Inclusivo-esclusivo

Il 'Preludio No. 8 in Mi bemolle minore BWV 853' in due composizioni di Luca Lombardi

Abstract

Since its very first works, the creative outputs of Luca Lombardi (1945) reflect two dialectic tendencies, which the composer himself has labelled inclusive/exclusive, depending on plurality/unity of sound materials, on the formal trajectory that the materials engender, on the possible extension to other media. Within the frame of the post-serial composition, which keep focusing on the processes and yet radically free the conformation of the materials, the incorporation of fragments from the musical past was no more a taboo: therefore the young Lombardi composed (1967-68) to work using diverse portions of the Prelude in E flat minor BWV 853. 

In Albumblätter for piano solo, the Prelude’s incipit is inserted as a quotation along a path connecting various stylistic-linguistic features, some of them up to an evident as well as updated informal conception (clusters, textures of trills...). Transitions are rigorously controlled through proper musical shapes, so that the Bach quotation – a kind of apparition in fade in/out between two informal episodes – appears as a particular status of the sound matter.

In Das ist kein Bach, sagte Beethoven, das ist ein Meer! (for 7 players, new version – 1993 – for 5 players), melodic-harmonic excerpts of various extensions make up the only sound-materials sheet available to improvising musicians instrumentally undefined, but chosen among timbrally statued families. The improvisational process is governed by a relational score, which establishes which players are active, which transformations are to be projected on the selected excerpt, and which interactions between players – loaning of materials included – are to be carried out.

Hence Albumblätter mirrors the inclusive principle, the mutual morphing of sound panels differently shaped (the ‘album leaves’), expanded in the immediately following multimedia version – Opus 10 – towards verbal, gestural and filmic elements, employing a second performer live and on screen; however, this work realizes such an expansion without modifying the existing score. Das ist kein Bach… is exclusive as to sound material and structure (partly regulated, in the players’ alternation, by typically serial rotations), however flexible and undetermined. It is also relevant that Bach's Prelude and Fugue was at the centre of a compositional reflection about the dialectic between multiplicity and unity.