Fulvio Caldini's Memories of the Flood

I'll freely admit that I'm no expert on contemporary Italian classical music.  Sure, I know and love post-WWII guys like Luigi Dallapiccola, Luciano Berio and Giacinto Scelsi, and featured a piece by Niccolò Castiglioni on Forgotten Leaves, but that's hardly a comprehensive knowledge and would make me look like a poser if I ever attended university over there.  That doesn't mean that I won't promote lesser-known Italians like I own the place, which brings us to Fulvio Caldini, a composer I discovered via Keith Johnson's sheet music shop in Seattle, the stock of which can be viewed here.

Caldini is best known for his pieces for the recorder as a soloist and ensemblist, an instrument I've long held disdain for due to its deceptive difficulty and tendency to create grating wolf tones (at least whenever I try playing it).  Caldini is a spiritual disciple of Steve Reich, and as such most of his more current music, including the many recorder works of his to get recorded, are dyed-in-the-wool minimalism that reflect a heavy Reichian influence.  They also show how excellent it can be when people can actually play the recorder, such as in the Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet in their recording of his Clockwork Game, op. 72/a:

That slap-tongue effect is really something, adding a rich percussive texture that immediately sets the piece apart.  There's also a slight flanging, possibly unintentional but totally welcome.  In the spirit of the genre he allows harmonies to unfold naturally, and the rhythms gently transition from duple to triple meters and back again.  The texture becomes more pointillistic as the piece reaches the middle but the true center sees longer notes than ever before, accompanied by seething dissonances.  Once the 8-minute mark rolls we get both high slap notes and moments of actual silence, and the low strings of repeated notes eventually return, though in a different key.  It's a fine act of hypnotism at the very least and the performance here is excellent.

The Sonatina in Quartetto, op. 65f, features a long solo on the sopranino recorder or garklein (I think; I don't have the album liner notes) that dances across a disjointed chaconne in the first movement.  This instrument is one of the more treacherous I know and the performer here is pretty stunning; I'd think those li'l beasts require insane breath control.  The second movement is more flowing and pastoral, akin to a late Medieval partsong and exploiting the recorder's Earthy resonance.  The third brings back the sopranino for another off-kilter dance, but this time there's less staccato chirps and more melismatic lines supported by quasi-organ chord bursts.  In all three movements Caldini's harmonic palette is ebullient and bubbly, making for a sonatina both condensed and somewhat light in tone, especially in the last movement.  Did you know that you can get both these tracks as well as many other recorder ensemble pieces by Caldini on this excellent-looking CD?  Lovely stuff.

On a less Reichian note, Caldini created this piece of musique concrète only a few years ago, Sulle scogliere di marmo, op. 132.  The title translates to "On the Marble Cliffs", and I have a feeling it's in reference to Ernst Junger's novel of the same name.  Published in 1939, the novel is mostly remembered for having predicted the outbreak of WWII with its depiction of a Utopian rural society infiltrated and corrupted by an insidious, pseudo-fascist regime.  I read that book some years ago, and while I didn't think it was all that great and largely read like bad fan fiction of the War, it did have some very striking imagery and I can see other people liking it far more than myself.  I can't be sure that Caldini had that book in mind when writing this, the first movement of which begins as a study of bells and gongs smeared across a wide, processed canvas.  By minute two crashing waves and screeching wails have entered the scene, as well as low thunder-tube notes akin to the music that accompanies the scene in Star Trek: the Motion Picture where the Klingon ships get destroyed by V-GER's energy field.  Caldini's own energy field soon takes over and is wholly terrifying, layered break drums emerging from a hundred writhing snakes.  The waves subside and single pitches needle into our foreheads.  Movement two aims to illustrate the sensation of dropping a 70's moog into a river.  The high pitches insinuate themselves into our frontal lobes and the break drums/gamelan bells return.  Then Caldini tosses a rock in and we flash back to 'Nam.  Movement three slows down to allow for an apparent alien invasion as many of the electronic layers are classic sci-fi stuff, but as before water and helicopters take precedence.  It's here that I realize what Marmo is - a psychological tale of the arrival of war and an atmosphere piece that works best as a stream-of-consciousness narrative of someone hiding from war machines in the wild, and the Junger reference makes much more sense after a full listen.  In purely musical terms, the best reference I can muster for this piece is Xenakis's concrète masterpiece Hibiki Hana Ma, but Marmo's sound tapestry is wild and mysterious enough to evoke whatever you feel like.  Any way you look at it the piece is a striking and expertly crafted addition to the musique concrète rep and shows Caldini as a master of atmospherics.


