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Federico Incardona and Giovanni Damiani

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Carapezza P. E.

Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology

2013

issue 12

41-56

Together with Sciarrino and Casale, Incardona and Damiani are the most important composers trained at Palermo University’s Musicological Institute. Federico Incardona (Palermo, 1958-2006) reconciles the social commitment of Berg and the political tension of Nono with the sublimated eroticism of Szymanowski. If Nono’s works, like those of Evangelisti in a different way, blend dodecaphonic dialectic with the corporeity of the sound of Varèse, Incardona blends Evangelisti’s sonorous cosmogony with the erotic immediateness of Bussotti. But his principal reference point is Mahler. His music is rich in meaning and strong emotional intensity, concentrated and sublimated: it is like “processes of denuding of the melody, carnal embraces between the parts, dodecaphonic series modelled on the body of the loved one” (Spagnolo). Its “new linearity and temporal tension”, is wedded to the “absolute primacy of expression and emotion”, in full awareness of the “deep unity of emotion and knowledge” (Lombardi Vallauri). Indeed, in the intense expressionism of his music, dodecaphonic construction is always at the service of a dialectical discourse which is dense and deep, but - in his last works - clear and fluid like a melody by Bellini. “Infinite melos”, Marc Crescimanno defines it: harmonic richness and dense hétérophonie complexities are blended; the counterpoint is based “on the superimposition of manifold variations on the same figure, with precise control of the vertical encounters on its melodic-harmonic hinges”. Born into a dynasty of engineers and architects, Giovanni Damiani (Palermo, 1966) is himself an engineer and architect, but in sound space. Rather than music, his works are organized Sound: “embodiment of the intelligence inherent in sounds themselves”, in the manner of Varèse, and specifically “sound vegetation”, in the manner of Bartok. His most important work, Salve follie precise (1998-2004: on a libretto in verse by Francesco Carapezza, based on Semmelweis et l’infection puerpérale that Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote between 1924 and 1929), represents precisely the germination of life (of algae from water, of grass from rock, of man from woman, of sounds from Sound) and the threats of death that surround it, that is to say of regression of the animal and vegetable kingdoms to the mineral kingdom. In it Damiani exclusively uses, as previously in the great symphony Matrice/Organon (1995), natural harmonic sounds. We thus assist at harmonic germination; Sound generates sounds, the Note generates notes. If Damiani as a musicologist follows on from Réti, as a composer he follows on from Schenker. For him the note, seen as pure Sound internally structured a priori, is everything: the universe of artistic creation in sound space is only unfolding of the tension internal to the note itself. Everything (melody, tonality, polyphony, harmony), as Cesare Brandi wrote, “comes from the very nature of the note, which is, in the stratification of harmonics, tonic, isolated note (of a melody), vertical chord and horizontal encounter of polyphonic lines”.

Aldo Clementi musicus mathematicus

100%

Carapezza P. E.

Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology

2013

issue 12

57-72

Like that of Liszt and Stravinsky, the composers by whom he was attracted in his adolescence and early youth, Aldo dementi’s (Catania 1925-Rome 2011) musical production went through various phases, greatly changing on the surface and in appearance, though not in depth and substance. He himself suggests a division into five phases: 1. Preliminary (1944-1955), juvenile and apprenticeship works. 2. Structural (1956-1961). 3. Informal material (1961-1964). 4. Non-formal optical (1966-1970). 5. Polydiatonic (1970-2011): groups of letters indicating musical notes (for example: B-A-C H), or canti dati (modal or tonal - monodic or polyphonic - compositions of the western tradition, from the Stele of Sicilus to Stravinsky), but most often segments of melodic lines inferred from them. But - in the polyphonic counterpoint that derives from it - they are simultaneously intoned in the different voices in different tonalities: hence their superimposition restores the chromatic dodecaphonic total. Clementi himself proclaims the constitutional continuity of this development. The substance of his music consists in the direct transposition of a figurative project into a sonorous structure. Geometrie di musica: the title of the 2001 book by Gianluigi Mattietti refers first of all, as the subtitle says, to The diatonic period of Aldo Clementi, but it perfectly defines his whole musical production, all pervaded by dense polyphonic counterpoints. For Clementi construction is a goal, not a means to articulate discourse: indeed, he was even to do without discourse in his three central creative periods; and when in the fifth and latest one he has returned to it, he has enslaved it entirely to construction : he draws fragments from it, to be used as raw material, i.e. the diatonic subjects, of his dodecaphonic counterpoints. After the different phenomenology of the eruptions of sound matter of Varèse and Stravinsky, dementi’s music represents a further peak of pure construction in the sonorous space. His counterpoint however, like Webern’s, is limpid, subtly articulated, and dominated by reason: but here construction reigns supreme, and the composer in accordance with his requirements uses discursive melodic segments as raw material, as bricks (“modules” he says, and he describes them as mosaic tiles). “The idea of a construction achieved with the dovetailing of mirror-like images is also at the base of the figurative research of Escher, hinging on the concept of division of the plane, through repeated figures, mirror-like and congruent” (Mattietti). Indeed, dementi’s music is “disciplina quae de numeris loquitur” (discipline that speaks of numbers), according to the definition by Cassiodorus, rather than “scientia bene modulandi” (art of singing well), according to the definition by Augustine; and it is, more precisely, paraphrasing the famous definition by Leibniz, “exercitium arithmeticae manifestum coscientis se numerare animi” (evident arithmetical exercise of the mind aware of counting). Three compositions of dementi’s polydiatonic period are here thoroughly considered: two canons for string quartet, the very simple four-voiced Canone on a fragment by Platti (1997) and the very complex eight-voiced Tributo (1988) on “Happy birthday to you!”; and a de-collage, Blues and Blues 2, “fantasies on fragments by Thelonious Monk”, for piano (2001).

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Federico Incardona and Giovanni Damiani

Aldo Clementi musicus mathematicus