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Aldo Clementi participates in the movement beyond serialism called Informalism, and his version is less philosophical — Adornian, in his case — than pictorial. His approach is negative: he aims to neutralize the interval by means of dense frameworks, textures, and polyphony made from counterpoint, canons, and chimes. His musical language culminates in the suspension of form, with neither beginning nor end, in an inconclusive continuum. The result is illusory, inert masses of sound: aphasic, magmatic testaments of both a horror vacui and an a contrario creation. In his works, the organic, the human, beauty, and even art are experienced as lost paradise. We can cite the following statement from Clementi, with its echoes of Beckett: “Music (and art in general) must simply have the humble duty of describing its own end, or at least its slow extinction.”1 In other words, it is about finding a way to stop.
Clementi’s work can be divided into four periods.
The first period, up until 1960, is Webernian, serial, structural, and marked by strong timbres, and it builds upon Bruno Maderna’s technique of permutations. In these works, such as Tre studi (1956-1957, for ensemble), Clementi subdivides his base materials into a few sounds that he subjects to a circular counterpoint determined by a numerical matrix. He writes them on graph paper in magic squares, which helps him to change the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal order, continuously altering the material. “It was like finding an intermediate stage between the brain and the note. The notes are put down at the last moment as a pragmatic fact, a formality.”2 The magic square represents the first transposition of a visual, figural, plastic — rather than speculative — dimension into a sound space, with the graphics resolving the aporias of the composition. The Tre studi alternate strata, statics, figures, and tensions. Next, Composizione n. 1 (1957, for piano), creates a sophisticated system of accelerations and decelerations, within which duration is a horizontal projection of pitch.
Ideogrammi n. 1 (1959, for sixteen instruments) and Ideogrammi n. 2 (1959, for flute and seventeen instruments), in their very title, reflect an attention to the relationship between sound and sign. In an almost disembodied language stripped of psychological value, with the impassive and anonymous objectivity of a robot, with an instrumentation as white, transparent, and cold as the rest of the project, “silences are understood as ‘solid’ elements of construction … They are also ‘contrary’ relatives of the chords, as ‘silent dilation’ of an ‘audible contraction.’”3 For these silences, inherited from Anton Webern and which Clementi considered were opposed to Schoenberg’s linearity, he gradually substitutes strata, agglomerates, clusters of notes, zones of density, and other frameworks within which the sounds condense and, alternately, dilute in a creative and destructive dense polyphony. In 1960, following Zeitmasse by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Clementi’s trio Triplum, still using graphic staff notation and through counterpoint alone, eliminates any residue of melody.
Staged on 14 May 1961 at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome, Collage, an artistic “action” (“un’azione dell’arte”) in one act, marks a turning point.4 It is an abstract mechanical ballet with neither actor nor dancer. It has no characters, in fact, only objects and machines. The piece draws inspiration from the alchemic notion that matter transformed into the homunculus, representing the birth of man, who is then integrated into the world around him before being annihilated and sent back to his inanimate origin. The title, Collage, is the work’s program: it is neither happening, nor Gesamtkunstwerk, nor synesthetic union of the arts, but rather sounds, movements, mobiles (in the wake of the artist Alexander Calder), magic lanterns, projections, films, mannequins, inflatable structures, and more. This co-presence of autonomous materials, this scenic Merz borrowed from Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, rejects parallels, descriptions, and narrations, in quest of a non-relation between the events. Yet, Clementi concedes, “it is not as simple as one would think not to set in relation.”5 Far from being an immutable Eden, the materials must be mobile so they can enter the fundamental dimension of music: time. In return, the visual dimension is an integral part of the composition: music for the eyes, like the objects arranged on an invisible canvas that Clementi perceives in the work of his teacher Goffredo Petrassi.
In 1961, after Clementi attends a course given by Stockhausen in Darmstadt, a new period commences. This second, “informal” period, extending to 1964, takes its name from three works: Informel n. 1 (1961, for piano and percussion), Informel n. 2 (1962, for ensemble), and Informel n. 3 (1961-1963, for orchestra). The period is a musical echo of the contemporaneous painting lexicons by Antoni Tàpies, Alberto Burri, and Jean Fautrier, who replace geometric structures with piles of matter, cutting them, covering them, pulling them apart. Shattering the serial logic, Clementi establishes a chromatic, amorphous continuum, a cluster, immobile but within its contours constantly changing through counterpoint and internal canons. He calls this effect “static matterism.” The pieces are often scored on a single page that describes the musical resources and rules for their usage. That single sheet sometimes takes huge dimensions, as for Informel n. 3, which consists of seventy-two parts (twelve woodwind, twelve brass, forty-eight divided strings).