All of these pieces allude to wide spaces and internal worlds, and this fascination is much older than his Reichian work - it has been present since his career was in its infancy, which brings us to the works I wanted to talk about the most.  At Keith Johnson's shop I found two sonatas, which we won't be discussing, as well as three large-format one-sheets written back when his opus numbers were single digits and immediately grabbed my attention for their elusive beauty and elegant engraving.  I recorded all three of them for my Soundcloud (making my performances the recording premiere of these pieces) and scanned them as to make them as easy as possible to enjoy and perform by others.  And first on the docket is a micro-suite inspired by Old Scratch himself, just in time to miss Halloween by a little while.

"Iblis" is the name for the Devil in the Qu'ran, and Caldini totally avoids filling his portrait of the Lord of Lies with lots of fire and brimstone.  Each of the movements of the suite are played attaca and are not immediately perceptible as distinct pieces, relying on the prowess of the performer to make them notable.  Starting out only with three intervals - minor second, minor third, major third - each movement expands the sound palette to create mounting foreboding, all within the context of static-yet-expansive drama.  Caldini ladles on fermati and dynamic quaking, his harmonies caught in a limbo between tonality and atonality but can't help but be dark.  A particularly curious detail are he quasi campanella fourths and fifths in the Liberissimo statico movement, marked with both staccato markings and fermati; as there's no standard approach for this on the piano I used half-pedalling to make the notes decay unpredictably.  The piece reaches a climax in the middle of page 2 at Libero, where rolled tenth chords sound subterranean gongs and a minor ninth roll marks a grand fall to a low E, leading into a soft variation on the opening figure and a final abyssal D-flat.  There's been a lot of great classical music written about the Devil but the Iblis Suite, op. 3a is one of the most subconsciously compelling and makes for a singularly entrancing performing experience.  Let's hope I didn't botch it too much.

Translating into "Memory of the Flood", Memoria del Diluvio, op. 5 is a bigger step towards minimalism but avoids the modal noodling that is post-minimalism's hallmark sound.  In fact, in all these early pieces Caldini's harmonies are unlike anything else being written at the time, neither tonal or dodecaphonic, maintaining strong lyric sensibility without appearing old-fashioned or sentimental.  Once again using limited intervallic variety as stepping stones, Memoria pulls the dragshoot on drama and sits on the sustaining pedal, allowing single notes to shimmer in the deep.  The left hand ambles along broad triads to create enormous resonance, allowing familiar harmonies to emerge organically and clash with one another.  When the pedal is finally changed nearly a minute has elapsed and the effect is like a huge heartbeat.  Caldini maintains this reduced writing for many minutes, all the way until the middle of the third staff of page 2 where two perfect fifths offset by a minor second and a few octaves sounds like an Earthy bell.  Some people will think of John Cage's In a Landscape as a possible inspiration, and while I'd buy Caldini being a fan of the work what this piece really reminds me of is the piano suites Charles Koechlin wrote in 1910's, such as his famous hour-long cycle Les heures persanes, op. 65 and more appropriately Paysages et marines, op. 63:

Those resounding open intervals are key to Koechlin's unique brand of Impressionism and Paysages was my biggest reference point for performing this work, and even if my work here only succeeds in making Paysages et marines more popular than that's okay, too.  Memoria del Diluvio doesn't need help from Koechlin, though, and hopefully it'll come in to its own with repeated performances.

