Example 4.1a: Ascending fifth leap
ALESSANDRO DE ROSA: Ennio, I have a confession to make. I’m a little embarrassed, but I’m sure you’ll take it the right way.
ENNIO MORRICONE: Tell me. . . .
A long time ago, before we had ever met, I had this dream. I was in your house and we were talking, just like we are now. At a certain point, I stood up and saw a strange statuette in a glass showcase. After taking a closer look I realized it was an Oscar—one that you hadn’t yet won. The showcase was right next to a half-open door.
Now, I know my question may sound odd and perhaps indiscreet but where do you keep your Oscars and all your other awards?
I’m glad you’ve waited to tell me this.
He smiles and stands up.
Come with me, I’ll show you.
We put away the chessboard and call off the game. Once again Ennio was winning by a long shot. I follow the maestro as he walks toward the inlaid door protected by Codognotto’s Warrior. That must be his studio. . . . We stop in front of a closed door. I had already noticed that Ennio always has keys hanging from his belt. He opens the door.
I usually never let anyone in here, you know. Brace yourself; it’s a bit of a mess inside.
We enter. In the studio there are some tables and a desk where he works. My eyes fall on some pictures: Maria, their children, their grandchildren. . . . It’s a big room, though not huge. There is an antique organ nestled in between floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side. I can spot all sorts of books, from C’era una volta la RCA [Once Upon a Time at the RCA] to a music encyclopedia;1 a vast collection of vinyls, cassettes, and CDs; music books, daily newspapers, and magazines scattered on the sofas; and piles of paper of various kinds lying on the tables. I would not define it as a particularly ordered room, but it is clear there is method. In sum, it’s lived in. Right in front of me is a massive shelf on which I can see all his scores collected in hard-paper folders and covered in white fabric—indeed, white is the prominent color. The enormous score that Morricone composed for the synchronized edition of the 1912 silent film Richard III stands out among the others.2
I feel a strong, particular connection with Shakespeare, among other authors.
He points at a wooden shelf.
You see, this is where I keep my awards.
I turn and finally see the golden statuette. This time, it’s a real one in front of me, unlike in my dreamy vision. Next to it, is his other one. Differently from my dream, there is no glass showcase, but the wooden shelf is actually behind the door. Collected are practically all the acknowledgments of Morricone’s career. Some David di Donatello Awards, several Silver Ribbons, honors from chiefs of state, the Polar Music Prize (that is, the “Nobel Prize for music”), one Grammy Award, a big Golden Lion. . . .
You see, there’s no glass showcase!
You dedicated both your Academy Awards to your wife. . . .
It was deserved and the right thing to do. She gave up a lot to devote herself to our family and children, while I was composing. We saw little of each other for over fifty years—I was either with the orchestra, or closed in here working. Nobody could enter, except for her; that was her special privilege.
When I work I’m under pressure until I finish what I have to do. It can be a pain to have me around; Maria took me, supported me, and accepted me for what I am.
Are all your children far now?
Alessandra and Marco live in Rome. The other two have been living in the United States for a while now, Andrea in Los Angeles, Giovanni in New York. Thanks to that computer we are able to stay in touch. . . .
He points at it.
I Skype with them, I find it convenient, although it’s quite odd to see my grandchildren grow through these screens. . . . However, if it wasn’t for this technology, the distance would feel even greater. Hence why I gave in and use it.
Are you kidding? People have tried to explain to me how email works numerous times, but I’m just fine with my telephone and my fax. I’ve always relied on paper sheets to keep to my weekly schedule—I split a sheet of paper in seven parts, write the days on it and fill in all my appointments and commitments for the week. Agendas bother me and I just don’t trust computers.
I know that today some people use them to compose. I experimented with them in the studio as well, but I don’t see how it’s possible to write for a big ensemble on a screen.
Why?
How can someone oversee the entire page at a glance? How can one check the vertical disposition of the voices? You cannot just enlarge a detail and neglect the totality.
Well, it depends on the software. Nowadays there are screens that are wide enough for big scores.
Do you use a computer to compose?
Very often.
Well, I need paper. To exert graphic control over the score might well seem a matter of secondary importance, but for me it’s fundamental. Being able to observe the density of the musical material at a glance, just by glimpsing at the sheet, is something I find reassuring.
Pasolini used to say that writing was a habit, an existential addiction for him. Why do you write?
Writing music is my job, what I like to do, and the only thing I know how to do. It is an addiction, yes, a habit, but also a necessity and a pleasure: the love for sounds and timbres, the chance to sonically shape my ideas, to transform an interest and a curiosity—my very imagination—into something concrete.
I don’t have a real answer to your question, I can’t say where this necessity, this urge to write originates. I don’t think there’s any fixed rule. I have so many motivations. . . . Perhaps it feels too complicated to pinpoint it and define it once and for all, precisely because there’s something so intimate and private to it, which does not want to be communicated.
Is there a particular condition in which musical ideas come to you more often?
They usually come when I least expect it. In any case, the more I work, the more ideas flow. Sometimes my wife sees me lost in thoughts and asks me, “Ennio, what are you after?” “Nothing,” I answer. In fact, I may be singing a melody to myself, an idea, mine or someone else’s that has gotten stuck in my head. I guess it’s something like a professional deformation. These symptoms tend to “worsen” as the evening approaches, when, after a full day of work spent at my desk or, worse, mixing and recording in the studio, I have dinner and go to bed. On those kinds of days, I take music with me under the covers. It’s unbelievable that Maria has put up with me for all these years. Sometimes sonic and musical ideas surface in my dreams. In the event that some of them persist into the half-sleeping phase, I sometimes even manage to catch and transcribe them. For years I have kept a notebook and staff paper on my bedside table. Depending on the type of idea, some can be notated in staves, while others require regular paper.
Do you think that the composition process originates from an act of will or from something bursting out, such as urgency? What’s your trigger?
It depends. Music springs out when I’m faced with the challenge to conjure up an idea, to give birth to it. Sometimes the idea may come up later, sometimes it may not materialize at all; other times it may show up randomly. When any of the above happens, I can either abort the idea, or elaborate it, or even transform it into something different. A composer imagines and writes music just like another person writes down a note or a letter.
As for film music, I put a lot of thought into it. Even when I’m not able to come up with anything extraordinary, I must force myself, because there’s a signed contract and a deadline, and I must be ready to record music that is good, dignified, and respectful of another author’s creative work.
When it comes to another kind of music, which I refer to as “absolute,” I tend to wait for a specific intuition that feels right—I can be attracted by a timbral idea, a combination of sounds, specific aleatory passages of the orchestra, an instrumental configuration, the option of using a choir. . . . In other words, parameters can be diverse and uncontrolled, independent from my will. This is at any rate how it works for me. In case there’s a soloist who commissions a work from me, or an ensemble that is going to perform it, that becomes my starting point.
In any event, in absolute music I prefer to work without deadlines. Recently some Jesuit fathers asked me to compose a Mass.3 I accepted, but specified, “I will deliver it to you when it will be finished. Only then will we be sure that it’s been written.” I don’t like due dates. A composition is an organism with a life of its own, which needs to be respected. I have often felt the same responsibility for a new music piece that one would feel for an offspring.
Sometimes I even felt like I was “pregnant,” so to speak. It is a process that deeply motivates and intrigues me.
Have you ever gone through crises of productivity and creativity?
I must confess that I haven’t been very keen on writing in recent years, but then again, I do it anyway and still enjoy it. In general, I’ve never experienced crises when faced with deadlines; I’ve always managed to meet them.
Once, however, I was considerably late when working at Once Upon a Time in the West—I couldn’t come up with new themes. The rumor that I was going through a crisis reached the ears of Bino Cicogna, the film’s producer. He didn’t think about it twice, he went to Leone and told him, “Why don’t you call Armando Trovajoli? This is a special kind of western, call Trovajoli.” They made an audition with him and even made a demo recording without telling me anything. When Leone heard Armando’s audition, he wasn’t convinced about it. Meanwhile, I had gotten over my crisis, unaware of what was happening. For a long time I knew nothing of this story, until one day Donato Salone, my copyist at the time, revealed all. When I demanded an explanation from Sergio, he replied, “Ennio, you were dawdling, what else was I supposed to do?”
Apparently it’s not convenient to have a creative crisis when in the film business.
He smiles.
You get the point. All in all, I felt bad about what had happened—for Sergio, but also for Armando, who had no qualms about replacing me. Similar episodes occurred on other occasions. . . . From that moment on, whenever I’m asked to replace someone, I first speak with them to understand their point of view, even if I don’t know them personally.
What is the function of a crisis phase, in your opinion?
I don’t know where crises come from, nor what triggers them; what I do know is that any creative process has to come to terms with a crisis sooner or later. At my age, it’s not easy to reinvent myself on every occasion. “Ennio, can you still make it?” I sometimes ask myself. Then I roll up my sleeves and get back to work. Anyway, I did experience crises when composing absolute music. The real trouble with composing this kind of music is getting started and then finding the courage to throw everything away two or three times. It’s been a while now since I have last written any absolute music.
I’m very self-critical and essentially a pessimist, and I don’t feel I am the right person to judge my own work. For this reason, I seek counsel from trusted people who can offer feedback or critique.
In film scoring, when I had troubles finding my so-called inspiration (though I don’t like this term), I had to resort to something else—craft. One cannot always find the right idea that perfectly fits someone else’s work. Although I approach every work with the highest respect, I can’t always expect things to run smoothly the way they did in The Best Offer, where the film itself dictated me what I had to do. . . . That would be the ideal situation every time!
What was it like on that occasion?
When I read the screenplay, I was particularly struck by the sequence in which the antiques dealer [Geoffrey Rush], who is the main character, enters his vault and unveils his treasure, a room safeguarding dozens of portraits of women. Such an intimate moment led me to compose a piece that integrates several female singing voices. The voices were meant to emerge as if they came from the paintings and were evoked and materialized in the protagonist’s fantasy. They were to liberally intertwine in a free counterpoint, reminiscent of a disjointed, disorganized madrigal—or rather, organized but improvised, improvised but organized.
So would you call moments like these “inspirations”?
Yes, in that case the idea sparked intuitively from the film. But make no mistake; even then it was only an idea, which had to then be elaborated with significant effort. By inspiration, I mean intuition, which sometimes can be generated from reacting to a stimulus that can be contained in the images or in a text, or produced by an unpredictable event, like a dream. Whatever the case, I consider inspiration the exact opposite of being without ideas. The romantic usage of the term, linking inspiration to the heart, to love and feelings, has never convinced me, yet it has affected the way most people perceive musical and creative professions today. So many times I have been asked about my inspiration. . . . I wonder why this mysterious realm is so intriguing to people. What’s your take on this?
In my opinion, this concept thrives because we all seek reassurance. Something that “suddenly falls from the sky” makes us feel less lonely, as it proves the existence of a mystery we can be hopeful for. And when this mystery is conveyed by a “genius,” an “artist”. . . well, that is when the reassuring and authoritative figure people have yearned for is manifested in the flesh, confirming our hopes.
I have always been wary of the word “genius,” and it always brings to mind a quotation, which I think was by Edison: “Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.” Sweat, hard work! If we want to speak about inspiration, then we must become aware that it just lasts for a moment; once that moment is gone, work remains. You write something, erase it, throw it away, and start again. There’s no such thing as falling from the sky. Sometimes the idea contains the seeds of a possible elaboration within itself, but in general, one must struggle. I realize that thinking about music in this way might be less appealing.
He smiles.
Well, anyway, it still is a fascinating mystery and we are trying to explore it. Going back to your instinctive reaction to Tornatore’s film, did you eventually follow your initial intuition?
Yes, as I usually do. When I have the right idea, I let loose, following my original instinct. I transcribe the idea to best mirror it, and this helps me get over the initial panic of a blank page. Only after the recording stage, or in that case after receiving the final appreciation of Peppuccio, the audience, and the critics, was I able to turn back and reflect on what I had done. At that point I could retrace all the previous stages of that idea, the various experiences that had crystallized before that final synthesis.
I realized how that piece of music had become my way of expressing an old subject in a new way. A few of my past works were forerunners, such as Bambini del mondo, Sequenze di una vita [Sequences of a Lifetime] (1979),4 as well as my score for The Devil Is a Woman (Il sorriso del grande tentatore, 1973) by Damiano Damiani.
I mean, one could even have a brilliant inspiration or intuition, but the process of elaboration depends on what one has acquired throughout years of training, deriving from the culture and the history one has absorbed, assimilated in depth before being able to give it back in some form.
I wrote the theme of 1900 by Bertolucci, like many other themes that are today very famous, in the editing room, in front of the film, in the dark, with a pencil and a blank piece of paper. Composing melodies is something I have been doing since I was a child, because my father taught me how to do so. Yes, the images did suggest something to me, but it’s also true that I trained for years in order to achieve that ability to synthesize thoughts into music. Harmony, counterpoint, historical forms, experimentation—everything comes into play.
By the way, writing a theme is not the most complex task—the intuition, the idea, or whatever we may call it, more often than not, is not confined to melody. For example, for A Pure Formality I created the whole score based on the screenplay’s structure. The theme of the last song, “Ricordare,” is made of melodic fragments that surface as the protagonist, writer Onoff [Gérard Depardieu], gradually recovers his memory throughout the story. One moves from trauma to settlement, from dissonance to consonance.
You emphasized how important past experiences are for you. Stravinsky, a composer you love, on the contrary avowed that he demeaned his past every time he composed.