From these vortexes follow three points:
First, Clementi removes the dialectic brought by the interval. Interval-level detail is no longer audible, as the polyphony annihilates all notion of melody, dynamic, and accentuated rhythm. He achieves this dissipation “by a very dense counterpoint and by regulating the parts to the shameful role of cadaverous and inaudible micro-organisms.”6 Clementi’s writing does not, however, exclude rationality. He involves rigorous counterpoint and canons. But the densities and textures turn out to be inhuman; they are created through automatism, and the listener becomes unable to anticipate the flow of sounds. As the game of imitation and of out-of-phase repetition is removed from the experience of listening, the tyranny of memory disappears — and the creator loses a little of his metaphysical aura.
Second, Clementi eradicates contrasts in dynamics, registers, timbres, and more, as well as caesuras and relations between parts, sections, or episodes. He radically flattens oppositions and tensions, which would only perpetuate the principles of sonata form. As he explained,
Every work is born from a unique original matrix, small, but like a sort of growing skein. There is no before and after, there is no acme, there is not something that grows toward the center and shrinks toward the end. … The form does not contain episodes, because the episode fractions, cuts up the detail, makes it appear as an ensemble of details. For me, each work is really like a single detail. … The macroform is at the same time a microform, as it comes from the enlarging of a small microform.7
The density, thickness, and transparency of the polyphony become the fundamental essence of the music. The form takes on a multipolar quality and becomes a “multidirectional phenomenon.” Informel n. 2 is thus lush counterpoint on a varied cluster, interrupted ad libitum by four insertions.
Third, Clementi suspends time. The absence of rhythmic, even metric, scansion, as well as the unchanging dynamics and timbres, accentuates stasis. The resulting blocks seem to have been extracted from a now shattered totality. Influenced notably by Mark Tobey, Clementi’s counterpoints and canons flow easily, but without arch or telos. They may, however, develop holes at certain points, as Clementi introduces foreign elements. Their sphericity transforms the music into a sonic object whose character is less temporal than spatial (lines ascend or descend only visually on the score). Its end is not defined a priori but results passively from the saturation that he creates: “The end of the piece should develop by its own force, by entropy, by saturation. At this moment, the composer becomes a spectator, who simply notes that the piece has finished, without directly intervening.”8 Death by hypertrophy.
After Variante A and Variante B (1963-1964, for choir plus orchestra and for thirty-six instruments, respectively9), Clementi’s informal period transitions into the third period known as “a-formal optical,” which extended from 1966 to 1970. This era, influenced by optical art and the paintings of Piero Dorazio and Victor Vasarely, reached its full expression in the Reticoli cycle (1966-1970…). The polyphony, in radical rejection of metronomic time, of articulation, or of anything that would be recognizable and memorable as such, generates a thick, compact continuum of strata, whose evolution listeners are incapable of following. Each voice, each line, is inexorably smothered and alienated, as is an individual in an administrative, bureaucratic society. Moving away from the static matterism of the preceding phase, contrapuntal and canonic structures persist in the optical phase. They continue to create not individualization but a chaos of indistinct elements.
Art and music die through saturation. So, you either have the courage to be quiet or you continue to do things … that express precisely the agony and dissolution of the created object. There is no contradiction between a pessimistic, or apocalyptic, vision of the future of art, and the rigor of carefully assembling notes together, a desire to continue a precious musical craft.10
A negative music exasperates, dissolving concept and rationality, but with the means of the ratio. Influenced by Adorno, Clementi’s craft-like approach denies everything except itself. Otherwise, it would amount to absolute nihilism.
With the tumult of the 1970s, Clementi reintroduces diatonicism into his counterpoint and canons.11 This fourth phase, beginning from 1970, is based upon five types of material:
a) motifs that are the musical transcription of the names of Bach (B-flat, A, C, B-natural)12 and other composers (Berio, Cage, Maderna, Schnebel, Petrassi, Togni, Webern…) or performers (Roberto Fabbricciani, Georg Moench…). The works’ titles reveal this motif in capital letters, as in GiAn(ca)rlo CArDini (1978, a seven-voice canon for prepared piano), which uses the tones G, A, C, A, D. Some of the letters in the names are omitted for musical reasons;
b) abstract, neutral scales (such as hexachords, “zig-zags,” and others), re-conceived based on Classical-Romantic principals, that split the ambitus of the work into sections, symmetrical or otherwise, and into dynamics;
c) quotations from old masters such as Dufay, Mouton, Michelangelo Galilei, Purcell, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Offenbach, Johann Strauss, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, De Falla, Stravinsky, Gershwin, and others, right up to the jazz of Thelonious Monk;
d) anonymous themes, such as the Seikilos epitaph, Gregorian chants, troubadour songs, or even Swedish folk melodies;
e) chorales and titles that allude to musical genres from the past: madrigal, concerto, intermezzo, capriccio, scherzo, fantasia, passacaglia, impromptu, romanza, rhapsody… As Gianluigi Mattietti wrote about Clementi’s last period,
The choice of starting material, which in the last period becomes the piece’s theme, immediately represents a precise compositional act, because it brings into play melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic forces, which then determine the polyphonic content of the piece.13
From meaningful and well-loved found objects, nostalgic ruins of a once organic, utopian totality, Clementi generates a wealth of scores for a variety of forces, from solo pieces to large orchestral and vocal music.