The Etruscan civilization became distinct around 800 BC and fell around 500 BC, and has sustained a fascination in the Italian soul due to its unique language and deep roots in the land; the region of Tuscany is named after the culture.  I've seen at least two Italian horror movies that use Etruscan mystery to spice up mundane zombie stories, and that's got to count for something.  In Caldini's case Etrusci (is that what you'd say?) is used much like Satie used ancient Greek gymnopedes, backdrops for delicate evocations of an unknown past.  The action is marked by contrasting beat divisions, simultaneously more sustained and faster moving than the textures of Memoria and alluding to a recalled restlessness.  Melodies snake eliptically and the hands dovetail each other's phrases.  The second "incantation" features a rarity in contemporary music, a repeated section, and he gives the number of repeats over to the choice of the performer; I've only repeated it once as to not overstay my welcome.  As in Memoria Caldini uses larger note values at slow tempi to give the illusion of flying over large space, and in the third incantation those values are nearly doubled, resulting in the one string of quarter notes moving by very quickly.  This practice might not be so much new as a throwback to Medieval and Renaissance music that used whole and half notes how we tend to use quarter and eighth notes today.  Not as obviously euphonious as Memoria, the Incantesimi occupy a harmonic world of their own and might be the most elusive of these works, and as always performance takes serious concentration and restraint, things which might not excite the Transcendental Etude crowd but is well-served by this haunting music.  Much like the Gymnopedies, In a Landscape and Paysages et marines, these three dark-eyed beauties by Fulvio Caldini need special advocation and a mature touch/ in order to survive, and thankfully they can all be acquired very cheaply at Sheet Music Plus, but I've tried to make it as easy as possible for you to take a crack at them yourselves.  Caldini aims to ripple deep waters in the psyche and casts a richly layered stone to do so, and the waves will keep going long into my future.

~PNK

Hans Otte - Medieval Minimalism and Tone Tomes

Books are no longer worlds.  I don't mean worlds like the book from The Neverending Story, though I'd put dollars to donuts people would snap up those volumes before they could blink.  I mean artistic worlds, all-encompassing artistic objects - the kind of vast, hand-crafted tome from pre-Gutenberg Medieval Europe, the kind that inspires wonder and hunger in antique book collectors and fantasy consumers.  Because there was no way to exactly reproduce anything before the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century, the requirement to remake everything by hand inspired a great deal of individuality, either intentional or unintentional, in format, illustration, and scope.  Many music history students come across Roman de Fauvel in their required reading, a 14th-century French allegory about a horse who rises to power in the French court and embarks on various satirical misadventures.  One of the earliest copies of the book comes with 169 musical insertions that span the breadth of Medieval music and allow for entrancing design opportunities such as this page:

This era also produced a trend for what is now called "eye music", notation in the form of a visually recognizable object or symbol, such as this gem:

The shape has no effect on the sound of the music, but rather is a holistic touch in a medium that over time would become more and more narrow in its look and feel.  It naturally went away with standardized printing, as does anything expansive and innovative in life, and the concept of engraving outside the box didn't come back until the 60's had something to say about it.  You remember our old friend Burr van Nostrand, don't you?  He was aided by the counterculture and his work is a fully-formed, organic anarchy, like Shel Silverstein was possessed by John Cage.  However, the most famous 20th century composer to work non-musical sight elements into his work is without question George Crumb, whose Makrokosmos sets for piano have adorned hundreds of college dorm walls since their inception in the 1970's:

While these guys were breaking American Mold there was another guy on the other side of the pond who wouldn't leap as intensely into the eye music fold but would return a Medieval past all the same (no, not Arvo Pärt).  Hans Otte (1926-2007) isn't a name that would leap out of the bushes of your local record store to bite your aural jugular, and he wasn't that name in Europe, either.  A longtime music director for Radio Bremen, Otte was unique in his steadfast promotion of the 60's Avant-Garde in America, specifically the John Cage/David Tudor/Terry Riley/La Monte Young continuum.  Minimalism never really caught on among European classical composers (who were so deep in the dodecaphonic cookie jar they wouldn't have anything to do with vast swaths).  There was a big minimalist movement in progressive rock (specifically Krautrock) and midbrow electronic music, with figures such as Jean Michel Jarre, Holger Czukay, and Klaus Schulze coming to the fore on parallel tracks to Brian Eno.  It's this lack of academic engagement in minimalism that lets Otte stand out, and his method was both delicate and enveloping, modern and ancient, down-to-Earth an spiritual all in one.

