Works
Fabio Cifariello Ciardi
Pa(e/s)saggi (1999)
for Alto, Live electronics and Tape
Length: 14:00
1� Performance: Piccolo Teatro - Milano - 12/2000
Buyed by: Agon - Centro Armando Gentilucci - Fondazione Dragoni
This composition, more perhaps than any previous work, originated in a question - a question referring to an apparently non-musical experience: What happens when one inhabits a space?
To begin with, let us clarify the terms of the question. First of all, inhabiting signifies finding oneself in an "inside" that is to a certain extent separate with regard to an "outside". The "outside" in this case is what precedes the moment of listening: the real world, the concert hall, the life lived before entering the hall; the "inside" is the world which begins with the piece of music, the challenge of a paesaggio (landscape) simulated by the music, by the loudspeakers that surround the audience. The first illusion proposed concerns precisely the conflict between the real limits of the internal space, that is of the hall, and those defined by the sound. Once this conflict has been overcome and what is "outside" has been forgotten, we can begin to describe the "inside". The questions then multiply. A part of the illusion is centred on expansion: one of the venues inhabited by the listener - the public understood as a single massive person, as a sole listener/visitor - was imagined, in my mind, as an open space with faraway boundaries. A contrary illusion aims instead at the definition of small, intimate spaces. I asked myself: What are one's feelings when confined in a small box? What does one feel on finding oneself inside the soundbox of a viola? The sound of the air filtered, coloured by the soundbox? Minute tremors, imperceptible in the reality, which here jolt the attention?
The articulation of these illusions implies diverse consequences. The first of course is that the venue occupied by the public tends to take shape in an inevitably dynamic way, with variable dimensions: large, small, full, empty. And then, if mutability is entailed, the inescapable question arises of the passaggio (transition) from large to small or from small to large. In that case, if we admit that the listener can feel the "transition", more or less rapid, between venues of variable dimensions, then we should presume a perception of time that is outside its real passage and that above all is changeable, unstable, since spaces of different dimensions can only be lived psychologically with diverse temporal scansions.
The setting to sound of a "transition" between different spaces should take into account not only the possibility of mixing the sound, but also a viable "physics" that controls the proposed world. In such a context, then, the "transition" could be realized in a gradual displacement in the space (something leaves while something else enters), but not only this. In real physics the walls between the spaces can be pierced, shattered, torn up (so as to include among the possible boundaries - and why not - also the delicate panels of an ancient Japanese dwelling). In these imaginary physics, the fragments of a space can transform themselves deviously into the natural (or almost) background of the succeeding landscape. And again. There can be sonorous symbols physically more or less admissible for making the landscape feasible: a space can invade the preceding space, taking advantage of a door imprudently left open or it can open a momentary passage-way "crumpling up" the preceding landscape just as one throws away an unsatisfactory sketch.
It is the decidedly wide-ranging concept of mixing, of "miscere", that frequently comes into play. The etymology of the term opens an extremely broad semantic field: miscere is related to confondere (confuse, jumble) and therefore to the loss of the original identity, but also to unire (unite) in the sense of binding together what was initially separate, and again, incendia miscet means to start a fire, proelia miscere to join battle. Finally, mixing presumes a preparation and therefore a constructive waiting for a future purpose: consequently, the mixing can symbolize an anacrusis, a "lift" towards that which the mixture will become.
If we decide to occupy a space we must also ask ourselves if someone, or - even better - something has arrived before us. Will the real/human presence on the scene find someone there where the end has occurred? (And, incidentally, the end of the preceding piece occurred there
. from the second scene of a longer story begun in France many years ago and entitled Giochi e Finzioni).
The presences that enliven the spaces are connected to reality according to different gradients. Their connotation, their relationship with a sound memory common to the listeners, is perhaps the principal parameter which characterizes them and without doubt is the lens through which I have settled the practical compositional choices that determine their characterization. The recollections which are called to mind here are, so to speak, pre-musical in the sense that they do not refer back to a knowledge directly connected to music but to more ancient worlds of sound. Among the latter, the essential is that founded on the word. A word never asserted or revealed, but which forms and defines intimately both the instrumental articulation of the viola and that of one of the categories of sound objects.
Finally, what is the viola? From a dramaturgical point of view, it supplies us with a double attraction. In one sense, the viola live is both the protagonist - as it should be! - and the companion in exploration for every eager listener/visitor seated in the audience. Since the viola is the sole physically tangible element of a non-physical space, it cannot be confined to the stage but should be given the possibility of a certain - this time real - mobility. The second function of the viola is "genetic". The sonorous material of the instrument is the foundation, more or less manifest, for diverse sonorous objects, hybrid and not distinctive, which contrast, integrate, alter and replace parts, fragments of the acoustic environment.
The fact of being a genetic reference, a pole, of parts of the acoustic universe, deliberately and also inevitably assigns a symbolic function to the sound materials produced and producible by the viola. A complete "class" of sonorous objects derive from the microphonic details of the instrument, identified and recorded during the initial phase of processing: it is that which occupies the small confined space, the "inside" of a viola referred to above. But then, what the soloist on the stage is exploring is really something outside himself, or is it instead an allegorical and exploded part of his own "inside" ? The doubt will I hope persist. On the other hand, I should be content if losing the reassuring coordinates of a deep-rooted logic were one of the most intriguing challenges of my work.
The search for a passive disorientation in what Peter Handke has called "The inside world of the outside of the inside", next to a viola that always verges on the anxiety for the definite loss of the way, is the intonation, the poetic mood which aims at dominating the greater part of the piece. Then perhaps something happens? (if not in life, at least in music?)
Some verses of San Juan de la Cruz comment my journey and, conversely, are commented by my music.
Tras de un amoroso lance,
Y no de esperanza falto,
Volé tan alto, tan alto,
Que le di a la caza alcance.
Y con todo, en este trance
En el vuelo quedé falto;
Mas el amor fué tan alto,
Que le di a la caza alcance
Esperé solo este lance,
Y en esperar no fuí falto,
Pues fuí tan alto, tan alto,
Que le di a la caza alcance
In amoroso furore
e non scevro di speranza
volai così in alto, così in alto
che raggiunsi la preda.
Tuttavia, nel punto estremo,
il mio volo restò manco;
ma l'amor fu così alto
che raggiunsi la preda.
ho sperato solo nel furore
e in speranza non fui manco
se salii così in alto, così in alto
che raggiunsi la preda.
from Coplas al divino in Juan de la Cruz, Poesie, published by Einaudi 1974
(Fabio Cifariello Ciardi)
Technical Specification
1 ADAT or Mac computer with Pro Tools (G3 or G4 recommended)
1 CD reader
1 radio microphone (type suitable for string instruments)
1 cordless earphone for tape playback for the viola
1 Lexicon reverberation unit or other equivalent professional model
Mixer: minimum 10 IN with PFL control (prefader) 4 premaster OUT, 2 master OUT 4 AUX
4 monitors for viola multicast (pos. 1, 2, 3, 4) [*]
4 loudspeakers for tape multicast (preferably subwoofer)
2 stereo final amplifiers
1 stereo final amplifier for monitors (if not self-.amplified) [*]
10 music desks with individual lighting (2 for each position) [*]
1 stopwatch
Lights
The performance requires house lights that can be gradually dimmed and lights on the 4 positions in the auditorium + the offstage position [*]. A final specification should be drawn up on the basis of space availability.
[*] material to be defined on the basis of the type of auditorium.