For me it is different. I believe that feeling the echo of the past resonating in my present is fundamental. In order to be able to do what I do today, I must acknowledge the pathways I have taken, those that have fabricated my culture, my musical and personal identity. This “system of references” is not of public interest, it probably doesn’t reach others as an element of communication, but it is crucial for me as a personal drive—it pushes me into writing. For instance, my idealization of Frescobaldi’s, Bach’s, and Stravinsky’s melodic cells—which I have included in so many of my applied and absolute music pieces—stems from a similar intimate urge.5
When I wrote the Mass I was referring to earlier, which I later entitled Missa Papae Francisci, Anno duecentesimo a Societate Restituta [Lat., Mass for Pope Francis, in the Two-Hundredth Anniversary of the Societate Restituta], I decided to use a double chorus to pay homage to both the great Venetian School, from Adrian Willaert to Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, and my score for The Mission. Similarly, for my Fourth Concerto (1993) for two trumpets, two trombones, and organ, I devised a stereophonic effect through the spatialization of the two pairs of trumpets and trombones because I wanted to evoke the double chorus of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. I feel the need to link present choices to tradition, to re-enliven my past in my present, even through writing.
An “eternal return.” György Ligeti used to say, “Be original!” More modestly, I’d rather exhort one to be honest, although first we should have to agree on the meaning of these terms. What do you think about originality, honesty, and sincerity in music (and beyond)?
Sure, that’s a difficult one to answer. . . . Be original?
He whispers to himself, almost as if to buy time. . . .
I believe I’m honest as far as what I think and write. Decidedly, I have influences, and can easily name them: Petrassi, Nono, Stravinsky, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, Bach, Aldo Clementi to an extent, perhaps a few others as well. But this doesn’t make me dishonest. Well, I don’t tell myself while I am writing, “Now let’s get out of trouble with this passage in the style of Petrassi or Palestrina. . . .” This is not how it works. These loves are so deeply entrenched in me that I no longer notice their presence. I limit myself to write, the important thing is to be self-satisfied, at least in that very moment—honest, at least in that moment. Afterward, I am open to review my choices from different angles, listen to criticisms and praises, rethink the whole thing from the outset.
Should I deem myself dishonest because sometimes I am forced to rush my writing, or because in given situations I didn’t wait for that pure, raw “inspiration” to reach me? I don’t think so.
The moment I read a screenplay or watch a film I know which idea is going to be the right one, the strongest, and the one to go for. There have been times, especially in the past, when I would have wanted to be given more time to develop an idea, but what I would hear in return typically was, “We’re going to tape everything in one month.” My fantasies would end right there. I ought to give my best anyway, this is what my job is about—to keep up to the task I am assigned, rescuing myself and my work.
I have always worked trying to not give up my highest ideals. I ended up writing very tonal melodies following inner procedures and a research path that would make me feel gratified with my conscience—that is to say, the conscience of a composer who carries the cultural baggage of studies and experiences that are “other,” different from applied music. This kind of professional and artistic honesty, which I have tried to embody in every professional circumstance, has often been very much overlooked.
Some things I have written could be analyzed more in depth, but unfortunately this kind of attention is usually not reserved for film music. I am not interested in claiming anything, but surely I defend my personal intention to give applied music the artistic and compositional dignity it deserves.
In sum, originality is something one may come across only once in a while?
Exactly, just like that.
The way you talk about it, you don’t seem to think of the composer as an inventor, someone who creates from scratch, but as someone who recovers, rediscovers, and envisions links between things that already exist.
A composer does draw on history in part, but if that was it, it would be like saying that all the music of the past, the present, and the future already exists, and composers merely transcribe something that is already there. Composers instead think, reflect, and unconsciously devise techniques based on the music they love or they have already composed. They appropriate the things they were inspired and struck by and look for new formulations.
It’s totally normal. In short, the history of music has not been for nothing, it has undoubtedly left us with something.
He becomes emotional.
And yet, were I to concede that it is just a matter of “recovering” or attuning to something that was already there, it would mean to admit that I have been going in circles, always rewriting the same music. Taken out of context and considered as the only answer, this possibility frankly depresses me. After all, where does this kind of collective memory that preserves everything really stand? What does it look like?
For this reason, sometimes I think that the act of composing concerns the creation of something new, something that didn’t exist prior to a specific need felt by the composer. Perhaps I’ve simply needed this idea to go on, and I cannot deny that it still pushes me forward today.
From time to time, the solutions that I devise in my work may lead to nonoriginal outcomes. However, because they derive from personal, uncontrolled, and incontrollable discoveries (they may even appear as such for a short time, but at least in that very moment they belong to me in their totality), they are what challenge me and make me continue writing.
In the moment of invention, during that instant of illusion, I find myself marking a step in the right direction and for a moment freeing myself from every burden, before returning to look around me immediately after.
So this is how you see the act of composition: claiming your space in history, perhaps your own story, for an instant, in the present, in the moment. And even if this may be an illusion, it is functional in life, to moving on.
It is an act of focusing and detachment that helps me realize the idea, that ultimately coincides with the idea, and is inextricably linked to the here and now. I remember when, for Marco Polo by Montaldo, I started to simply work over two chords in a specific piece. The alternation between the first and fourth degree (the first inversion of A minor and D minor) produced a monotony that reminded me of the static harmonies of certain Oriental music, in which a motionless harmonic discourse often does not lead anywhere. As a reaction to this concept, in the central part of the piece, I began modulating using exclusively plagal cadenzas.6 That was an extemporary invention for me. After I recorded the piece and the mix was finished, I found some involuntary reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, which evoked the Oriental world as well. The outcome I achieved was similar to Rimsky-Korsakov, although the reasoning behind it was completely different.
I thus think it’s important to let myself go at work, and only afterward consider the eventual attributions of what I have created. In sum, although invention and reinvention may appear as opposite attitudes, I believe that both of them are in a sense valid and legitimate.
Perhaps it is because of this eternal dilemma—invention or recomposition—that an artist is so often perceived as a medium or a genius, that is to say someone who enjoys a privileged contact with mysterious energies, be they internal or external, divine or psychological. These beliefs are still strong today; but maybe, as we were saying earlier, they are just functional to mankind in that they exhibit this insoluble ambiguity.
The idea of the medium makes me smile, as much as in a different way the idea of the genius amuses me. I rather see myself as an artisan. When I lock myself up in my studio and sit at my desk, composing goes through personal, concrete, and material activities—craftsmanship, in a word.
So you don’t compose at the piano, do you?
I directly write on the score. I heard that some, even illustrious composers, are used to composing piano reductions—compressed scores—to then orchestrate them at a second stage. It’s a matter of personal preference. A system of that kind simply doesn’t suit me, because I consider the orchestra or the ensemble as fully expressive tools, and moving from a piano reduction to the orchestra would be a flawed strategy for me. I usually turn to the piano only in double-checking what I’ve written, or when I am stuck and can’t manage to get where I wish. I also use the piano to present directors with musical ideas for a film. I cannot let them wait until we are in the recording studio before they know anything about my music. Certainly, what I play for them at that early stage is nothing more than a “little thing,” and I must hope that they will be satisfied once they hear that idea performed by the full orchestra in a more complete and elaborate form. That “little thing” shall in fact change in the recording room, because the orchestra always gives me something new in return.
Just to be clear, I am no modern wonder. Every composer who knows music and has studied composition, anybody who has mastered the technique and the ability to think of a musical fact, is able to write directly on staff paper without first needing a piano.
I even choose the kind of paper according to the type of musical idea I have in mind. I often start by ruling the staves in advance with tight or loose bars depending on my need—this helps me predict a sense of space. I can graphically foresee the interaction between the parts, their movements, their dynamic; still, I don’t fall into graphism, unlike Sylvano Bussotti, who designs scores that resemble contemporary art paintings.7 In some cases, I simply know in advance what I am going to write. Other times, however, quite the opposite happens—the paper constrains my original idea.
When I am chasing an idea that is widely varied in terms of musical and spatial expression, I go for tall and wide staff paper, I have it specially designed for that purpose. Seeing the blank space provokes a burst of ideas in me and renders the whole process interesting. . . . Then I might even think, “Let’s not use such a wide space here,” because it is as though I knew in advance that I’ll use it later, even though in that moment the idea has not yet materialized. That same idea burgeons in front of a huge empty space.
He gets emotional.
More on that, I write better when bars are not there, it makes me feel freer, although usually film music requires the use of bars.8
I remember that when I was a student I eagerly examined Wagner’s scores. I thought—and still think—that he felt the need to erase all the resting parts from the score. Almost as if he was bothered by them. He wrote in such a way that he could visualize all the instruments playing at a given moment in a very focalized manner. When one instrument rested, Wagner didn’t leave the staff blank, he got rid of it, so that his page was always full.
He probably enjoyed looking at thick, constantly flowing textures. I don’t think he needed to save on paper. This is obviously not to suggest that this is the only difference separating me from Wagner’s greatness . . . no debate about that!
In fact, Wagner doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would have saved on paper, nor did he spare his own ideas. . . . Speaking of musical ideas, in what shape do they usually come about?
In cinema, ideas and consequential options derive from several “contingent” factors, not the least the screenplay and the images; sometimes they burst out from an unexpected intuition. With absolute music, on the other hand, it is different.
In my Fourth Concerto, for instance, I felt the necessity to pair two trumpets and two trombones to the organ’s right and left. Nobody or nothing required that to be so, but I was interested in obtaining a sense of space, besides the specific timbral blend.
The commission of Vidi Aquam. Id Est Benacum (1993), for soprano and small orchestra, was very binding. In a way it was also unique in its genre, in that the location was clearly defined—the shore of Lake Garda. In that case I chose to use five quartets, each one differing from the other and entering one after another, one into the next, gradually building up to twenty-seven combinations. Why did I come up with such a solution? Where did that specific form come from? What made me decide to adopt a selection of pitches that conjured up a static and prolonged modal ambiguity, which embraced the soprano’s voice with two added sounds only at the end?
Everything originated from the idea of an apparent stasis, full of internal life, which that particular location had suggested to me.
When I write for films I can even lend myself to compose “romantic” music; but when I think about a music that doesn’t necessarily aim at amplifying emotions and feelings, a music that is not associated with moving pictures, in short that is not subjected to constraints but concerns my inner self, then I seek for a broader and more abstract kind of expressivity.
However, to partly contradict myself, I shall mention that when I wrote one of the pieces for Correspondence (La corrispondenza, 2016) by Tornatore I tentatively started from a reduced score for solo pianos—four pianos, to be exact. What did the pianos play? And why four? One pianist could not perform all the superimposed parts alone, that’s why I needed four different players, each of whom performed one note at a time (it was sufficient to use even just one finger).
The idea, in that case, came to me straight from a reaction to the film’s plot. It’s the story of two characters who are very close, yet far apart. My initial idea was none other than a theoretical speculation, almost detached from everything; it burgeoned from my reasoning about this “close distance.” The way I thought of and developed this piece can be compared to how I usually approach absolute music. Only after elaborating it did I realize that it was a good intuition, and yet it turned out to be too static when extrapolated from its applied context, and too little expanded to be used in the film. Eventually I decided to discard it, but who knows, something different may come up in the future from this idea.
This makes me want to rephrase my previous question, this time asking you to envision a moment in which you are free from constraints; how do musical ideas show up in this situation?
Timbre comes before anything else. Intervals come after for me, whereas timbre is fundamental; to think of an instrument or a combination of instruments—an ensemble—is always a source of inspiration for me. Only afterward do I reflect on the form, the structure underlying a musical composition.
Speaking of which, even if I no longer believe in the traditional notion of the musical form,9 I think that it remains no less central a parameter for undertaking any new composition.
When time is not dictated by the synchronization to the moving image, writing is freer and one can devise a personal form for every new composition.
Sometimes certain elements themselves define and structure a form, almost as though every composition allowed for a range of appropriate options that self-generate forms, in a sense. When this is the case, it’s not even necessary to think about it. This reflection comes to me a little later in the composition process, after I have already chosen the instruments. Many variables come into play during the working process—writing, erasing, correcting, asking myself whether an entrance should be delayed or anticipated. It is not so much a matter of reflecting, but a subconscious process that becomes pragmatically concrete as soon as the pencil marks a rest or a note. At any given moment new alternatives, new options open up. A piece may undertake several different directions—which is the right one? All of them and none of them, but this is precisely what makes each composition and each composer different from one another.
In your experience as a composer, as much as in your life experience, would you say that you planned your next steps and choices in advance, or that you first acted and only later thought about your actions?
In a sense, I’d say I did both things. Much of what I have, but also haven’t accomplished in my life and in my compositions, I have interiorized thanks to a progression of practical, often contingent experiences. Thanks to my perseverance and ambitiousness, I’ve been able to react time and time again to new stimuli. All of this has led me into a more and more personal synthesis. For instance, after attending the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1958, I felt an urge deep down to react to what I had witnessed there.
I had already gotten closer to some of the idioms and modes of composition of neue Musik in those years. Before leaving for Germany I had written 3 Studi [3 Studies] (1957), for flute, clarinet, and bassoon, and Distanze [Distances] (1958), for violin, cello, and piano. When I came back still immersed in the suggestions I had gathered there, I composed Musica per undici violini [Music for Eleven Violins] (1958).
Then I found myself becoming an arranger in the pop song industry and a composer in cinema. Both activities were very far from what I had envisioned for my future. In a nutshell, every time I’ve had to face what life had in store for me, I did so to the best of my abilities.
Today I feel like I have developed quite a different attitude toward composition than the one I had at the beginning, at least as far as my way of writing is concerned; however, the seeds I planted during those experiences, as well as the techniques I learned, triggered a process of gradual transformation and stylistic contamination, which, I believe, have little by little come to define my personal voice, my timbre, my identity.
To be clear, this is not the way I reasoned back then, I simply wasn’t aware of it.
How do you relate talent and commitment?
For my part, commitment has always been thorough and even a quite distressing factor; today, after such a long practice, I can say I have developed some musical talent. I say this because my early intuitions, which I could perhaps define as “inventions,” were mine, sure, but they initially didn’t play such a key role. It was arguably through their gradual development that they became important; thus, they should be traced to a non–completely conscious process, a sort of underlying attitude that is part of my way of being. It is the totality of ideas and their mutations that has produced results over time. Doesn’t this also depend on the commitment one puts into progressing? Perhaps it is not inappropriate to say that talent is what produces an improvement that is unnoticeable as it happens; every old experience, even the most insignificant, may lead toward an unforeseeable outcome, one that nobody could have ever imagined at first. Commitment, on the one hand, depends on conscious will; talent, on the other hand, may then consist in the unconscious element at the service of professional and creative improvement.