The use of diatonicism does not change Clementi’s relationship to polyphony, which he still uses to make sound wefts. However, he lightens the texture, simplifies his counterpoints and canons, and reduces his use of mirror-like mensural forms. He described his tools: “Technique still contrapuntal and canonic: the diatonic module [is] a piece of the mosaic: [there are] fewer than twelve notes, but more possibilities for building with the four specular forms plus the same modules.”14 Those four base forms are the prime, retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion; in addition, there is transposition. Diatonic structures are not denatured by these mirrors: the inversion of a major chord is a minor chord, and vice versa. Only exceptionally does Clementi introduce chromaticism. His “polytonality,” moreover, is not harmonic, but contrapuntal. He thus coined the term polydiatonicism (polidiatonismo) to refer to chromaticism built up via counterpoint, where diatonic (or modal) structures are added and duration, intensity, and timbre vary gradually and imperceptibly. Clementi gradates these structures, revealing partially intelligible fragments of tonalities, melodies, and rhythms.
Densifications and rarefactions, in this case thicker or thinner textures, no longer affect only individual lines but also blocks of sound. This is notably the case in Komm süsser Tod (1983, for twelve instruments), where Clementi borrows the theme and continuo line from Bach’s religious lied in C minor, BWV 478, and introduces an intermediate voice. The result is a three-voice polyphony, mirrored in canon through the four fundamental transformations. In a similar way, he creates a canon of three canons in Romanza (1991, for piano and orchestra).
Starting with Intermezzo (1977, for fourteen wind instruments and prepared piano), the vertical polyphony of changing pitches and densities is doubled by a horizontal, temporal polyphony with systematic rallentandos. Slackening effects, created by rhythmic augmentation, denote extinction, underlined by diminuendos. Such a metamorphosis competes against the growing size of a sonic object. The metamorphosis is evident in the echo, out-of-phase repetition of themes or blocks of themes, and in the chimes, whose mechanical effect and nostalgic character Clementi highlights. The metamorphosis is also evident in the imperceptible deceleration, through metronomic values as much as through a play of mensural rhythms.
Clementi’s writing at times recalls the illusions and paradoxical architecture of Maurits Cornelis Escher, translated acoustically by systems of rotation, by imperceptible accelerations and decelerations, and especially by grids of elements that descend chromatically on the diagonal, while the line climbs horizontally. An example is Passacaglia (1988, for live and recorded flute), which is based on twelve borrowed fragments: four from Bach’s Sonata BWV 1030, four from Mozart’s Concerto K. 314, and four from Schubert’s Introduction and variations D. 820. The musicologist Gianluigi Mattietti established other parallels between Escher and Clementi after reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter.15 Among these parallels are rhythmic phase shifts, between a series of colors and a series of figures with a different rhythm, and translations, reflections, or rotations of figures, to which variable sizes can be attributed within a regular division of the plane.
To conclude, let us now comment upon two stage works from this fourth phase.
ES (1978-1980) is a rondeau in one act, whose title refers to the Freudian concept of id. The music recalls operetta, the waltzes of Johann Strauss, and light music, which Clementi considered, like Karl Klaus before him, as the most faithful imitation of reality. The work stars three feminine characters, in a distant echo of Baroque, if not Classical, opera: the secretary Tuni is gentle, childlike, and neurotic, a sort of Zerlina from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The artist Mina is passionate, hysterical, and cruel, in the image of Donna Elvira. And the housewife Rica is pretty, saccharine, and moody, a descendant of Donna Anna. Like Sisyphus, these women are prisoners to the absurd repetition of their daily lives, but also to their desires. Symbolized by a shadow or a silhouette, Don Giovanni is the absence toward which their futile expectations converge. The figure from Mozart takes on an air of Samuel Beckett’s Godot. Furthermore, each feminine character has two alter egos: “Three women, nine real reflections, and innumerable virtual reflections are rendered by a complex game of mirrors.”16 Their voices employ four types of emission: song, Sprechgesang, speech, and laughter. Musical material comes from Johann Crüger’s Lutheran chorus Jesu, meine Freude, which Clementi had earlier also used in Variazioni (197917), in Capriccio (1980), and in Collage 4 (Jesu, meine Freude) (1979-198018). In ES, each of the six verses forms the base for one of the six sections of the rondeau, which repeats the same structure six times: scene–dance–lullaby. The scenes gradually slow in a canonical continuum, and the lullabies are essentially static instrumental interludes. Adopting a stable tempo, the dances (valse brillante, polka, blues, slow waltz, galop, mazurka, march, tango, and swing) break with those models.
