Do you notice a mistake?
Franco Donatoni’s catalogue, which consists of some two hundred scores written between 1950 and 2000, when he died, can be roughly divided into four stages. These can be distinguished both in terms of Donatoni’s aesthetic choices and in terms of the composer’s relationship with history: Donatoni’s path as a composer is characterized less by reflections on a given material than by his questioning of his position with regard to material that is already historical. This explains the scattered nature of his oeuvre, which bears witness to his changeable and highly diversified trajectory: “my personal history as a composer is an alternation between ‘separations’ and ‘unifications1’”.
Like many Italian composers of the early 1950s, Donatoni, a student of Gofredo Petrassi, was confronted with two dominant trends in music, incarnated by Stravinsky and Bartók, most notably, a few of whose central works made a particularly strong impression on the young composer (Fourth Quartet, Music for strings, percussion, and celesta, Sonata for 2 pianos and percussion). His progressive discovery of the Vienna School led Donatoni to begin with attempts at synthesis between Bartók and Webern: Composizione for piano (1954). Ligeti also remained strongly influenced by Bartók in his First quartet, and his approach is comparable to that of Donatoni in the sense that it translated a desire to shoulder the legacy of an earlier generation, ruptured only by the arrival of electronic music in his compositional repertoire, consecrated with Artikulation in 1957. It was that same year, in Darmstadt, and following his encounter with Bruno Maderna, that Donatoni actively stepped forward into the next phase in his work, which led him to disown in retrospect all that he had created during this period, destroying a number of his pieces – at least among his unpublished ones – that he found too conventional or too referential. It may be assumed that this attitude would influence Donatoni’s approach going forward, which specifically sought to wipe away or render illegible anything borrowed from other sources in his own music.
For Donatoni, learning a new way of thinking began with a short phase of “the craft of imitiation,” through the influence of Pierre Boulez’s Second Sonata (1948):Trois improvisations for piano (1957).
Abandoning this Boulez-inspired experiment, Donatoni turned toward the structuralism of Stockhausen’s Zeitmaße (1956), producing Serenata (1959), Movimento for harpsichord and nine instruments, and Strophes for orchestra (1960). Gruppen (written by Stockhausen in 1957) then led Donatoni to distance himself from intervallic punctualism in order to move toward writing in “sound clusters”, already showing the attention to virtuosity that would mark his entire oeuvre, derived from Stockhausen’s “gruppen”: For Grilly (1960). Finally, Doubles for harpsichord (1961), the brief work with which this period ends, corresponds to a first attempt to “disconnect” from the material which Per orchestra would soon use, thus auguring the shift into his third phase.
— 1962-1965: indeterminacy.
After a single experiment with tape music – Quartetto III (1962) – Donatoni’s work was influenced by several other artists, including John Cage, who was highly influential in Italy at that time, although Donatoni would later adopt a more severe attitude toward the American composer:
“The Cagean experience is the negation of composition (and not composing negative music) just as death is not an experience that one can feel while living. To be Cagean, it is not necessary to study Cage’s work, it is only necessary to compose in a Cagean manner […] The difference between Cage and myself is that, for him, the work does not exist in and of itself, while for me, the work is always present, subtly, I have to try to conceive of its monolithic unity3”.
Even more than Cage, the influence of Beckett and above all of Kafka, as for Berio a few years earlier, were decisive in Donatoni’s evolution as a composer until 1972, leading to automatic processes that would rapidly become predominant: To Earle two.
“In The Castle or The Trial, there are certain reference points related to acoustics that were very important for him, and also certain disconnects between a gesture and its function […]. At that time, I was galvanized by the need for a kind of indeterminacy that was not Cage’s chance operations. I knew very well that indeterminacy was not an achievable goal, but an orientation. I tried to apply it to different parameters: pitch, duration, dynamics, and finally, formal parameters 4”.
Beginning with Puppenspiel I, “study for stage music” (1961), in which he introduced tertian chords among clusters, Donatoni’s negativism reached its peak with Per orchestra, which renounced traditional notation in favour of purely gestural notation: the primacy of gesture over language corresponded with the disconnect between gesture and material. It was in this sense that Donatoni spoke of the “suicide of the interval” in Puppenspiel I5, a negation that expresses itself in a rich, teeming orchestral mass. It is through the search for the “denaturing of performance techniques of Western structuralism, and an audible form in an elementary language” that Donatoni’s negativism is expressed: “a refusal of the possibility of recognizing, admitting, affirming any kind of principle6”.
From Per orchestra to Puppenspiel II (1965), experimenting with dissociating the material from the act of composing progressively led Donatoni to a “loss of substance”: with “eccentric heterogeneity of the formative activity with regard to the material7” in Quartetto IV — “Zrcadlo” (“mirror”); with a buried reference to Webern’s fourth Bagatelle in an indeterminate context; Babai for harpsichord (1964), which reuses the material of Doubles in a sarcastic decomposition of structuralism through indeterminacy based on 84 performance techniques; in Black and White and Asar (1964), the “systemization of an entire complex apparatus of anecdotal interventions, external to the musical substance, that determine its formal superstructure 8”.