Therefore you see talent as a process, not as a starting point, as it is usually reputed to be.
Yes, I believe that talent is a consequence of passion, but also of exercise and discipline. These are ultimately the ingredients that make good qualities emerge. As for me, I have never thought of myself as a talented person. I’m telling the truth, I’m not being falsely modest. Today I do realize that there may have been some talent here and there, but I keep thinking of it as an evolution.
Although we cannot touch it or hold it in our hands, and despite the fact we could supposedly do without it, it seems that music has accompanied mankind since its origins. A sound; a magic and enchanting phenomenon; a myth; a divinity; a category of perception; a sociocultural construction—defining music has always given intellectuals and scholars a hard time, whether they have related it to subjectivity as well as to mathematics, to becoming as much as to being.
Where do you think music comes from?
Once upon a time, perhaps, one of our ancestors discovered how to produce sounds via vocal cords; little by little, by modulating their tuning with increasing accuracy, someone may have succeeded one day in transforming those sounds from yelling into singing. A voice, per se, produces melodies, even when we use it to speak. Obviously, there is no way to be sure about my theory, but I see music as born with that one ancestor, whom I have often called the Homo musicus.
Similarly, one day the ancestor hit a rock with some bones, creating at once a potential weapon and the first percussion. Then he or she came across a pipe with holes, through which the wind had blown before. Maybe, through experiments and tries, the ancestor realized that sound was not only produced by blowing, but also by the vibration of a leather membrane, of a percussed metal or stone, as well as of plucked strings. Instruments, timbres, vibration phenomena, overtones (later theorized by Pythagoras) were then discovered.
The human heart provides a more or less regular pulse; therefore, hitting a percussion can turn into a musical call understandable to anyone. It’s not by chance that a lot of primitive music is based on percussion and song.
In life’s most important moments, from birth to death, in military as much as in religious contexts, music amplifies human values and makes events more exalting, providing a sensual and exterior, though most of all interior, clarification of spiritual human feelings. These associations jump directly to our present time, because a certain way of applying music to images triggers our instincts and emotions in a very basic and similar way, especially in advertising.
What is music? We will probably never agree on a satisfying answer, but the question has always borne a relevant philosophical weight. Perhaps “making music” responds to a human need, which is even deeper than creativity itself—something that’s related to the impulse to communicate.
Creativity and communication appear to be means by which humans affirm themselves and express their belonging to something bigger—in other words, they are means to survive. This starts already as infants; the attempts made by newborns to communicate with their mothers are necessary for life, they are sturdily linked to the instinct of survival.
Think about yelling, as I was mentioning before: it serves to affirm our existence in the face of other people and the entire world. The first way to make a shout become a form of communication was to transform it into singing. It must have seemed like magic. Singing became in turn a coded way of communicating, developing along the uses and customs of a society, or at least the part of a society that produces and consumes culture. Singing became a generally shared code between those who make music and those who listen to it.
A language?
A language, which has undergone processes of mutation and evolved or regressed with mankind, as happens with all sorts of language. Beware, though, I don’t believe in music as a “universal language.” Communication is based on complex and varied parameters, which are in most regards cultural, meaning that they are limited to geographical areas and historical periods, not unlike what happens with tongues, which are different for any epoch and country in the world.
How does communication happen in music?
There are those who conceive and produce music, and those who use it. Media, that is, the means through which musical communication takes place, may change through time—performers, disc, radio, television, the Internet . . . all of these are musical media. Composers are influenced by their own musical culture, by their habits, by the styles they have been accustomed to throughout their training and experience, by their knowledge of musical idioms and music history (at least the ones they should know, even if sometimes they don’t). At any rate, however, even the freest among composers draws on practices that have consolidated over time, be they genres, forms, ensembles, or writing techniques.
Do you mean the linguistic codes of a society, of a culture?
I call them constraints, some of them may be conscious and others unconscious, musical and extramusical, interior and exterior—all of which shape the individual to live in a given context.
Then there are the receivers of musical messages—the listeners or users. They too are conditioned by their own culture and their musical experiences, as well as their listening habits. As an example, some years ago I found myself arguing with a person who had confessed to me, “I don’t like Mozart, I find his music boring, it’s like he’s always writing gavottes and minuets. He is predictable.” It sounded like a daring statement to me, and in replying I tried to defend Mozart’s genius by referring to his historical and linguistic context.
What was sacrilegious to me was truth for that fellow. Listening to Mozart bored him. For one thing, I could not force him to like his music, but my conclusion was that he had probably listened to Mozart while being accustomed to a different kind of music. Then I reflected upon the fact that abandoning oneself while listening to an unusual piece of music might not suffice in order to appreciate it. One can still be deaf even when confronted with something he or she can recognize to have some kind of richness, something that our culture presents to us as the expression of value and quality.
Once again we go back to our experiences as listeners, to the tools we have to understand music, which more often than not are weak because nobody taught us how to develop them—I’m especially thinking about schooling, which should be completely reformed, perhaps not only from a musical point of view.
Communication discloses complex questions. Can incommunicable music even exist? Is it the same with two people who speak different languages and don’t understand each other?
Unfortunately, it can happen, and it does happen especially with certain contemporary music. I said it a few moments ago, I don’t believe music is a universal language that communicates with everybody in the same way, so I equally don’t believe in universal incommunicability; yet, sometimes it can be difficult for some to access certain kinds of music. We just witnessed this with Mozart, no wonder it’s even more so when it comes to the so-called avant-garde, experimental music, like that realized in Darmstadt, where compositional and organizational principles were often based less on intuition than they were on science, sometimes even on chance. More often than not listeners are not aware of any of this, or even if they are, they don’t know how to relate to it.
They don’t feel they’re being involved. Are you saying, then, that music may cease to be a language in certain instances?
That’s precisely the point. Some music doesn’t aim to signify, to “say” or “narrate” something, at least not in the sense we are accustomed to in our Western tradition. This music remains a language in the sense of a code which was created by a composer—we still perceive codified units through our senses, and we are led to decode them in accordance with our own listening habits—but as a language it is different every time, changing from composer to composer, and thus being shared by a minority of people.
Still, all of us can anticipate the moment in which a finale by Mozart or Beethoven is about to come. All of us almost instinctively respond to the following melodic cell [Example 4.1a]:
Example 4.1a: Ascending fifth leap
with this [Example 4.1b]:
Example 4.1b: Descending fifth leap
That is so because over the centuries, the so-called tonal system has been widely adopted as the language of Western music. Aside from gradually evolving, this system substantively drew on melody, harmony (based on scales and on definite relations between the scales’ degrees), and rhythm (meant as a regular time matrix); all of these parameters were shared by a large collectivity.10
Before this system was adopted, modality was in use, harmony could already be inferred, but was rather understood in terms of voices moving autonomously and simultaneously. The very concept of tonal organization was yet to come.
When the tonal system and its forms spread and became the standard, they ensured a great number of people a safe anchor to consolidate their own sensibilities and express themselves by creating timeless and extraordinary musical works.
A sort of cornerstone?
Exactly. The twentieth century witnessed instead a speed-up, which can be compared to the amount of all the changes that occurred over five to six earlier centuries combined—in music and more in general in arts and sciences. Languages have exponentially multiplied, and all of this has happened very quickly.
Do you then see the revolutions in musical languages that have occurred in the twentieth century as processes leading to incommunicability, at least in part?
Within the evolution that informed a certain kind of twentieth-century music, sounds have emancipated themselves, at least in theory, from their containers, such as structure, form, grammar, and gesture. This has somehow unsettled almost all that we used to refer to as “music.”
Approaching the musical fact has turned into a true problem, and this certainly hasn’t helped to draw “bridges” between those who create music and those who listen to it.
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde already marked a revolutionary milestone—its melodic chromaticism rendered functional harmony more ambiguous; it undermined tonal consequentiality, making it less and less predictable.
With the twelve-tone theory elaborated in the early twentieth century by Schoenberg, the pivotal chord hierarchies in the tonal system (self-evident in terms such as “dominant,” “subdominant,” and “tonic”) lost their meaning altogether. The democratization of sounds unsettled the dictatorship of scale degrees and consequently the very concept of tonality crumbled.
Following Schoenberg, there came Anton Webern and his followers. They theorized the integral serialization of every parameter, such as timbre, pitch, silence, duration, dynamics, and so on and so forth. All of this pointed to logical organization, pure mathematics—another fatal blow to the tradition.11
One consequence of this revolution was the exclusion of melody (together with its harmonization and rhythm) from the criteria of composition.
The public was consequently deprived of the most important function of the melody, which had thus far worked as a sort of “compass” for the listener. All the more, the increasing difficulty connected to the rapid progress of the various languages made comprehension even harder. Listeners were required to accept sounds devoid of any shared traditional rule, while composers asked nothing more than simply perceiving sounds for what they are—sounds in themselves, combined in free forms.
This was further exacerbated as the category of “sound” opened up to gradually include noise. Musical Futurism, Luigi Russolo and his intonarumori,12 Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse, and several other composers were all key in the progression leading into musique concrète. In 1949, Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer composed Symphonie pour un homme seul using sounds of footsteps, breaths, slamming doors, the noise of a train, and a police siren, thus starting the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète.
The process of continuous innovation and research drove post-Webernians into developing total serialism, according to which compositions draw on complex logical procedures and speculations; all the parameters are serialized and report to a matrix that predetermines the logic-mathematical structure informing every detail of the work. Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Maderna are perhaps the most famous interpreters of those experiences. Never had such a peak in complexity been hit before, at times leading to extraordinary results, other times to decidedly less memorable outcomes.
That was the moment in which I landed in Darmstadt. After finishing at the conservatory I wanted to engage in the world around me by creating something that was all mine and original. But the side of the music world that I met there was new to me.
I was shocked by what I heard and saw. “Is this what they call new music?” I asked myself.
I remember Evangelisti playing excellent improvisations at the piano, at the level of Stockhausen’s earliest Klavierstücke.13 Have you ever listened to them?
Sure. However, the Klavierstücke are not improvised, but composed precisely through total serialism, the ultimate frontier of avant-garde research in those years. The formal, grammatical, gestural sense of the tradition was set into crisis, to say the least, not by a total absence of rules, but by their abundance.14
This is the point. Someone may think of it as a provocation, but the question many of us shared at that time was: “What’s the point of devising such complex systems if, in the moment of listening, complexity reaches the ears as a totally open improvisation, or even as noise?” At any rate, I was attracted to it and composed the three pieces I mentioned before—3 Studi, Distanze, and Musica per undici violini. Meanwhile, John Cage was demonstrating that chance too was an option for new music.
The ingredients of his revolution were nonsense, improvisation, and audacious silence. With his work, Cage delegitimized many post-Webernians. Still, what would the composer’s task become after reaching that point? Improvisation, calculation, or something else?
Nobody had solutions, but we still had to deal with a moral imperative concerning the figure of the composer and our work in front of history, society, and culture, in order to find a meaning, both exterior and inner, in the uncertainties of those times. Research turned to novelty, originality at all costs. We ended up in a situation where a work would be considered good merely because of its difficulty, its impenetrableness—the lower the public consensus, the higher the satisfaction of the composer, who could thus consider having accomplished his or her goal.
Moreover, in Italy, the notion of musical pureness, of music for music’s sake was perpetuated in the wake of Benedetto Croce’s idealism, a philosophical doctrine that had pervaded music aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth century and had been embraced by both academia and music critics—in short, the figures who had been responsible for the education of my colleagues and myself.15 Any music that didn’t conform to the established criteria of purity and autonomy from extramusical meanings fell into public contempt; applied music was despised and, implicitly, hierarchies between high and low musical “classes” were strengthened. The constraints were so substantial that they determined not only our aesthetics, but also our very ideas about “composing.”
This too was probably a necessary passage, even though as a result communication between composers and the public was all the more complicated, perhaps compromised.
This brings to my mind the lines pronounced by the industrialist’s son in Teorema by Pasolini, the moment in which he finds out he is a homosexual wanting to be a painter. While stacking the glass panes he has just finished painting, he tells himself:
It’s always necessary to come up with new techniques, which are unrecognizable . . . and therefore resemble no previous works or methods; to avoid the childishness of the ridiculous . . . so as to build a world in which it is possible to be anything . . . and for which there is no previous measure of judgment. . . . It should be new like the techniques. . . . No one must realize the painter’s worthless, that he’s a moron, inferior, that he’s no better than the worm that writhes to keep alive, that they’re comparable. . . . Nobody should appreciate him or think he’s clever. . . . It must all be presented as if perfected, as if based on unknown rules which therefore cannot be judged. . . . Like a fool, yes like a fool! . . . Glass on glass, since I can’t correct anything . . . but nobody must realize that. . . . Although a stroke painted on one glass can correct, without spoiling it, a stroke painted before, on another glass, but nobody must believe that it’s all the result of being powerless, impotent. . . . It must seem to be a firm decision, unhesitating, high and almost overbearing. . . . Nobody must know that a brush’s stroke succeeds by chance, by chance and in trembling, . . . that as soon as a line turns up well done by miracle, . . . it must be covered up right away and protected as in a reliquary. . . . But nobody, nobody must catch on! The painter is a poor shaking fool, a half-ass who lives by chance and by risk, as ashamed as a child, he has reduced his life to the ridiculous melancholy of one thrown down by the impression that something has been lost forever. . . .
Pasolini underpins these words with Mozart’s Requiem, a Mass for the dead.