Clementi bases Carillon (1991-1993), opera in one act, upon a play by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Difficult Man. Over the course of an evening, Count Hans Karl Bühl, the nonchalant, somewhat deadpan but charming anti-hero, a mirror-image of Don Giovanni in ES, dialogues with Viennese socialites. Those six characters each have an alter ego, splitting the self and creating a new double: these are represented by twelve performers, six facing six others, like puppets. Each is associated with two instruments or groups of instruments, winds or strings, in an almost geometrical organization of the cast. As the piece unfolds, the text is reduced to a round of fragments and creates the illusion of a conversation full of ellipses. It reveals the vanity of the word, just as music refuses to be language, expression, communication, or articulated discourse. This music is based upon two parlor pieces: Souvenir by František Drdla and A Musical Snuffbox by Anatoly Lyadov (which Clementi had used earlier in Madrigale [1979], for prepared piano for four hands, with recorded glockenspiel and vibraphone, and in Concerto 2E2M [1982], for sixteen instruments). Carillon is a canon of canons, a polymetric layering of six canons in four parts and in unison. It thus involves twenty-four voices. The work introduces six sung dances, in pairs (two waltzes, a foxtrot + ragtime, and a tango + slow blues) connected by their tonalities (D-flat, A-flat, and G), and three interludes. The transitions are far less perceptible compared to the caesurae of ES.
These dramatic works provide visual, onstage evidence of Clementi’s circular, closed structures and sonic processes that remain simultaneously in perpetual movement and at tragic standstill.
Translated from the French by Ruth Oldham
1. Aldo CLEMENTI, “Commento alla propria musica” (1973), in Autobiografia della musica contemporanea (ed. Michela Mollia), Milan, Lerici, 1979, p. 73. ↩
2. Gianluigi MATTIETTI, “Canoni e figure: La produzione recente di Aldo Clementi,” in Canoni, figure, carillons: Itinerari della musica di Aldo Clementi (eds. M. R. de Luca and G. Seminara), Milan, Suvini Zerboni, 2008, p. 154. ↩
3. Aldo CLEMENTI, “Ideogrammi n. 1,” Notiziario: Aldo Clementi, Milan, Suvini Zerboni, 1983, p. 12. ↩
4. Collage 1961: Un’azione dell’arte di Achille Perilli e Aldo Clementi, Rome, Gangemi, 2005. ↩
5. Aldo CLEMENTI, “Alcune idee per un nuovo teatro musicale contemporaneo,” Il Verri, VIII/9 (1964), p. 63. ↩
6. Aldo CLEMENTI, “Commento alla propria musica,” p. 51. ↩
7. In Benedetto PASSANNANTI, “Clementi: Intervista,” Archivio: Musiche del XX secolo, 1 (1991), p. 72. ↩
8. Ibid., p. 70. ↩
9. A static, glacial mass of molto piano intensity, without the slightest crescendo or diminuendo, Variante A is for 144 musicians: seventy-two vocals and seventy-two instruments. These are divided into twelve groups of twelve, with anywhere from two to twelve of the groups performing at once. The vocalists sing the syllables of the Latin mass, reordered according to phonetic criteria. The duration of the work is indetermined, but its sixteen measures should last around one minute and be repeated at least twenty-three times. ↩
10. Cited in Renzo CRESTI, Aldo Clementi, Milan, Suvini Zerboni, 1990, p. 45. ↩
11. See Gianluigi MATTIETTI, Geometrie di musica: Il periodo diatonico di Aldo Clementi, Lucques, LIM, 2001. ↩
12. See the following works on the BACH motif: B.A.C.H. (1970, for piano), which initiates this fourth phase of Clementi’s work, Replica (1972, for harpsichord), Manualiter (1973, for organ), Esercizio (1975, for student violin, violin, and viola), Reticolo: 3 (1975, for three guitars), and Variazioni su B.A.C.H. (1984, for piano). ↩
13. MATTIETTI, Geometrie di musica, p. 9. ↩
14. Letter from Aldo Clementi to Antonino Titone, Rome, 8 October 1979. ↩
15. Douglas R. HOFSTADTER, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), Paris, Inter, 1985. ↩
16. Aldo CLEMENTI, “Ancora sul teatro musicale,” Musica/Realtà, 14 (1984), p. 161. ↩
17. For viola, in the circular canon for eight voices, two on each string (in normal arco and pizzicato). ↩
18. This piece treats the opposition between Catholicism and the Reformation. The chorale, performed by a double choir with sixteen parts (eight voices/vocals and eight brass instruments), collides with a tape of Gregorian chants borrowing from the eight ecclesiastic modes. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?