Di stanze documents a Piano Solo recording experience dating back to July 2018. Almost two hours of recorded improvisation, of which little had been predetermined if not the choice – both aesthetic and technical – to create short extemporaneous compositions, with an ideal limit of five minutes per piece (hence the reference to pictorial miniatures, meant as works with a reduced form).
Theaftermath work resulted in the selection of the songs that best could satisfy the idea of synthesis and coherence required for a record, exploiting and highlighting the possible re-appearance of thematic materials and / or timbric similarities between the recorded tracks.
Coherently with the philosophy that has always driven my research in the Piano Solo form, I decided to leave the “Truth” of the moment – the overall sound returned by the instrument and environment – as intact as possible.
The term rooms (Stanze), used in the title of the album, seemed very effective for the specific extent of his polysemy, which welcomes different interpretations.
First of all, the room is intended as an intimate environment and, for transposition, as a “sound environment”. If sound is the basis of the existence of music itself (“Music cannot exist without sound. Sound exists without music. It is the sound that counts », wrote Giacinto Scelsi in 1953) and the sound originates from movement, music is made up of “sounds” and “gestures” that only later crystallize into something we can recognize as a code and therefore as a language.
I like to think of this primal, original dimension of creating music as a space, or more precisely as “rooms”, in which we enter to trigger each time that part of mystery – indefinability and unpredictability – inherent in the practice of improvisation.
Another possible interpretation of the term room is related to the universe of poetry, a universe as dear to me as the musical one since childhood. In poetry the term “stanza” can be synonymous with verse, indicating a self-sufficient structural unit within a larger poem, but at the same time it can indicate a composition in itself consisting of a single verse, similarly to a musical composition consisting of a single section or a compact and coherent thematic idea, without further development.
To underline this link with poetry, three passages in the record – vetro (I), vetro (II) e sabbia – are inspired by the lyrics of the young Milanese poet Davide Romagnoli (El silensi d’i föj druâ, Marco Saya Edizioni, Milano 2018). Also, two more compositions – Ballade I and Ballade II (cose non dette) – refer to a poetic-musical form with a very long and articulated tradition, which preserves in its legacy the bond between the two arts.