The Essential Rhythm of Shifting Visions

György Ligeti
Poème symphonique, for 100 metronomes

Arvo Pärt
Fratres, for violin and piano

Guo Wenjing
Drama XI op. 23, for three percussionists

George Crumb
An Idyll for the Misbegotten, for amplified flute and percussions

Steve Reich
Clapping Music, for two performers

Icarus Ensemble
Paolo Ghidoni, violin
Giovanni Mareggini, flute
Marco Pedrazzini, piano

Icarus vs Muzak
Gabriele Genta, percussions
Francesco Pedrazzini, percussions
Matteo Rovatti, percussions

A musical path that from the objective alea, controlled only by the laws of nature, travels a long way towards to man starting from his spirit. A circle that marks the inevitable confrontation between the Herculean man, who by defeating the lion declares his superiority – and therefore his extraneousness – to the natural world, and the Homo Sapiens, on the other hand, who is inescapably part of that world.

The path opens with a large group of small pendulums, the oscillation of which is subject solely to the will of nature. Tintinnabuli then transcends Ligeti’s ‘spheres’ minimalism into Pärt’s sacred minimalism, breathing the breath of the human spirit into the spaces between those hundred needles. An ancestral theatre of percussion and voice then guides the audience towards the final confrontation of the human species with its own destiny, which in Crumb takes on the face of an idyll as a return to an embrace with nature:

“Mankind has become ever more ‘illegitimate’ in the natural world of the plants and animals. The ancient sense of brotherhood with all life-forms (so poignantly expressed in the poetry of St. Francis of Assisi) has gradually and relentlessly eroded and consequently we find ourselves monarchs of a dying world. We share the fervent hope that humankind will embrace anew nature’s ‘moral imperative’.”

George Crumb

Finally, the timbral and conceptual identification of man with that machine of his invention, the metronome, specifically designed to mark the manifestation of an idea of his invention, time. Reich artificially exploits the same natural principle of phase shifting that allows the hundred hands to slip and recompose themselves almost as if by divine will. A researched and studied return to nature and at the same time a synthesis between the man of technology and homo sapiens.