Per me si va nella città dolente - composition for solo piano
- Submitting institution
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The University of Leeds
: A - Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - Music
- Output identifier
- UOA33A-4447
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The earliest elements of the piece appeared around 2010. Materials elaborated before 2014 comprise fragmentary sketches of pitches, chords, and intervals, and pre-compositional plans for rhythmic material, none of which have been deployed in any other piece. They perhaps amount to between thirty seconds and two minutes of the finished piece. They are treated compositionally in the same way as the ‘found’ material (meta-quotations from the literature, actual quotations from Kurtág, and insertions from the pianist) as generative multi-textural layers, contributing to the density of individual sections according to the overall structure, itself devised for the piece only in 2019.
Per me si va nella città dolente explores two related ideas: translation and memory. It contributes to questions of how (and whether) literature can (or should) be translated into musical form and how musical memory functions semantically and syntactically for composer, performer, and listener alike.
It translates James Thomson’s epic poem, The City of Dreadful Night (1870–74), a meditation on horror and alienation in the modern metropolis, itself recalling Dante’s Inferno, and prefaced by the well-known lines which form the title of the piece. The twenty-one sections of the poem become twenty-one (attacca) musical stanzas, each of identical one-minute length, rendering the wildly different lengths of the poem as different musical densities.
The musical material is original, but knowingly alludes to and recalls the gestural and figural language of the canonic piano literature, from the nineteenth century to the present day, affording different degrees of recognition for the performer and the listener. This sort of ‘meta-quotation’ was redoubled by developing musical materials from embryonic sketch materials going back up to ten years: as well as the piece evoking the sedimented memory of the canon, this is further embedded by incorporating the composer’s (sometimes faulty) memory of the musical material which is elaborated in it.
It incorporates, too, parenthetical musical ‘footnotes’ provided by the performer on the basis of a late sketch of the manuscript. These appear at exactly the points where the performer said they had occurred to him, which trigger a further, distinct form of performative memory in the physical moment of performance.
The piece was premiered by Ian Pace at the University of Leeds on 6 December 2019. Though further planned live performances were postponed as a result of Covid, it has been available to stream on YouTube since 29 May 2020.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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