four hands. The piece was finished during a chamber music workshop in Argenteuil (France). Tarasti’s reading led to the idea of composing a work for two pianists playing the same piano, but with one playing natural harmonicson the strings and the other playing ordinary sounds on the keyboard. Thus, one represents the spirit, the absence of weight, the absence of a body and of real matter; freedom, energy, the invisible and the untouchable. The other pianist playing the same ordinary pitches on the keyboard of the same piano represents matter, density, weight, the real world, the physical aspect of things in human life and the limits of the body in relation to the mind. It is thus a contrast between energy and body gesture, as well as between intellectual thought and action in space. The pianist playing on the keyboard also represents human civilization through the system of tempered pitches. On the other hand, the natural harmonics on the piano strings are metaphorically associated with the natural and ancestral world. We therefore aim at a hybrid sound result. The acoustic material is characterized by this double condition: natural and humanized. Sound’s Transcendence is a work dedicated to composer Franco Oppo (1935-2016). This composition is characterized by a unique, contained and directional evolutionary process. The piece starts with a unison and during a little more than six minutes I start composing articulations and figures of “large” dimensions, consisting of elements from the harmonics on the strings and ordinary sounds on the keyboard.. The musical form is in perpetual transformation and is elaborated through principles of variation and especially compositional techniques of micro-variants.
alessandromilia 