The Essential Rhythm of Shifting Visions
Spazio IcarusViale IV novembre 9Reggio Emilia
October 30 - 2018, 4.30 p.m.(private event for the guests of Collezione Maramotti)
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.
With the support of
Regione Emilia Romagna