But, even admitting that a composer’s goal is to set up a world closed in itself, for which no comparisons are possible, to which no previous standards apply, does this mean that one should give up communicating with the outside world and relate only to him- or herself and their work? If every composition is an autonomous, independent, and incommunicable entity, a dead language denying its own relational nature, does it instead aim to produce death and separation? For one thing, it pursues the death of the community and celebrates the triumph of individualism, breaking the social contract between the two parts involved—the makers and the users.
This is what many started professing in varied ways. Just speaking about it brings back all that weightiness. A sense of void and confusion was in the air; at the same time one could perceive a certain presumption growing larger and more radical, the moral imperative to go on at all costs in that direction, no matter what. It was a dead end.
My mind goes to a great flutist like Severino Gazzelloni, who performed Evangelisti’s “crosswords” in Darmstadt, to the glue used to stick flies to the staff paper, to the newspapers distributed in place of scores to the musicians . . . was it a perverse plot? If yes, against whom exactly: the audience, the performers, or the composers themselves?
As time went by, I started suspecting that, rather than “perversion,” it was a matter of provoking or maybe defending our belonging to an intellectual and musical class that aimed to distinguish itself from the rest. Only rarely was there true honesty and real experimentation.
A class who based its raison d’être, its power on inaccessibility?
Everyone coped with that situation in their own way; in the meantime, however, we had lost most of our public, our main interlocutors.
We had begun making music based on certain principles, sticking with criteria that seemed sacred and undisputable, and then we saw practically all of them dismantled right under our noses. Composers were tangled up in a complicated knot.
Which direction should music take?
Someone started promoting the narrative that music was dead, while all other expressive forms were nearing their end.
A deep silence hangs over us. Ennio remains absorbed for some moments, I do too. Like we can feel the impasse of communication weighing on us.
It was chaos.
Or something like it, at least for me.
Suddenly, in the summer of 1958, something deeply struck me in that general confusion. Cori di Didone [Dido’s Choruses] for mixed chorus and orchestra by Nono, based on texts by Ungaretti, hit me down in my core. There it was, an abstracted expressivity intermingled with cold logics, set up on tight calculation.
The reaction of the concert hall was immediate; everybody cried in unison, “Encore!”
It was a moment of convergence between the most elaborate logics, the strictest calculation, and a kind of expressivity that was new and familiar at once. Contrarily to most of what I had heard during those days, that piece succeeded in moving and stimulating me.
Before going to Darmstadt, I had already heard a recording of Il canto sospeso [The Suspended Chant] (1956), for solo soprano, alto and tenor, mixed chorus, and orchestra, and that work had also left me breathless.
Two systems—a mathematic and an expressive one—proceed side by side in those two compositions, nurturing one another. Their most disruptive power consists precisely in this tension.
Like some sort of hope?
Yes, in this complementarity I primarily found the pleasure of listening, but also hope and a possible direction to follow, which I fully embraced. Back in Rome, I completed three compositions, which still today satisfy me in that they musically translated my experience in Darmstadt and my reactions to it. Calculation, improvisation, and expressivity could almost touch each other and communicate, lining up in the same compositional project. I was not aware of all this up front, not in the terms I am speaking of it today. Back then there was no time to reflect, and my worries were others. I needed to work with music to be able to survive and support my family, and this also implied that I should please the taste of my clients, who could not be bothered with incommunicability issues.
I was anguished with the fear of betraying the world of research, to which I owed my background—a world which still represented for me a source of values and enrichment, besides being faced with enormous challenges. Therefore, the more I was led afar from research over the years, the more I would nourish my own personal worldview; no matter how disputable the latter would be, it came to constitute my very being as a composer.
Particularly for this reason, the Darmstadt experience was a turning point for me.
A certainty grew inside me as I realized that all the greatest composers in history were able to make science and logic coincide with expressivity, using the languages they shared with their colleagues at the time and improving them with elements that had not previously existed, thus determining a more or less conscious change in the course of things.
Musical works that have been passed on to us from the Western tradition have brought to our knowledge the evolution and the experiments that past composers condensed and established as they lived their times to the fullest, split between logics and emotion, rationality and irrationality, reason and instinct, calculation and improvisation, freedom and constraints, experimenting and newly reconfiguring preexisting elements. These syntheses were in turn a mirror of the society that produced them and entertained manifold relations with all kinds of other human activities. Those were qualities that I also found in Nono’s work, as well as in other great composers I still respect and admire.
I often draw parallels between music, history, and the evolution of thought. I tell myself, “Maybe it’s not by chance that Schoenberg’s twelve-tone democracy, which ascribes the same value to all sounds, was formulated a hundred years after the French Revolution with its motto ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’—then followed by the Revolutions in 1848 and the national independences a few years later.” These historical events undoubtedly bore a deep influence on the development of musical thought. The very term “dominant” in the tonal system is opposed by the idea of “democracy,” which suggests an antihierarchical vision of sounds. How can one not see a linkage between these things? In my view there are dynamics that transcend the musical facts, music’s language and its inner rules, and can be related to extramusical, social, political, and philosophical factors. In the second half of the twentieth century, for instance, the fall of dictatorships can be linked to an extremely fast evolution in music and in the other arts and sciences. All of them have moved quickly to develop an extremely vast multiplicity of theories, languages, hypotheses, and reformulations.
To be precise, we are not the first to argue that links exist between music and society. For example, a composer like Mozart worked in an apparently more stable context, as compared to a present composer, at least as far as language is concerned. In a letter to his father on December 28, 1782, he declared à propos of his series of concertos for piano and orchestra K 413, K 414, and K 415, “These concertos are a happy medium between what’s too difficult and too easy—they are Brilliant—pleasing to the ear—Natural, without becoming vacuous;—there are passages here and there that only connoisseurs can fully appreciate—yet the common listener will find them satisfying as well, although without knowing why.”16
The target and the context within which such music was composed, performed, and distributed is clear—a ritual for the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. However, while Mozart was able to secure his own space within this apparent stability, realizing a kind of polite complexity through his music that flows effortlessly, his music is anything but obvious if one takes a look at the score.17The logical transparency of his music is paralleled by the illuminist confidence in a reality that can be subdued through the instruments of deduction and rationality. The triumph of reason, in which everything is consequential (at least in appearance) and all is representation and thus spectacle, is interpreted with the self-confidence of someone who can relax and enjoy his time knowing that he has the winning card in his pocket—reason, indeed. Think of Così fan tutte, where everything is fictionalized—a theater-within-the-theater staging played around with comedy.
When the French Revolution came, on the other hand, Beethoven had already started questioning the relation between mankind (including himself) and history. Is it mankind who determines history or history that governs mankind? This question remains unanswered in Beethoven, who spent his entire life deconstructing the sonata form (as well as many other forms) driven by a constant urge of change within a thick flowing of invention and fantasy. He remained split, prisoner of his dilemma—do I believe or not? Am I the maker of my history and destiny, or do history and destiny shape my identity?
The grand opéra, like the historical novel, took on these issues with special vigor. Mankind over history, or the other way around? This was typically done by setting the love story of two youths against the backdrop of history’s adversity. I’m thinking of The Betrothed by Manzoni, dealing with an impossible love story amid epidemics, wars, and adversities. Love, death, the Middle Ages, the Greek theater. . . . Romanticism flourished in these subjects. Then comes the Wagner case.
Wagner created a musical and theatrical language that exposed the human subconscious and the instincts inhabiting it. In his syntax, harmonic functions are maintained and articulated only to make their ambiguities emerge—the same way the irrational is shifting and mutable. Through melodic chromaticism and the recurrence of semitones, which may represent the subjugation of the individuals (but also their emotions and impulses), Wagner stretched the boundaries of vertical harmony, the chords, which instead stood for the social contract, the rational, and the conscious. Harmonic functions are stated, but only to be denied. Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, shares elements with Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel: there is not one reality, it depends on the watcher’s perspective.18Meanwhile, Freud’s psychoanalysis and later Einstein’s relativity were about to break through in Europe.
God was declared dead by Nietzsche, together with several other certainties, which were being confronted by a wave of relativism. It was easy to sense that the end of an epoch was approaching. The heavy decadence of European culture, melancholically smashed and dismantled by the advancing future, can be sensed in Mahler’s music, in Thomas Mann’s writings—both of which, in my opinion, share this paradoxical melancholy of the future—and later in some films by Leone, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Visconti, and others; more in general, in all the contradictions characterizing the twentieth century.
He remains silent for a moment, immersed in his thoughts.
During my studies, I repeatedly observed sharp contrasts unraveling between different epochs. To give an example, while Romantic music was linked to interiority and irrationality and was concerned with the evocation of emotions, the twentieth century turned to decidedly scientific, logical, structural, and mathematic criteria, which led to a complexity of musical codes never before reached to such an extent. Those were two opposite attitudes and sensibilities that guided the research and the evolution of music, science, and philosophy. As a consequence, techniques too progressed and in turn supported research and change. Certain things grow up independently and connect to others, somehow connecting mankind as a whole. Therefore, I must confess that I believe in a natural, synchronic progress of all facets of art throughout history.
I perceive a veiled positivism in your words. You subsume all the human activities within this “contrasting dynamic” and consider languages and music as organisms that transform in order to survive. This continuous oscillation, which seems to characterize mankind in all its manifestations, works as a push toward life, research, discovery, preservation, and, in addition, motion and becoming.
It is like chasing the solution of a mystery that will probably always slip away—even if we will come to understand part of it, it won’t stop changing and vanishing. Every point of arrival is, consequently, a new start. All this leads us to deal with the present, with our time, which we must live to the fullest—it’s the only way to find our own path and ultimately ourselves.
According to your vision, there wouldn’t seem to be a great difference between the primal scream of our ancestor, the Homo musicus, and what “making music” means today to a composer. Even if things have become dramatically more complicated since the age of the earliest discoveries about sound, the primordial intention to communicate with others has endured. Some avant-gardes may have attempted to resort to mathematics and logics in order to escape randomness, anguish, and solitude (or, conversely, in the quest for God); but this has paradoxically led them to an even greater isolation. Giving credit for a moment to this line of interpretation, we may as well say that, rather than incommunicability, we have gone through a period of “in-communication”—the communication with our inner selves that doesn’t necessarily demand a way back to the outside, but rather self-reflection, internal exploration aimed at better understanding certain facets of ourselves and the way they relate among themselves and with the world.
This is a very interesting point. When we wondered about the origins of music and made up such fascinating, mysterious, and emphatic hypotheses, we imagined that originally music served for a human’s self-determination in the world, a means of communication, “the scream that became a song.” The essential function mankind assigned to music might have been a response to such a primary pulse, and would have been retained over time.
I’ve spoken more and more about a certain type of music, especially my own concert music, in terms of “sound sculpture.” I think the word “sculpture” satisfactorily represents an element of my musical poetics, in that as much as one can feel a stone by touch, one can perceive a sequence of timbres and sounds through listening. One is put in touch with sound matter the way he or she touches a stone or a block of marble.
“Don’t listen to music in the way you’ve been accustomed to,” I keep saying. “Think of the sounds as though they had a shape, as though they were part of a sculpture.”
Indeed, I found myself facing this issue in examining part of your work. How do I speak to readers interested in a musical work, honestly and in a possibly communicative way? Due to the necessity of translating something nonverbal into words, I realize that I tend to oscillate between a structural description, aimed at identifying, isolating, comparing, and analyzing elements, micro- and macro-structures, recurrent patterns; and a semantic analysis, which attributes arbitrary meanings to listening.
For instance, when listening to your Fourth Concerto, I began visualizing whirlwinds of concentric sand—a totally personal and private association. But how do I approach this idea? Perhaps not by searching for communicative and linguistic elements, but embracing a sensorial, possibly synesthetic experience, almost like letting free associations flow through private and personal symbolic paths.
It’s like holding a big stone in our hands. Attempting to dialogue with the object would be useless, not to mention a very unlikely manner to obtain answers. We could instead opt for a tactile perception, a perception that engages ourselves as subjects, but simultaneously encompasses the interpretive stratifications that instinctively spring from our culture, from the evolution of mankind and, according to some, from the “collective subconscious.” The object, in other words, is hollowed of all its meanings, it is us who, according to the need, may want to attach a specific meaning to it and assign it a function, thus defining the position of the object in the world and, as a result, our own place in relation to the object.
It seems almost as if you were talking about a mechanism of “projection.” Indeed, most of the imagery you draw on to describe my Fourth Concerto appertains to you as a perceiving subject. This process, which pushes the listener to interpret, is even more relevant when the composer does not necessarily aim to “imply something,” but presents a determined sound object to the public.
What about communication? How does it come about at this point?
Everything depends on what the composer wishes to do with his or her sculpture, as well as on the surrounding context and the meaning that anybody can or wishes to attribute to it. There are no univocal solutions. After surviving ideological dictatorships of various kinds—in music as in society—we have reached a greater freedom in musical languages today than in the past, without giving away the presence of relevant scientific elements in the compositional stage. Composition, however, no longer depends on dogmatic theorizations about what it ought to be, it is no longer anchored to a consolidated practice, but varies according to the author and the context.
The problem today is no longer whether we want to communicate or not, but to whom we communicate and how. Making myself understood is as important to me as pursuing my own personal research, which is likely to be challenging for the average listener. I will say more: these two aspects may even go hand in hand.
Thanks to the concrete experience I have gained in my lifetime, I have come to realize that a piece of music may receive better feedback than another depending both on the way it is written and how it is circulated. I have painstakingly come to understand that what I intuit to be the meaning of a message in a given moment may not be the same for other people. We discussed this earlier; music is not a universal language, it is based on codes which composers share, at least in part, with an audience.
In my career as a composer there have been moments of experimentation and other moments more settled, definite, and clear; as well as others in which the two poles converged, both in my absolute and my applied music. When I started composing pieces that needed to be understood by the masses—even without forgetting that experimenting was a crucial aspect for me—I aimed to be as accessible as possible, while trying, however, not to give into banality. I alternated phases of transition and consolidation with phases of experimentation.
