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Franco Donatoni
Etwas Ruhiger im Ausdruck (1967)
for fl., cl., vl, vlc and pf

The original material of this composition of 1967 was taken from the eighth bar of the second movement of Schoenberg's Five Piano Pieces op. 23. The title ("A little calmer in expression") is derived from the expressive direction indicated by Schoenberg for the bar in question. The formation is the same as that of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (without however the voice).
Donatoni described the works he composed between 1967 and 1977 as belonging to his first manner; Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck is perhaps the first and the most important score of this period, just as Spiri (1977) was to be the first of the subsequent period, in which the composer declared he identified himself.
Donatoni undertook the analysis of Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck in his book Questo (published in 1970): "It is a question here of having fairly neutral material, historically determined but extraneous to modern praxis and therefore resistant, almost antagonistic, to the ways of the craftsman, a material that flouts the possibilities of control, of verification based on the assessment of the result, in order to investigate control methods which are in their turn extraneous to any historical and stylistic predetermination, and at the same time to keep the control within the limits of ludic correctness of one's own actions so as to extract from them every illusory reference to a possible spontaneity".
The composer then explained why the choice of material fell on the eighth bar of op. 23: at this point "one always meets with extreme difficulty in understanding what is exactly happening at the moment, perhaps owing to the dynamic pp, ppp and pppp: to what one hears, of course. There is something elusive in those few notes, something which escapes from what has to happen and almost invites investigation into what can happen".
What can happen is investigated with logical proceedings, with processes of transposition, permutation, quantitative increase or reduction of the material.
The whole composition develops in four episodes:
multiplication of initial material;
gradual and progressive increase through accumulation and condensation;
gradual and progressive decrease, or reduction, by fragmentation and rarefaction;
attempt (unsuccessful) to reconstruct the initial material for the precise purpose of reintegrating the Schoenberg text.
With regard to the final pages of this piece, Donatoni wrote: "the conclusion must be understood as an arbitrary interruption of the experimentally failed attempt". This does not mean that the result was a "failure": the project failed, the initial idea. Or perhaps one could say: the initial idea was modified. Referring to the initial affirmation by Braque: "the work is finished" or, better still, can be interrupted, t he "arbitrary interruption" concerns this piece, while the work of Donatoni continued in the successive Souvenir (Kammersinphonie op. 18) of the same year.
The music is in itself highly expressive, the four episodes flow on without a break captivating the attention of the listener: I do not wish to add other comments; however, this last brief quote may be illuminating, taken again from Questo: "Those who consider their own self as something diminutive to be capitalized, find it hard to accept the idea that one's own self is, on the contrary, something in itself excessively immense to be written in small letters. They alone need to be attacked".