His most well-known work is The Book of Sounds (1979-1982), and even if he died the second after he inked the last note it would still loom high in late-20th century piano rep.  He played it quite frequently during his lifetime and a cursory glance through the interbuts reveals a plethora of performing admirers.  Properly notating minimalist pieces can prove tricky, as literally writing out each repetition induces madness in both the engraver and the consumer, and sticking repeat signs on every other bar is a clunky solution.  Otte's novel approach puts elegance and open space first, a system I've only seen matched in appeal by György Kurtág's unique system:

The performance included above is only one such solution, and no two performances are alike.  These pieces hinge simultaneously on precision and instinct, and The Book of Sounds facilitates both of these forces without getting in the way of a good-looking score.  Less is certainly more, and the lack of some recognizable elements in the staff allows for others to be expanded and exploited.  Sometimes a visual collision occurs, such as this charming latticework:

It's important to know where all of this came from, and along with the official explanations of Eastern spirituality and championing of American minimalism, certain earlier works point to another source:

Being quite the far cry from my thesis, this work is a fine example of the 60's new music atmosphere surrounding the iron curtain.  The major players in this kind of monumental, gesture-based music were Witold Lutosławski and Krzysztof Penderecki.  While Penderecki's works eventually diverged from 12-tone blocks,  Lutosławski stayed firm and fashioned serialism into a vehicle for pure musical drama, allowing systems and jargon to melt away and seducing audiences with passion and movement.  Like Lutosławski's best, Passages is a bestiary of timbre, occasionally edging into farce but largely staying within the realms of concert-hall terror.  The most notable moment is at 5:45, where the orchestra gives way to reveal a D-flat major chord spread across the strings, a chord that wouldn't have been half as powerful without everything that came before it.  Sometimes beauty comes from withholding what we most anticipate, and Otte is nothing if not a master of pacing.

The Book of Hours (1991-1998), while not nearly as popular as The Book of Sounds, is just as worthy, spreading 48 pieces across four volumes in page-long increments.  Otte continues developing his notational scheme but, rather than slipping into modal complacency, lets chromatic linelets ping into the distance.  Pedal saturation is a given, and forward momentum is nil.  The only YouTube performance I was able to find was of the entire set, and I'm assuming you don't have an extra hour to spare, so don't feel obliged to watch the whole thing.  The act of reproducing the composer's manuscript brings the reader back to the handmade nature of illuminated manuscripts, where each copy is unique and the scribe can be felt through the book.  One element that rears its lovely head more than in Sounds is physical space between notes, and part of his notation allows notes to be held longer if there is more blank space after it than others.  This is a tricky game to play, and it wouldn't work at all under a different musical reading history than ours.  Thankfully, most people seem to get the drift:

There's plenty more to see, of course, and the lack of clandestine uploads of his scores may be more of a boon than a problem.  As with Medieval manuscripts, their singularity and physical beauty intimates a mystical quality that ordinary printed music lacks.  As with any object worth finding, the search is a major element, even if that search is nothing more than a simple online order form.  If I were you, I'd abscond with the nearest copy of your favorite Otte Book and head for Mont St. Michel, perhaps camping out next to its ancient clock with an oil lamp and a wheel of brie.  In a few hundred years Otte's work will perhaps be confused with sacred tomes or New Age manifestos, and perhaps that's for the better, and perhaps we can all group the Books with Charles Koechlin's Les Heures Persanes and Kaikhosru Sorabji's massive cycles as the closest the piano has gotten to a religious experience.

~PNK