For this reason, I have partly moved away from the vision—typical in new music circles—that the composer is the uncompromising carrier of novelty. In my opinion, the audience should sometimes make an effort, but composers should do the same for their part. In communication, it is not possible to ignore the other’s needs, even when, paradoxically, communication does not deal with anything specific. All prominent composers tried to be understood by the audiences of their time. We can take Mozart as an example. As we were saying, he respected the canons of his time, but brought them to flourish, thanks to his genius and fantasy.
Today, composers have extensive freedoms in experimentation, and shared canons are more fleeting than ever. But it’s the same with race cars—it’s fair to experiment in your garage, but when the time comes to race, you join the fray to win. I don’t despise the avant-garde, but I believe that after reaching a certain point, composers have a duty toward the public and toward themselves—the duty to be understood, to be felt, at least in their intentions; only then can the present and especially the future credit them for their attitude and their actions. I can’t judge my own deeds, least of all, those of others.
The path I’ve traveled so far has led me to discover many things in this process of experience. Several reflections we have been touched on converged and found an answer in the Gruppo d’Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, which pursued, to a certain extent, an extreme, radical, and uncompromising experimentation. Other answers I had to find in my personal composition activity for movies and such.19
Initially it was hard to harmonize my ideals of composition, the technical background gathered during my school years, and my early work in the record industry and in film. When you are a student you look for your own personality, your own vision of music, yet I was forced to attempt a personal synthesis of all these elements. Records must be sold, you can’t afford incommunicability! It’s no easy task being yourself, with your own ideals and language, while serving a film production and, most important, an audience at the same time.
I’ll give you an example. There was a moment in my life, starting with the first three film scores I made for Dario Argento—The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971), 4 Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)—when I decided to adopt a completely different writing style from the one I normally used in cinema. I wanted to experiment in a more contemporary and dissonant language, embracing techniques that reached beyond Webern’s influence. I started to gather ideas, melodic and harmonic fragments based on twelve-tone techniques, utilizing principles derived from Schoenberg’s dodecaphony.
I collected these materials in two books that I called Multipla—a thesaurus from which I could pick and combine any of them in a different way every time. Every idea was numbered and could potentially be assigned to any instrument or orchestral group (e.g., idea 1 to the clarinet, the trumpet, or the first violins, etc.) and matched with other ideas (phrases, melodies, chord sequences). In other words, I created a handbook of combinable musical modules.
In the recording room, I would assign to the orchestra the free dissonant structures that I had previously prepared; while a group of instruments would play parts 1 and 2, I would give the attack for part 3 to another group, and so on—I later applied the same procedure to the voices in Exorcist II: The Heretic.
I would conduct the performance in sync with the film screening, and the score would offer a wide variety of options, which is why I started using the term “multiple scores.” The outcome was an array of swarming, dissonant sonorities, a semi-aleatory atmosphere that was shaped in the process of performing, through live choices I directed via my gestures. Of course, the skills of the performers were decisive. All this was enhanced by the sixteen-track mixing that I had at my disposal at the time, with which I was able to obtain an even greater variety of post-produced sonorities.
Seeking the functional double aesthetic that I was trying to explain earlier, I had planned up front to pair such a dissonant and semi-aleatory texture to some tonal music box–like melodies. In the horror and thriller genres these elements work well, both separate and combined. For most of the public, dissonance produces a state of tension, uncertainty, and uncanniness, whereas extremely simple, childlike themes work as anchors for listeners and concurrently sound chilling in context.
Up to that point I had always reasoned in terms of coherence (tonal language for certain sequences, more advanced idioms for others). But for the first time I combined the two. This double aesthetic seemed a feasible way to intermingle communication and experimentation—I thought I had created something new, at least as far as cinema was concerned.
Dario Argento was at the start of his career and seemed quite open-minded toward these experiments. At a certain point, however, his father, Salvatore, who was the producer, took me aside and told me: “It looks like you’re making the same music for all the three films.” I replied, “With all due respect, the music is different every time; if you want to listen to it with me, I’ll show you how.” We went to the studio and listened to everything, but I don’t think we managed to totally understand each other. Was it his problem or mine?
That experience taught me that dissonance constitutes a problem for some people. If its use is too protracted in time, especially when twelve-tone techniques are involved, functional harmonic references loosen, as does the melodic fil rouge that generally guides listeners—though in that case I had tried to compensate with tonal melodies. I kept telling myself, “What about dodecaphony, what about my research? Where am I going to use it?” There was no way to make myself understood; to him that kind of music would always sound the same.
After this episode, my collaboration with Dario Argento stopped and we only picked back up twenty-five years later (The Stendhal Syndrome, 1996). They never called me back. Neither did I.
I stubbornly kept experimenting in other films, which allowed for that kind of research, and I demanded more and more freedom. I tried everything! I reached a quite remarkable grade of complexity using peculiar ensembles and devising continuous inventions. However, after about twenty-three or twenty-four experiments of this kind, someone warned me that nobody would ever hire me again if I were to go on like that.
What was I supposed to do? I had to change. I kept looking for options that made these kinds of contaminations possible without disrespecting the films, the public, and myself.
What’s more, sometime after that, a musicologist I highly esteemed both on a professional and a personal level, my friend Sergio Miceli, criticized me.20 Referring to my use of dissonances in film music, he said something to this effect: “You adopt dissonant and contemporary idioms in the most traumatic sequences of a film; in doing so you link this kind of music to a violent and sorrowful human condition. Such associations harm nontonal music, because you make it even harder for listeners to appreciate it in itself by charging musical languages that are already complex with the strong dramatic tension of those scenes.”
I trusted I was doing an excellent cultural service; he instead disputed that and caused me distress. Initially I felt really hurt; that was yet another element that pushed me into a long period of reflection.
Miceli was perhaps outlining the subconscious conditioning an audience may experience when faced with the association of dissonance to trauma, especially when this takes the shape of an imposition by “few” over “many.” All this could be linked with the phenomenon of the so-called decentralization, promoted by a number of composers and musicologists with ties to the Communist Party in the midseventies, among whom Luigi Nono, Claudio Abbado, and Luigi Pestalozza. They went to the factories and brought workers to the theaters, to give those social classes access to contemporary avant-garde music, which otherwise would have been inaccessible to them due to their social extraction. . . . It was meant as a way to “give them a chance.”21
It was commonplace in those days. There was an attempt to gradually accustom people to contemporary music; it was a cultural mission. It was nevertheless necessary to be aware of the listeners’ average sensibility and work on that basis—the real point being, how?
Over time I have reached the conclusion that people are not used to listening. If a piece of music is particularly complex, listening to it two or three times would be advisable before dropping it. I usually do this, as I am curious by nature. For the same reason, I have frequently advised film directors to listen at least twice to certain themes I have written for them. This simple practice can build up a higher emotional grip. What can’t be grasped on a first listening might be on a second round; meanwhile, one grows more familiar with the novelty of a piece.
I used to think that a film, that is, a popular piece of work, could put anybody in touch with unusual and peculiar musical idioms, gradually acclimating people to diversity. In the same way, I have “exploited” the sense of estrangement that certain music “naturally” triggers in an audience. When discussing double aesthetics, you asked me whether I was concerned with a pedagogic attitude, but as I told you, I never meant to change people’s minds, nor have I ever thought to have the power to do so. I was trying to make space for my silent, individual research, always respecting the public and the film’s message. I felt it my duty, a need that gratified me on a personal and professional level. If I’ve ever introduced a new style into popular culture, I’ve done so empirically, through practice. I had no models to follow, I had to build my profession day by day, taking risks and even failing at times.
Time and curiosity, as much as any type of negative, positive, or critical feedback, have led me to develop a style, which I now consider truly mine—ultimately, I have found myself. When the languages I was using and their sonic outcomes were considered too arduous for a given context, I had to reformulate them from scratch and rethink my role accordingly, with humbleness and a dose of good sense, but also without forgetting the necessities of my research. Whether or not I always succeeded, I can’t say.
I would ask myself, on what basis can I demand that someone be interested in what I value? Why should they listen to me? Why should they make such an effort? Just because of my love for research? Just because I think they should find beauty where I find it? These are the profound doubts that crossed my mind and still do; I always found it necessary to challenge myself. It’s never been easy, all of this is the result of an excruciating process.
Arguably, being caught in between inner and external strictures, split between infinite variables without any form of objectivity to rely on, is a substantive part of our complicated contemporary condition. There is an aleatory, unpredictable, and unforeseeable factor in communication; it can be insidious, but also an opportunity for new discoveries. Everything revolves around this very ambivalence. Besides caring for your own taste, you must satisfy the taste and the habits of others.
I am convinced that’s true. All in all, this is an issue composers have always dealt with, both in the present and in the past; to put it bluntly, you must communicate to make a living. I replied to Miceli’s objection that even Verdi, many years before me, had used dissonance to underline dramatic tension, emotional conflict, sorrow—he did so with the resources of his own time. Verdi might have even reputed some dissonant chords pleasant to his ears, but he stuck with the common meaning they had for his audience.22 In order to function, music must rely on common knowledge, which an audience can recognize and interpret accordingly; the “limitations” imposed by a context can produce very effective and attuned solutions, as much as reductive, arbitrary, and personal ones. There is not only one possible outcome. The important thing is to be conscious that you did your best. Yet again, what is “the context” after all? It’s the present, our contemporary condition, our restraints and limitations, but also our chances.
Let us deal with the present, then.
While the music originating from the tonal tradition was “dying”—or so it seemed—and the “highbrow” musical idioms multiplied and became “sound sculptures” for a restricted niche of individuals, many people got in touch with new genres that developed in close relation with the spreading of recording and reproduction technologies. In the span of a few years we went from mechanical formats (the disc, the cassette) to digital formats (the CD, the MP3), and the role of mass media (radio, cinema, television, the Internet) has dramatically increased.
This revolution in theory allows us to access much more music and information today than in any past historical epoch, all with a simple click; from listening to a symphony performed by a thousand people while we sit in our car to seeing images of the Second World War while we comfortably lie on our sofa, in the same way we can watch a football game. The here and the now of information is decontextualized and decentralized; sounds and images are redirected to a timeless technological non-place, replicated in millions of copies by every loudspeaker or screen on the planet, simultaneously or in displaced moments. Walter Benjamin had already focused on similar thoughts in 1936, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
These are epoch-making transformations that have, in theory, enabled us to experience much more music than has ever before been possible. These changes have created outstanding possibilities, though sometimes they have promoted aberrant models and ephemeral trends. I had already foreshadowed the ambivalence of such a phenomenon back in my days as an arranger at RCA, and I have continued to throughout my entire career, tormented by personal conflicts as anybody who produces or listens to music in our times is. Moreover, this revolution brought music from the past to us, as well as from the most varied geographical origins.
This goes to say that the very concept of contemporaneousness should be revised, to say the least.
We could then speak of an increasingly dilated present, in which several traces of mankind are stored and stratified. For the first time in human history, centuries of culture are made to coexist thanks to technology. Does that mean we could say, in other words, that Vivaldi is as contemporary as a piece composed earlier this morning?
Paradoxically, yes. For too long “contemporary” music has been identified just with “highbrow,” art music, pure and disconnected from the demands of the present. For some time now, however, we tend to identify every type of music produced nowadays as “contemporary”—rock, pop, jazz, blues, folk, . . . crossover and hybrids of all kinds, which altogether make up a cultural phenomenon that demands to be taken into account (if anything, to be able to ask ourselves where we are headed today, musically and beyond).
Particularly since the post–World War II era, the record industry and cinema have undergone a lightning-fast expansion affecting more and more people and nurturing these phenomena, for better or for worse.
Besides feeling an increasing responsibility and reacting to this condition in accordance with my morals, I haven’t always managed to avoid producing music of which I’m not proud today. All this being said, I never thought to back down in the face of the complexity of our time, which I wanted to live in its fullness, at the forefront, with curiosity and all the inevitable contradictions, mistakes, and misunderstandings.
What do you think the problems of our time are?
I believe that all too often this contradictory situation produces a misjudgment concerning the musical education of the youths—and not only youths, to be fair, but anyone who doesn’t have the tools to compare the present with other phases of our history. The misjudgment is generated by the invasion and broad dissemination of music that is marketed and commercialized. New generations are faced with such a varied and unequal array of options that makes it very unlikely for them to be able to choose what to learn and get to know in depth.
Most of the record industry’s investments focus on commercial music, that is, songs—the recipe being to point to the highest profit with the least expense. For this reason, among others, we are experiencing a general leveling of musical culture, from the perspective of both listening and comprehending; today music is “consumed,” and all too often its role doesn’t go beyond that of a background facility for shopping.
The technological revolution brought about by mechanical and then digital reproduction represented a great chance for music to free itself from its cultural boundaries and become accessible to everybody. But the direction undertaken in recent years has increasingly led toward a generalized consumerism. More and more often, the skills of a jazz soloist are confused with the substance of his or her music. Rock exists only in the “ingenuity,” the peculiarity of a performer, not in music per se. The same is true for pop, where the musical message is so extremely dried up and trite that the arrangement is the only thing that can still make a difference (although oftentimes this doesn’t even happen). Music by new composers often bores me, and the rare times I find something that excites me, I am often disappointed to find out that it is confined to conservatories, or to a restricted group of insiders, a very tiny part of society.
This complex system determines a high level of conditioning and engenders confusion in those who must choose what to do and how to orient their interests. This mostly concerns the youths, and among them a small niche interested in pursuing a musical career—young musicians and young composers.
There are all too many distractions—some of which are right, some of which aren’t—that divert students from focusing on and delving into a subject with which they could and possibly should fall madly in love, committing all they have to it.
Which distractions are right and which are not?
That’s difficult to say.
