VERRÀ LA MORTE E AVRÀI I TUOI OCCHI
This piece was the first approach to using a text not only as a source of inspiration but also as material for composition. The poem is written by an Italian poet called Cesare Pavese, and its title means Death will come and it will have your eyes. It talks about how death is a constant presence, that permeates life, and looks at you through the mirror. Love and death as two faces of the same silence, the same hope that waits at the end.
Most of the music comes from an improvisation session I had with Margherita Baggi (singing in the recording), and it’s tinged with the heaviness of the text. Throughout the whole piece there is a constant note, like a bell, on the piano; a continuous reminder, a shadow. All the associations with this idea of despair, solitude, and hopelessness; the scratching sounds, the metallic scraping, or the nervous tapping, are not consciously chosen as representations but came out naturally as an image of the text.
There is a tight relationship between the structure of the piece and the words, in terms of tempo, rhythm, and development of the material. In the score, there are no specifications relating to those parameters, apart from the order or sequence of the notes. The music is instead open, left to the musicians to feel and intuitively move through it. What marks the pace and form of the changes and makes the music move forward is the text.
The first voice has the verses of the poem and recites them, with a speaking voice. In this case, the text and the music are separated, forming two different layers. When there is singing there are never words, it’s a humming, a voice surrounded by silence. The text instead becomes the central focus, the words the rhythm, the space between the phrases. The music is merely coloring the words, following the breathing.
Every time there is a new verse of the poem, it causes a change in the music beneath it, it’s the cue for the musicians to move to the next section, and it makes it grow into a different texture. The text works as a trigger within the music, unleashing the chain of events. Each verse creates a reaction in the sounds, as an interactive surface.
Everything is built around texture and timbre, except for a brief moment towards the end in which actual melody and harmony appear. Bell sounds, paper, and metallic textures, inharmonic sounds, are also a way to relate to the spoken language, to the clicking and percussive sounds of the words when they are uttered. That small space in which the harmony becomes present is the separation from reality, the possibility of abandoning oneself to hope.
