Transarmonica

Music composed for soprano and counter-tenor based on De Rerum Natura by Tito Lucrezio Caio.  

Musical ensemble: violin, viola, cello and two keyboards. 

Scenography by Roberto Masotti. 

Commissioned for the festival "ATERFORUM" in Ferrara  (1988).  TRANS-ARMONICA (1992) opened the Festival of Villa Arconati, at Castellazzo di Bollate, in an inaugural evening dedicated to operas by Roberto Cacciapaglia.

 

On a train, through the window, everything passes by so fast: houses, trees are left behind while the eye of the observer searches for something in the closest and furthest space, up to the horizon line. At night a base note of a harmonic cord (bordone) is running while everything is moving, is changing along a journey to be explored through harmony. If you look around, there's so much to see: mountains, seas, trees, cities, quarters; harmony penetrates into everything. It's impossible not to consider all these places and things. It's like a plain where a pentagram passes from major to minor keys, triads, pauses, perfect chords which have the power of telling a story of relationships, of suggestions and impressions that help us finding a contact with our emotional world.

The idea of crossing, searching, leaving, wandering through harmonic movements. It's much more than a geographic space, they are real worlds: upbeat and downbeat (battere e levare), sunrise and sunset, to breathe in, to breathe out. It's a journey with no stops, because stopping is dangerous; stopping can chain you to language, to habits, to nostalgias or to rules that let everything be solved by mental and theoretical processes without considering that perception is physical and emotional too. Moving means not being captured, being on a constant movement, moving away from schemes trying to suspend the mechanisms of music codes. Perception depends on our state of mind, on our receptivity; during a journey, it's possible for our senses to be more awake and, for the sound impressions that touch our memory, to impose themselves trying to go beyond an harmonic code. No, don't stop! Just look and observe along the way, let's make opposite musical conceptions meet and let's use these energies, expressed in many different forms, to obtain a stronger intensity. Don't relate just to "high" music tradition, let's look at all those music phenomena that are a means of cultural exchange, of a behaviour and symbol of generation changes. Just do this with the hope of going beyond those boundaries that divide music into categories and hoping that once dawn has come, we'll be able to go beyond any border.

 

visualizza libretto in italiano

visualizza libretto in latino