But if I were to recall what Petrassi’s lectures meant to me when I was a student, my discovery of counterpoint and how I felt that it would become the foundation for my own profession and my way of thinking. . . . I was selfish in that respect, thirsty for learning! If I were to compare it with today, I realize that the world has drastically changed. And if I dare to express my opinion, it is not to criticize the present, like a melancholy old man who’s nostalgic for the things he misses and knows he’s lost forever. No, I do it to offer my viewpoint as a man who comes from another epoch.
Obstacles have always been there, but certainly things have changed and we should be aware of that.
That is like saying that the ease through which we access such a variety of music doesn’t automatically entail that we have gained a better understanding of diversity, but it can, on the contrary, cause confusion and distraction in some cases. There’s more to that; how can we distinguish what is musically worthwhile and what is not in this chaos? It seems as though we are headed toward absolute relativism.
Exactly, this is the danger. If everything’s worthwhile, then nothing is. I don’t believe it should be so. In my opinion, putting your heart and mind into what you do makes the outcome effective and clear. People are unfortunately more and more attracted to the easiest and most spectacular music, which doesn’t require patience, study, comprehension, and subsequently reflection—all such qualities are less and less valued. A better education to listening would be necessary, and I believe that my personal attempt to encourage it does play a role, but is not nearly enough to trigger a revolution, a shift in the attention, in concentration, and especially in the ability to create the premises for a project and thus create a context. The initiative should primarily come from schools, better if from primary schools, at a more receptive age; but this is hardly the case. Sometimes I even think we’d need a great genius, a “musical messiah” who could awaken mankind and educate us on using our precious resources and finally reaching the potential we aspire to. But I don’t see any messiahs around, and solutions should probably not come from outside ourselves, but from the “inside.”
We have reached a condition of global subjectivism. There is no single objective truth, but only individual, private, and personal interpretations. Today the media can dislocate messages with ease and bring us even further, to a yet-to-come conception of space and time—a dilated present, incorporating the past within itself, where information and languages proliferate. Once again, I think of the Homo musicus, that ancestor of ours who yelled to affirm him- or herself and communicate its presence to others, perhaps beyond its own space and time. In short, technique seems to be following the same direction of language and, perhaps, technique and language are the same thing.23
After all we’ve said, do you think it’s still worth studying composition?
Absolutely.
What would you tell someone who wants to start exploring the world of music-making today?
He smiles.
One must love this profession, feel the urge to undertake such a mission. The first step is to search for a good mentor, I mean a really good one. Even better, more than one. Then begin with studying the historical repertory, but a good teacher will take care of this. It is important to embrace a mindset prepared to suffer, because in this line of work one studies for ten, twelve, or thirteen years, then earns a brand-new diploma in composition—maybe with full honors—and that’s just year zero.
That’s when the real work starts.
That’s the point in which one has the technique and the duty to engage with what already exists, with what is good and what is less good.
When I finished conservatory, I faced this dilemma. With Petrassi I built up my background. I adored my extraordinary maestro, I would meet him outside his home before every class and we would walk together to the conservatory, then after class we would walk back to his place—this was my way of spending the most time with him. I was totally fascinated by him and I deeply admired him. But when I got my diploma, I found myself at year zero. What was I supposed to do? I opted to engage with the music scene of the time—the Second School of Vienna, Darmstadt, the avant-garde. I wrote those three compositions, which I never disavowed. That was my beginning. Then I started evolving.
What if a student came to you, what would you ask him or her to do?
I would start by saying that I don’t consider myself a good teacher. I guess I’m not patient enough. But if a young man or woman wishes to become a composer and is convinced of this choice, they must study hard, listen to the right music, the one that carries the lineage of history with it, all the great authors—Bach, Frescobaldi, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Mahler, Nono. . . . They should not feel discouraged, especially at the beginning when studying may seem boring. They should measure themselves with the difficulties caused by the many restrictions of counterpoint and tonal harmony’s classical rules (such as the prohibition of parallel fifths and octaves and the like). There will be a time for rescuing those prohibitions and gradually building up a more personal language.
The importance of these rules will only be clear at a later stage. I am firmly convinced that students, as much as scholars, before being able to find their own way, must re-experience in first person the stages that punctuated human history and brought it to the present state.
This argument finds credit in Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony.24 A profound innovator like Schoenberg makes it clear straightaway, in order to learn the new twelve-tone theory—a language that shatters traditional tonal harmony—students must first master those very rules that dodecaphony is going to dismiss. I believe that the ability to follow rules preserves all its value even when everything that comes from the past has been destroyed or put aside. It may seem that rules no longer exist, but that’s an illusion, they are still there.
If I use a twelve-tone row in a piece and I suddenly perceive the presence of a parallel octave, this bothers me. If I notice the repetition of a sound before the row is finished, or in a place that is too close, I perceive it to be “wrong.” Studying the rules shapes our way of thinking, makes us selective and consequently more confident; these laws become part of us and shape our identity. This is why studying may be difficult, especially in the beginning; maintaining that parallel fifths and octaves are wrong, that the tritone is forbidden, that the leading tone goes upward and the seventh goes downward may seem dry talk. . . . However, if pupils accept these rules with an active outlook, conscious that they are in the learning stage, then the vast panorama and the immense possibilities of composition shall open up in front of them.
Might this not also carry with it the problematic constraints that come with studying the musical language, besides the positive solutions?
The alternative would be disengagement, throwing it all away. Perhaps this is no less an illusion.
Today I feel free to devise a personal musical architecture, drawing on all sorts of calculations and such, deciding which traces of the past to let emerge, trying to break out of my own habits. But I don’t feel forced to do so, nor do I need to stick to conventional “manners” of writing. If we have the tools of craftsmanship on our part—technique, love, and passion for this art form—music can teach us how to be free, how to experiment, and sometimes, with the same amount of courage, even how to fail.
All in all, prior to communicating with an audience, with other musicians, or more in general with the outside world, the problem of a composer—my problem—has always been the same, “Why am I writing this sound?” For each notated sound, there always must be an answer to that question.
“Why,” “how,” “to what end”? Bringing the irrational to the rational, or at least putting the two things in relation?
Exactly. Why does this chord work in this specific position? How is it made and how does this melodic line convey this set of emotions? Why should I make the voice shift in this way? All of these questions are excellent starting points for both analysis and self-analysis.
After all, it’s all about not being passive in front of what we perceive and think, which in turn may grant a new perspective in a wider context. Time, energy, and commitment make up our talent, which takes on several shapes in each and every one of us.
Building relations between significances and signifiers helps us find our own position in relation to them. In so doing, we become gradually conscious of something we weren’t or may have only seemingly been aware of at first. Yet, let’s not deceive ourselves: so many things are beyond our rational understanding and control, even when we analyze a musical piece. Ultimately this is fair enough, because it pushes us into new experiments and new solutions, new mistakes and again new attempts and new confirmations. It’s a process in which every presumed point of arrival immediately becomes a new starting position.
In fact, sometimes we are unable to thoroughly make sense of what’s happening, a piece of music rocks us at our core in a given moment, maybe for that one time only—and this is fine too. The emotion we feel in that moment might be a new stimulus and must be absolutely respected. However, it is important to go back to it on a second moment—with the aid of the score, if needed—to try to better understand why that happened. To be able to preserve the first impression and rationally break it down using our knowledge and technical competence: this is the process that enables us to master our craft.
I keep my level of curiosity high whenever I return to solutions that I have developed during the creative process. We codify, catalogue, compose, recompose, then we might stumble upon an idea that works and we can’t figure out why. On paper, an idea may appear dull, wrong, insignificant, and instead it may work perfectly once it is enacted. It can be the bridge between the audience and us, it can be understood and appreciated—it works, plain and simple. The contrary can also be true, of course: How much music leaves us cold and indifferent that is in theory perfectly written?
What is the current frontier of music in relation to media?
If we think about music the way I’ve just described it, then any music, especially the most “abstract” and “unusual,” can become a cathartic means for those who compose it, perform it, and listen to it. It can transcend and trespass univocal “meanings,” in that, even when music does not necessarily aim to tell a story, it can paradoxically engage us into looking for meanings or even make them up for our own use.
A meditative ritual?
In other cultures, especially East Asian ones, music has been a key meditation element for centuries. In the sixties and seventies this tendency also invaded Europe and the United States. Some rock, pop, and jazz musicians, but also some avant-garde composers, were greatly influenced by it.
Is there a relation between music and power?
There is a link between the two, and music certainly entertains an ambivalent relation with some sort of positive power—by which I mean the power to stimulate, awaken, move, renew, create—as well as a negative one, a manipulative power that deprives individuals of their ability to choose; it is almost an act of violence, a means to perpetrate impositions, dogmas, to make men and women passive and oppressed by overwhelming forces.
I intimately feel closer to the former vision of music, but I can’t exclude that there is some truth in the latter. Much depends on how one connects with music, whether actively or passively. More in general, I would add that music, by its own nature, lends itself to ambiguously relate not only with the moving image, but also with power. It is the same shifting nature Pasolini referred to when, as I already said, he maintained that music in cinema is able to “sentimentalize concepts and conceptualize sentiments.” That statement has stuck with me from the very first moment I heard it and gradually I came to realize why; it accounts for something that I as a composer always make sure happens, and it doesn’t just include my film music, but all my music in regard to what surrounds it.
Music as a bridge between reason and emotion, the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the subconscious, . . . language and instinct. A timeless non-place where we all are potentially lonely but also potentially united, where we can experiment with a feeling of belonging and isolation at the same time, where we can lose ourselves and find our way back, where the personal and the collective identity coincide. . . . Once again we are back in the most archetypal human condition—in this joining of the opposites, the dance of awareness with death, and perhaps with life, returns.
Should we thus fearlessly open ourselves up to experimenting with communication in order to successfully channel music’s positive and beneficial potential?
Yes, but with responsibility and awareness. The intention with which one “does” something is fundamental, in my opinion. Sometimes things turn out well by chance, but one should not stop there. I think we should always try to act to the best of our abilities and with the utmost honesty. This is my personal and debatable belief, which has guided me in my work and beyond that. What will be said of us in the future? Some of the current experiments in communication will end in the present and will be erased by history; others will persist for many, many years. This is arguably the noblest goal for anyone who makes music and generally deals with language—hence in a way, every one of us.
Do you mean, to expand and decenter the creative (and perhaps communicative) potential, the moment you described as the compositional act, in order to dilate and transcend time? To push it beyond the “here and now” into history and the world?
This is for me the highest meaning of music, especially, I confess, of absolute music—a possibility for tomorrow. Therefore, you see, it’s somehow like progressing, walking forward, but always returning to square one, to the idea, the intuition, the moment of full potential preceding the primal scream—which may just be an illusion.
When you use the term “absolute,” do you mean the music that is meant to survive in the future, whereas “applied” is the music of the present, struggling to resist the passing of time? As though absolute music worked like a time machine making the embryonic intention or intuition of the composer eternal, in an infinite space-time expansion that reaches beyond one’s lifetime . . . or at least the hope that this might happen?
You could see it that way too, in a certain sense. I say, and hope, that music—at least that portion of wholeheartedly and skillfully written music that will resist the passing of time—will be listened to in the future regardless of the occasion for which it was originally composed, as absolute music. Today I don’t see unbridgeable differences between what I’ve composed for the cinema and what I’ve written for myself, because all in all I feel quite satisfied with my work. Theorizing the double aesthetics and putting it in practice helped to assuage some of my inner conflicts and set forth other sides of me, leading to tangible results. However, when it comes to envisioning what may happen in a hypothetical future, in fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years . . . it’s better I don’t even try to think about it, unless I want to precipitate into doubt and fear and, most of all, depression.
When composing absolute music, do you feel you are refusing the call of duty, that you are detaching yourself from the audience’s expectations and day-to-day demands, from your obligations toward anyone in particular, almost as if this was a revolutionary act? Something that reaches beyond your own time?
That’s exactly right. Some of the things I’ve accomplished in my applied music I have then transferred to my absolute music, and vice versa. At least this is what I feel I’ve done, even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time, and even today I’m not sure I always managed to accomplish this. I am convinced, though, that both categories belong to contemporary music, to the present. All of this will either speak about us in the future, or it won’t. Will it resist time? History will tell.
Sometimes I find myself thinking that having worked in cinema has probably helped me live my time profoundly, because cinema is perhaps the art of the twentieth century par excellence, the discipline that represents the perfect synthesis of the positive and negative examples we have discussed so far. I believe that cinema can be considered one of the mirrors of our society, a faithful portrait of life in contemporary times.
Fundamentally, I have always chased quality in my music, its ability to be autonomous, its identity and functionality in a broader context, be it cinema or anything else.
Even though such research, such an attitude may come across as twisted, perhaps even contradictory, I believe it has been and remains to be one of the crucial elements that has allowed me to perform my job to the best of my abilities.
How would you like to be remembered in the future?
As a composer.
We were speaking about honesty in music. Has your music ever scandalized anyone? Or have you ever thought it was misunderstood or misjudged because of an excess of honesty?
I tend to be cautious and even pessimistic about my work. Though I seek feedback right away, I have never wondered whether any piece I’ve written was liked or disliked. As to film music, good feedback has been wide in many cases, but in general I don’t ask colleagues for an opinion. Frankly, I repute it to be a rather embarrassing question.
It’s different when someone spontaneously comments on my work, be it positively or negatively. When Suoni per Dino [Sounds for Dino] for viola and two tape machines premiered in 1969, after an eight-year pause from absolute music, Cicognini approached me and said, “By now, you never mess up.” In that case, nobody had expected I would have gone back to non-film music. I have always found it embarrassing to ask colleagues outright for opinions of my music, the only exception being when I asked Petrassi about my first Concerto, which I dedicated to him, and my Cantata per l’Europa [Cantata for Europe] (1988) for soprano, two reciting voices, chorus, and orchestra. But Petrassi had been my mentor and at times we hung out together with Clementi and Bortolotti, almost as if to bring back the old conservatory days.
In the film field, on the other hand, my main concern is that the director and the producers are satisfied and that I’m fine with the goals I’ve set for a given project. Then, if my pieces cause a scandal, I don’t particularly care.
