FIVE MEMOS [2010]

[fl, cl, vln, vc, pf, perc]

[in five movements]

​

Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation for Eighth Blackbird and the Look and Listen Festival

Premiere: May 7, 2010. Look and Listen. New York. 

Eighth Blackbird

DURATION: 15'

​

Program note:

​

The five movements of this piece, “Esattezza”, “Gli Uccelini del Signor Tic-Tac”, “Legerezza”, “Rapiditá”, and “Molteplicitá”, were written—more or less consciously— in response to the “values” proposed by Italo Calvino in his well-known “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”.

Lightness, speed, visibility, exactness and multiplicity are qualities that have pulled me to appreciate art for as long as I can remember. They are the values that make me listen to Mozart and Donatoni, look at Morandi and Klee, or read Murakami and Potocki.

Like Calvino, I prefer art that raises above the weight of the world. I also favor direct, clear, visible gestures that, while mysterious, speak to me with precision and assertiveness. I like the precarious line that separates drama from comedy, and celebrate the fact that an author can make a hat become the main protagonist of a funeral with the magic touch of a sudden gush of wind.

I am a somewhat chaotic thinker, and my impatience (which I would hardly describe as a value) makes me gravitate around a narrative that is fast, direct, terse, and to the point, and whose intensity is multifaceted, like the ecstatic anguish felt by a soccer fan before the execution of a penalty kick…