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Traum

for piano

Daniele Venturi

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for piano

£14.99
£9.99
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Composer Daniele Venturi
Year of Composition 2020
Duration 6' 10"
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Instrumentation Piano
Categories (all composers) , ,
Catalogue ID ce-dv1t1

Notes

This composition is inspired by a very short and touching poetic text by Marina Popadić, a sensitive Serbian poet and pianist who the piece is dedicated to.

Taken from the collection Gli scritti in via Sottoriva, the text is very cryptic and subject to the form of haiku: The soul is awake in the dawn of the dream. And the drafting of the composition takes shape exactly from the concept of dream. The title itself, Traum, is the concept of a dream in German. The musical writing of this composition is very varied, just as performance techniques are often borrowed from those used by other instruments. One of the most particular is the one that requires the interpreter to play with an eardrum bat, percussively and directly on the serious strings of the instrument, imitating the sounds that can be produced on a gable or on a xylorimba. The score also provides for the performer to try an instrumental technique of a guitar type, the one that makes use of glissando on the strings, directly in the cord with the help of a guitar slide. This contributes to transfiguring the piano’s sound even more, making it tonally more similar to the vaults of an Indian cymbalom and sometimes an electronic instrument. These dramatic and ethereal sonorities at the same time, which characterize the first formal area of the song, strongly contrast with those present in the central part, where moments of great piano lyricism alternate with others in which there is a clear polyphonic idea. In the latter area emerges a sort of two-voice invention based on Bach’s style and rarefied poetry. Although with a very chromatic language, which often uses all 12 semitones and with considerable shifts from one chromatic harmonic field to another, the very characteristic idea of the author’s poetics and language, the one of a strong material lyricism, persistently remains.

A great changeability of sound dynamics also characterizes this composition by Venturi, as well as many others by him. They become the recognizable figure of the composer in combination with the variety of musical writings, although with an ever-unique language. This is greatly amplified in the last part of the song, which follows the large area of formal development, the heart of the composition itself. In this area the percussive writing previously used by the composer is taken up and greatly varied. Here the score involves the use of two stocking needles, replacing the use of an eardrum mace. The composer’s search for a very particular sound is clear and characterized by a more markedly metallic tone. Each of these sound ideas are inspired by the one of the dream which is present in everyone since we were children and which Popadić’s poetry brings to the fore with disruptive force. Thus, the composer tries to lead the listener by the hand, in a sort of introspective and psychoanalytic journey at the same time, in which the sound is not only the one heard but also – and above all – the one imagined.