Some years ago, RCA planned to compile an anthology of experimental works extracted from my film music. Afterward, they decided to drop the project because they considered it “not commercial enough.” I was sorry because it featured many works I deeply care about, such as Requiem per un destino, Venuta dal mare [She Came from the Sea], Others, Who Will Follow Us (Altri, dopo di noi), Fräulein Doktor. . . .25
Would you care telling me something about these pieces? Why are they so important for you?
Each one has its own story. To start with, Requiem per un destino is part of the score I wrote for Half a Man by Vittorio De Seta. As I mentioned, auteur cinema allowed me to experiment. Composing music that was more complex than standard and not necessarily tonal made me feel freer. On some occasions, I enjoyed it so much that I wrote much more than was required for the film. In the case of Half a Man, though, the film’s box-office failure made me think that perhaps I had overdone it and that my music had contributed to stiffen the audience.
Did you feel responsible?
Yes, which is why I decided to emancipate the music from the images. This would have guaranteed a few performances in the concert hall—my music had been out of that circuit for so long at that point! Choreographer Pieter van der Sloot conceived a ballet, a genre I had never been much interested in, but which justified the reuse of my music in a new context. I had in fact conceived Requiem per un destino for a precise filmic destination, with musical sections that closely followed the visuals. The ballet was first performed in Perugia in January 1967, with scenography and costumes by Vittorio Rossi.26
What about Venuta dal mare, Others, Who Will Follow Us, and Fräulein Doktor?
In all those pieces I adopted serialism, yet each time in a different guise. The latter two are certainly the most dissonant works in this list.
The film Fräulein Doktor [1968] by Alberto Lattuada tells the story of a fascinating and ruthless German spy during World War I, based on a real historical figure, a very enigmatic character whose identity has still never been discovered. For the sequence of the First Battle of Ypres, in which the Germans used a terrible toxic gas obtained thanks to the spy’s work, Lattuada told me, “I don’t want the usual film music, rather a real symphonic work.” I was in my element.
As for Others, Who Will Follow Us, I composed it for The Red Tent by Mikhail Kalatozov, starring Sean Connery, Claudia Cardinale, and Peter Finch.27 It lasts over twenty minutes and it draws on a rhythmic pattern derived from an SOS Morse code signal. The film tells the story of the incredibly misfortunate expedition of Umberto Nobile to the North Pole aboard the airship Italia. As is well known, the explorer remained imprisoned in the ice with his team, and rescue attempts could only be undertaken after the unfortunates managed to send an SOS signal in Morse code—three short, three long, and again three short impulses.
I decided to transform those nine pulses into a rhythmic pattern, obstinately reprised by orchestral instruments, to which I added some synthesizers and a chorus. The latter surrounded the synthetic impulses in an atonal and dissonant grammar.
Almost as though the SOS signal was the only recognizable element remaining to rely upon in the midst of adversity?
The orchestra is supposed to evoke suffering, isolation, and the feeling of the ice surrounding and squashing the poor lost explorers. The SOS signal is all they have. . . . Synthesizers also build up an inescapable dramatic tension, a suspension of space and time that articulates the crew’s waiting.
In Venuta dal mare you used a tone row as well.
I decided to use four sounds and five instruments—voice, flute, percussion, viola, and harp—matching the number of characters in the film Ecce Homo (dir. Bruno Gaburro, 1968), for which I originally composed the piece.28 The basic tone row and the choice of instruments symbolically express the relations between the characters and their shared fate [Example 4.2].
Example 4.2: Ecce Homo, basic tone row
From the outset, this tone row is presented by Edda Dell’Orso’s voice. I linked it with the character played by Irene Papas; like a siren’s song, the voice guides the viewer through the apocalyptic odyssey of the film. I recorded the piece in haste, in the middle of August, almost all the musicians were on holiday, and some of them literally joined the session straight from their vacations.29
The film was Bruno Gaburro’s second feature-length movie, the first in which we collaborated. It did not have commercial ambitions, but the filmmaker had worked well and his story was stimulating, leaving me room for experimenting.
There was no real action from a dramatic point of view; the story takes place on a remote beach where the tragic experience of five survivors, three men, a woman, and a child, unwinds in a postapocalyptic scenario. In this extreme situation, the male characters symbolize three facets of society degraded by “progress”: the arrogant virile soldier, the conciliatory intellectual, and the husband in decline, always negative and sexually frustrated. The woman becomes an object of desire, a prey the three men contend for, as she is the last female survivor, while the kid observes all that happens through his young, defenseless eyes.
Do you usually start from a unitary compositional idea when scoring a film?
Usually, yes. I start from a reference key (if I work within the tonal system) and from the choice of some common elements—a leitmotif, a tone row, a chord progression, a solo instrument, an instrumental group. . . . Also today, whenever I decide to use certain elements, I’m certain to reprise them throughout the score, because I link them with specific meanings in the film. The audience is not necessarily interested in this detail, but it’s relevant for me. It is important to restate something in the music that has already been presented, because it creates familiarity and cohesion; on the other hand, one should also take care to bring in some novelty to renew interest each time.
Sometimes the publisher accompanies the film release with a soundtrack album. Music ought to be even more autonomous and well structured in those cases.
Those who buy records don’t want to listen to a bunch of twenty-five-second-long tracks; they prefer something more consistent and satisfying (unless they are into Webern and his Bagatelle).
I don’t teach composition today, but if I did, I would advise young composers of applied music to mentally prepare to conceive of extended pieces, which have an inner coherence but are concurrently functional to the film and can also be fragmented into modular segments adaptable to the moving pictures.
Did you always seek to ensure yourself a margin of experimentation in film scores?
It wasn’t always possible to adopt unusual kinds of writing; it was important to be in the right context. I had to bear in mind which film and director I was working with; I met directors who started with the best intentions, asking me for music “never heard before” with “unprecedented” timbres, who then changed their mind when I really let myself go. Sometimes I could afford experimenting because I was granted more freedom due to the prestige I reached; and other times, because a production was cheaper, or for other more specific reasons, I could find more openness toward experimenting.
Is it possible, in your view, to exceed the limits of “decency,” so to say, in the experimental domain, and cross over to a kind of “musical perversion”?
Frankly, I don’t know, I don’t like to play the part of the purist. Perhaps perversion is improvisation devoid of rules and sensibility, as I maintain that some kind of order should always be there or at least seem to be there, even when disorder takes over.
Chaos alone is perversion.
Yet, in music, I wouldn’t know.
Is improvisation without rules a form of perversion?
Even in this respect it depends on a case-by-case basis, and sometimes I happen to appreciate even the most radical experiments.
Have you ever been perverted, in musical terms?
Since you are interested in the topic, I can tell you that from time to time it has been necessary to evoke “perversion” because a film required it; this especially happened in horror films. I can think of a movie by Aldo Lado, Paralyzed (La corta notte delle bambole di vetro, 1971). In the track “Emmetrentatre” [M-Thirty-three] I had Edda Dell’Orso performing panting moans over a dissonant percussive background.30 It was a provocation for the audience’s ears. Yet again, one can talk of perversion in that case due to its context, and primarily a shared taste, a listening habit that immediately connotes a particular sonic configuration as such. I don’t think that anything is or isn’t perverted per se.
Do composers consciously utilize elements they are sure to share or not share with their audience?
Absolutely, and they play with them, if they aim to communicate. After all, even the greatest composers of the past created musical-grammatical syntheses and concordances. Composers who work in film must consider that they write for a vast public—not everybody will be able to get everything, or, even if that were the case, how is a message to be understood? It’s difficult to attain the right balance.
I remember when, years ago, my mother was worried about the experiments I was into when I was a student; she told me, “Ennio, what you write must be catchy, otherwise people won’t understand you.” “Catchy” was a vulgar expression to me, because she was not a musician, but over the years I’ve come to realize what she meant. Let me give an example.
In 1970, RCA asked me to arrange some songs by Chico Buarque, the famed Brazilian singer-songwriter who was in exile in Italy because of the dictatorship in his country. I was no longer working for RCA, but Sergio Bardotti, a lyricist and very good friend of mine, insisted. At the time Bardotti, Luis Bacalov, Sergio Endrigo, and I all lived close to Mentana.31 In the end, I accepted.
In arranging the album Per un pugno di samba [A Fistful of Samba] (1970), I overdid it a little with the experiments;32 I adopted several unconventional solutions, such as “dirtied” harmonies produced through pointillist gestures of the strings or specific entrances of the vocalists. Songs like “Il nome di Maria” [Maria’s Name] and “In te” [In You] feature less obvious solutions, whereas in “Tu sei una di noi” [You Are One of Us] I inserted a twelve-tone row in a completely tonal context. Yet I believe that “Lei no, lei sta ballando” [Not Her, She Is Dancing], in which I used a seven-tone row, is the song most representative of the subject we were dealing with, because of its balance between catchiness and novelty, between the familiar and the unusual.
The lyrics tell the story of a girl who, on the day after Carnival in Rio, keeps dancing alone, raving, wandering around the streets of the town as though the party never ended. I established the tone row and assigned it to Edda Dell’Orso’s voice; the tone row gradually “contaminates” the strings before passing onto the woodwinds and returning to the pure voice.
I convinced myself that this procedure would generate a characteristic, slightly dissonant flair, which would well represent the folly of the girl’s lonesome singing, immersed in a world of nostalgic dreams.
I employed the tone row in a strange way, because the tones had to fit the very simple underlying harmony. On a C-major chord, I could certainly accept an E, an E♭, or a B♭, but an F♯ would trouble me, not to mention an A♭.
So I selected a tone row, which was highly compatible with the key of the song; this way the harmony remains clean, except for the slithering melody of the voice that intertwines throughout.
As the voice pushes us “outside,” the rather standard percussion and especially the bass make us feel “at home,” confirming the “Brazilian model.” Generally speaking, the complications you introduced are counterbalanced by simple elements that take the listener by the hand, so to say. In this case too, one can speak of a balance between predictability and unpredictability that produces enrichment and comprehensibility.
Aside from Edda Dell’Orso’s voice, the arrangement is completely normal; had I been more daring with the other elements of the arrangement, the overall outcome would have been “too much.” It was necessary to stay simple, to take care of both my client and the final listeners. Back then, each time I would destabilize a “norm” I would try to introduce a compensatory reassurance, by means of highly connoted and recognizable elements.
At any rate, Per un pugno di samba didn’t sell well, and it took twenty years until it received the recognition it deserved. Just consider that even Buarque had to rehearse extensively because the arrangements were too complex, too distracting for him and he didn’t know when to enter. On my part, I had warned him, “Beware, if you ask me to be your arranger, I’ll do what I want. If you want Brazilian stuff, go to Brazil.” Moreover, I followed a personal rule: I took more liberty in experimenting with the long-playing albums than with the singles. This was because the LP was considered an elite, more sophisticated product, while the 45-rpm singles were intended for a more generic public.
Could we say that you pursue a sort of “communicative balance,” that is to say, a pivotal point between stereotype and novelty, between the known and the unexpected, partly relying on your craft and your knowledge of the audience’s tastes, and partly on your instinct?
Yes, that’s right. To this regard, I might mention a piece I still enjoy despite the passing of time: “The Cross of Love” from the score of Love Circle (Metti, una sera a cena, dir. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1969).33 Besides it being in C minor, this piece exhibits many of my “habits,” many of these compositional blends. It starts with the piano presenting a sequence of three tones, C, D, and E♭ [Example 4.3].
Example 4.3: Love Circle, incipit of the main theme
After the first exposition, the intervals invert in a new rhythm, then the theme is expanded, dilated. The bass line sustaining the whole piece is made with pitches recalling the tone row derived from the name “Bach.”34 Then the brass section enters, playing a line that I wouldn’t properly define as a “theme,” since it is made of a simple progression of fifths.
The three independent and combinable voices make up a triple counterpoint, then three other voices join in and the counterpoint becomes sextuple; there is no confusion, on the contrary, every part is completely comprehensible to the listener.
It always pays to use counterpoint, I am convinced of this. It has always been fundamental for me in everything I’ve written. Even the simplest double counterpoint can bring a lot to a piece. Considered in abstract terms, that is, devoid of its context (harmony, colors, timbres), counterpoint won’t fail to bring richness and value to a composition.
One who shared your opinion was Luciano Berio, among others. Where does this attitude—which almost resembles a “disseminating” cultural enterprise—come from, given that you already stated that you don’t think of yourself as a pedagogue?
It comes from a commitment that I felt toward myself, a necessity that has rewarded me on both a personal and a professional level. It was a silent path, demanded by no one other than myself. If anything, I did it primarily as an act of presumption and egoism. Did this later lead me to have to mediate, perhaps negotiate? I wouldn’t know. To me it was a consequence of the double aesthetics, as I explained before.
The technological revolution brought about by the music industry and cinema played a key role in amplifying the content and the research you were immersed in. Leaving your intentions aside for a moment, a cultural reference model, a “Morriconian” style germinated that created bridges between high and popular culture, in a way that other composers sometimes aprioristically rejected.
It is strange to be turned into an adjective. . . . What I can say is that arranging was very useful training for me, perhaps the only training that really taught me something about how to write music for films.
I could arrange songs any way I wanted, either through simple or through complex instrumental procedures, with sounds taken from reality, as well as with strange, less strange, or “personally strange” solutions, but always paying the highest respect to the harmonic structure handed to me by the songwriter—although from time to time I was forced to reharmonize and correct certain melodies.
I transferred this expertise into cinema. I had to value the perceptual habits of the average moviegoer, who is used to tonal music in songs, but at the same time I had to carve out a space for my ideals and research. Perhaps this deliberate twist I gave to my career might well have complicated my private life, but in contrast it has met the interest of people from varied cultural backgrounds. I applied my craft to another art, cinema, with the goal to redeem my profession. Once Walter Branchi told me, “You write pieces that look like songs, but aren’t.”35
In talking with you, one can sense the great constancy and perseverance you put into changing yourself, but also in preserving yourself; you are at once different and the same, so to speak. This concerns your inner self and your work, but what do you think about change in filmmaking and film music? Do you see it as evolution, involution, or conservation?
I believe that things always move ahead, somehow. For better or for worse, I’m not the one to judge. I think that cinema is moving toward an increasing spectacularization in the United States, a constant quest for special effects, which brings remarkable outcomes, but causes a “rehashing” of trite musical solutions as a drawback. In short, US cinema is following a rather commercial pathway.
On the other hand, fewer and fewer films are produced in Italy, and I say this begrudgingly. If I compare the current situation with the way things were some years ago, the number of films produced has steeply decreased and the industry has collapsed. On the contrary, television has grown and this has deeply affected the overall language, for several reasons that we have already covered.
Do you think that the sphere of applied music can still be a “safe ground” for composers who wish to engage with the present and look at the future without giving up on experimenting?
Difficult to say. For one thing, those who want to engage with the present, our time, will find in cinema a precious, though at times contradictory, witness of our society. However, cinema is changing too, as we were saying, not simply because of its economic impoverishment or because of television, the Internet, and the new technologies that are gradually replacing it. I don’t see it as a mere economic issue; I think there was more courage in the past. That’s no longer so, and there are consequences on a broader level. But there’s no need to repeat myself.
I could afford to make several varied (and strange) experiences, because first and foremost the desire to experiment was strong, even when the means were limited. This still happens today at times, but all too often people chase easy success. Moreover, I retain that we are headed toward amateurship on every level.
Some amateur composer-musicians—there are all too many out there—are keen to work for free and content themselves with copyright royalties, at best.
Some years ago I had to refuse a job with Negrin, with whom I have collaborated a lot in TV productions, after RAI told me about the ridiculous, unacceptable budget they had at their disposal. With a similar figure it would have been impossible to cover the costs of recording and the orchestra, not to mention my fee; in cases like this, directors are in a weak position, as they are forced into a corner, unable to oppose the producer’s demands. Negrin told me, “Ennio, don’t mind them. I’ll pick some music that you composed for some of my old films and that’ll do.” So he did, and I must say that he made the best with what he had.
The job market, not just the musical one, can now rely on a wide pool of amateurs (which it previously contributed to create) who would do anything to work, even if underpaid. Moreover, there are synthesizers, like we said before. One computer alone can do the job of a full orchestra. This is enough to fool those unable to realize the difference.
Another issue is that orchestras are shut down for a lack of working gigs. . . . Perhaps this too will lead to an evolution, who knows? We’ll have to see. . . .
Which orchestra did you usually record with?
The Orchestra dell’Unione di Musicisti di Roma, which gathered a selection of the best musicians around. When I say “best” I don’t mean it in absolute terms, but I refer to their skills and versatility in the recording studio and in the field of applied music. Film music requires specific competences.
In recent years I have often worked with the Roma Sinfonietta; I’ve toured worldwide with them and my excellent soloists: Vincenzo Restuccia, Nanni Civitenga, Rocco Ziffarelli, Gilda Buttà, Susanna Rigacci, and many others. . . .
Speaking of performers, you brought to mind what you were saying earlier about making timbral choices according to the musicians you have at your disposal. In Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, for example, the mandolin and the guitar are popular instruments, the out-of-tune piano seems directly taken from the street, but it is also an instrument typical of bourgeois salons, even if deteriorated and broken; the sound of the press in Lulu the Tool evokes the mechanistic awareness of a life with no escape, a Kafkaesque destiny; I could go on with the Jew’s harp in For a Few Dollars More. . . . In short, there’s always a symbolic parallelism between what you write and the elements of each film. At times you focus on the compositional techniques and grammar, but most often a timbral concern is at the core of your work. Are these instinctive deductions or do you explicitly plan them? And what do you do when you don’t have the right instrumentalist for a given idea?
More often than not, ideas flow quickly, almost instinctively in film music. But one must also take his time and reflect accurately. It is vital to reason about what, how, and why something works. The success of a piece of music frequently depends precisely on understanding this point. In Lulu the Tool, I could have replaced the violin with the strong rhythmic sound of a milling machine. . . . It might have even sounded more coherent, but certainly less evocative. In this way, instead, every time the machine comes back after the violin has appeared, its presence feels harsher and more violent, in accordance with the film’s message. It works as a deprivation of pleasure.
But even when one has a timbral intuition, one must be pragmatic in film music; in the event I cannot count on the right musician, the one I repute fit for the task, I dismiss the option with no hesitation and replace the instrument. Had I not been sure to have the great Lacerenza at my disposal, I would have never given in to Leone.36 I have always relied on soloists who could bring an added value, convinced that their specific talent would make the difference.
I would have never dared to do what Mario Nascimbene did in 1972 for Indian Summer (La prima notte di quiete, dir. Valerio Zurlini), when he demanded that Maynard Ferguson—a great trumpeter who could reach a very high pitch range—fly straight from America just to record one part. I do what I can with what I have there with me, otherwise I change; rather, I am accustomed to shaping my musical ideas according to the people with whom I will be working.
These are the criteria I sometimes adopt in making music for films. I confess that for years I used the clarinet very seldom because I couldn’t find soloists whom I thought would fit. Then Baldo Maestri showed up and I was finally able to indulge my whims.
Other times, as it happens, I must take risks and write for performers I have never met before. But when I realize that a musician is not up to the task, taking full responsibility, I change the part and assign it to some other instrument.
I notice an interesting conundrum in the fact that when you told me about the stages leading you from an idea to the finished work in your absolute music, you put the choice of timbres first. Now, however, in speaking about film music, it seems that you indissolubly link the originating idea to the identity of the musicians. The fusion between an idea and a specific performer has resulted in a peculiar sound, a Morriconian sonic cipher. . . .
Absolutely. The contributions certain musicians gave to the discovery of a timbre were crucial; in many cases we worked closely together. The human voice is one of my favorite instruments, because it originates in the body without intermediate passages and is able to evoke every possible emotion and feeling. But I can say this because for several years I could rely on the magnificent voice of an extraordinary singer such as Edda Dell’Orso (I may have even overused it in some cases).
Also the viola—which, among other things, has a range akin to the female voice—exerts a particular fascination over me, especially when Dino Asciolla played it. When he regretfully passed away, I was lucky enough to meet Fausto Anselmo, the first viola of both the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the RAI Symphony Orchestra of Rome.
Other great instrumentalists I wrote a lot for were pianist Arnaldo Graziosi, guitarist Bruno Battisti D’Amario, violinist Franco Tamponi, who was my first violin while he lived. . . . With people of this sort I was sure that we would waste no time and everything would work out smoothly.
I always engaged talented, reliable, and smart musicians, with each of whom I tried to build continuity, a durable exchange. But this is true for film music, while it isn’t so much for absolute music.
With many of them I developed friendships and I even taught with some of them in Frosinone for a period.
Really?
Yes, between 1970 and 1972. Teaching was never my real vocation, but that was a very particular circumstance. Daniele Paris started an initiative to provoke the Ministry of Public Education, and I enthusiastically supported it.37
Did you found a school?
Yes, which still exists. Today it is called Conservatory “Licinio Refice,” in Frosinone.
It was Paris who decided to found it, bringing together several friends and important names in the Rome scene: Vincenzo Mariozzi taught clarinet, Dino Asciolla viola, Arnaldo Graziosi and Mimì Martinelli piano, D’Amario guitar, Bruno Nicolai and I taught composition, together with flutist Severino Gazzelloni, and other illustrious musicians. We all worked on new programs, distancing ourselves from the ministerial guidelines.
During the third year, Paris was appointed as director and the school officially became a state conservatory. As teachers, we therefore became employees of the Ministry of Public Education. At that point they told me that I was required to teach two classes a week; when I heard this, I turned the job down and left. Faced with nationalization, Asciolla and Nicolai also had to drop their positions.
Was that your only teaching appointment?
I taught some workshops. . . . But my most long-standing teaching experience was with Sergio Miceli in 1991, at the summer master classes of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena.38 I first met musicologist Sergio Miceli in the early eighties and our encounter immediately was revealed to be an important one, as Miceli had decided to write a book about me and my music.39 He realized long before many others that film music is an expression of our time, and supporting such a stance was especially courageous within Italian academia, which has only recently started giving applied music the consideration it deserves.
Between the late sixties and early seventies, there were periods in which you scored over twenty films per year. How much time did it take to prepare a score?
Although one should take dates with caution, as films are usually catalogued according to their public release date rather than the working period, it is true that I did work frantically for some years. For a while now I have been requesting at least one month to work on a score, but in that period I scored the music of even relevant films in a week, maximum ten days. The soundtrack was considered the third wheel, especially in commercial cinema. Directors would think about hiring a composer only at the end of the whole process, after shooting and sometimes even after editing their films.
I’ll give you an example of the mindset I had to cope with for years: let’s say that today, February 8, I reach an agreement with the director; he or she immediately warns me that the release date is planned for February 26, so mixing must start on the twentieth and the score must be ready on the fifteenth, because it must be recorded first. . . . In short, I have no more than seven days to conjure up the right idea and realize it.
I always experienced two conflicting sides during those intense periods: the positive side was that I had the chance to immediately listen to what I had conceived and written down just a few days earlier—this is something that composers, even the most respected ones, usually don’t get to have outside film music; the down side was the producing frenzy, which resulted in good and, at times, less good outcomes over the years. Sometimes I felt I was repeating myself, even though I always tried to avoid that.
The conservatory, absolute music, music for cinema, arrangements . . . how did you find the time to write all that music?
For those who think that these are extraordinary achievements, I suggest you note how much time Mozart or Rossini were allowed to write some of their works, and how efficient Bach was, who had to compose a cantata each week. As for me, I wake up early in the morning.
What time?
Every morning I battle with laziness. My alarm used to always ring at 4:00 a.m. Now I set it a bit later, but still early, and even when I complain with myself that I can’t make it, in the end I always get up.
Why four o’clock?
It was the only solution; my best time for writing has always started around 8:30 to 9:00 a.m., before which I had to work out and read the newspapers—which I still do—to keep me updated with what is happening in the world. Locking myself in the studio and work was the next thing.
I usually use the afternoon to rest when I don’t have things to do, but nowadays I always have so many urgent deadlines. . . . In the evening I exercise, moving my ankles and even my toe tips; and my neck, which I turn to the left and to the right, as much as I can. Some time ago I went to my doctor and he asked me to turn my neck, thinking that it would cause me pain; I did it without trouble simply because I have always kept it in shape, every day. Overall, I used to do fifty exercises, combined in series of three. This way I tested the efficiency of my joints and I felt happy in realizing that my body responded well. You must take care of all these practical things your whole life, unless you want to end up old and stiff.
When did you realize that you ought to work out every day, and how did you start?
When I was a teenager I spent the whole day writing music, from noon to night. Once my doctor came to see me and, after a checkup, he told me that if I were to continue in that way I would certainly get scoliosis. So he advised me to do some sort of movement, and when I asked him what kind, he firmly replied, “Whatever you like, but you must move.” I started with tennis. When I stopped, I began with fitness regimens, gymnastics, then back to tennis, until one day I fell badly face down to the ground trying to catch a ball. I was playing with my son Marco, who fires some incredible bullets, and I was winning! I hit my chin and ended up knocked out worse than a boxer. From that moment on, I decided that I would never play again and went back to my fitness routine gymnastics.
For over forty years, every single morning from 4:40 to 5:20 a.m., I have kept my promise to stay fit. And now that I can concede myself to do without so many exercises, I try my best anyway. Years ago, I even tried to involve Maria for a period. But the day that she woke up with me and observed me while I merrily got ready, she said to me, “Ennio, do what you want, I’m going back to bed.”
When did you reach a stable economic condition that made you feel safe?
It will be difficult for you to believe, but I didn’t feel sure of my professional stability until the early nineties. Sure, I have always worked a lot, even more than a lot. In fifty years in the film business I have been a part of 500 productions (at least this is what I’m told, I think it’s a little more than 450), aside from the absolute music and other activities. I struggled to achieve such continuity over the years, and it was only after a long time that I managed to reach it, fortunately.
Now my financial situation is quite acceptable, and I can’t complain; thanks to royalties, I have an income even when I’m not working. During the early years, on the other hand, I couldn’t be sure about what would happen after. This is a freelancing profession, full of risks, and a job in which you can’t just offer your services to clients. You can’t call directors and ask them to take part in their new film. It doesn’t work like that, not at all! It would be as if a lawyer went out looking for his or her next client. . . . The lack of stability, which is so typical of this job, is something that has always made me anxious, perhaps even when there were no longer objective reasons to be.
Around 1983, I greatly reduced my commitments in cinema, and a few years later I even went as far as to announce my definitive retirement. But then things changed, some very interesting projects and a few important collaborations made me change my mind. I continued with cinema, though I managed to attain more and more time for my “other” music—today I must call it so—the one I can write with more freedom.
Fellini used to say that he made films because he had signed a contract, accepted the retainer from the producer, so he would have no choice but to finish a project. He needed that sort of constraint (which I find typical of Italian psychology, or at least of Italian artists), a commitment rather than a presumed “total freedom,” which on the contrary should make one feel disingenuous. He added that total freedom was dangerous for people like him, for he needed imposed limitations which allowed him to pile up a certain energy, obstacles against which to oppose a growing tension. Do you find that the constraints of cinema and, more in general, of the present times, stimulate you?
The constraints Fellini referred to are real and have always been there; I agree that, instead of withstanding them passively, one can turn them into useful stimuli. Limiting the notion of liberty surely awakens fantasy, at least in me, because in a way I feel compelled to react, as a person and a professional, to those restraints. This being said, though, it remains fundamental for me to earn a space that is mine, in which I can devote myself to the music I have decided to call “absolute.”