Donatoni’s period of indeterminacy came to an end in 1964. Returning to traditional notation with pieces such as Divertimento II (1965), the composer attempted to “neutralize” musical substance by starting from its most unremarkable structure, a simple C major triad: Puppenspiel II (1965).
The crisis at which he ultimately arrived was marked by a year of complete silence and deep questioning in 1966, an anticipation of other periods of depression that punctuated the composer’s life.
— 1967-1972: a return to substance
“Each time, it was not about inventing, but transforming; and this need to transform, to transmute the musical substance, gave birth to techniques that were still founded in automatisms […]; the significance of automatism, of repetition, was just as great here as in cellular biology. I sought to advance experiments done in other fields that deal with the separation between the self and matter, and this duality still exists 9”.
After the attempt to reintegrate neutral musical substance – Puppenspiel II – the most characteristic examples of this appear in Donatoni’s work in the year 1967, Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck (“automatism and dissociation of the process/codifying result”), based on a fragment of Schoenberg’s Opus 23 N. 2 (process based on figuration and density within a dynamic ambitus set between pp and pppp10); and then, in Souvenir, (continuous “transformation of the musical substance”) based on 363 cells collected from Gruppen, with a nod to Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony op. 9 (15 instruments, ending in B major) 11, a process he would follow again in Orts (Souvenir n° 2, 1968). “The invention of process, which is often made up of automatisms acting on a group of statistically discernible events, is a necessity that complements the form that is alive in the work’s very frame: this process is not the work itself, it constitutes a phenomenon located outside of the phenomenon that results. The resulting phenomenon contains the functional characteristics specific to the process, and not the process itself 12”.
Donatoni reached the “limit” of negativity in Secondo Estratto, Doubles II, 1968-1972 (“multiplication by enlargement and automatic reduction”); in To Earle, To Earle two, and Black and White N. 2, which consists of “120 exercises for the ten fingers on any key, as if it were a rehearsal of the work and not a performance. The sounding result and the formal appearance are in large part indeterminate: the articulation imitates historical musical gestures, the compositional intent retreats and can be located in a conceptual gesture that precedes the form, but which does not find a final conclusion. Last, and perhaps somewhat wearily after numerous experiments, the focal point remains a laceration of composition, a renunciation of the compositional game 13”.
Donatoni’s reference to more or less recent works (from Schoenberg to his contemporaries) is more a matter of “pretext” – “pre-text” – since it is exclusively intended to nourish the labor of creating a work’s “pre-history.” The reference object, which in fact loses its meaning as a musical object – Donatoni speaks of “scrap” in reference to Souvenirs –, is deliberately erased; the act of depersonalizing accomplished at the beginning of the process means that these traits are no longer perceived as such; it is a kind of “murder of the origin.”
“I can affirm that the composition process varies considerably depending on the musical substance used, and that it is nearly impossible to repeat […]. The invention of the process can therefore be nothing other than a result of focusing on a substance that must be transformed, which is an integral part not of the form, but of the work […]. The ambiguity lies in the fact that the work is really where process and form intersect. Whereas form is a phenomenon that one observes in its definitive stasis, process is a dynamic phenomenon that precedes form 14”.
This “historiographical” stance with regard to composition, this manner of “writing music about music” of which Stravinsky is the undisputed champion, took place in the trend toward integration that characterized the music of the 1970s – Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck or Souvenirs must be examined in parallel with attempts to create collages of citations, “musical museums”, such as Musique pour les soupers du roi Ubu by Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1966), Hymnen by Stockhausen (1967), Heterogéneo by Luis De Pablo (1967-68), Sinfonia by Berio (1968), all the way to Ludwig Van by Kagel (1969).
Donatoni’s approach to composition (Substance-Form-Work) can therefore be seen as acting on the musical substance through various automatic processes – that constitute a phenomenon located outside the work itself – which at times leads him to prefer the title of “elaborator” to that of composer.
“Composing is like provoking opposing movements of fusion in a physical realm, of contact and then separation […]15”.
“Beginning in 1967, I gave up on ‘creating musical substance’ and limited myself more to ‘transforming different substances according to the personal habits of my craft’ […]. Right now, composing to me means inventing the process necessary to continuously transform the material 16”.
After 1972, the work Donatoni produced, according to Cresti, seemed to represent a return to a “positive” relationship with composition. The composer ended up drawing a distinction between automatic and mechanical processes: “The mechanical state corresponds to what happens as a result of an external action, according to the will of something outside the mechanism itself. Automatism, by contrast, corresponds to a process that can be controlled from within at any moment, according to the gesture of a will and a conscience that at each moment set all conditions 17”.
Thus, many scores from this period open with the ending of the previous work, such as Voci– “exercise for orchestra” (1972-1973), which is based exclusively on the B.A.C.H. notes from a passage in To Earle two – or Tema (1981), which uses Ruisseau sur l’escalier (1981) as its point of departure.
Starting in 1973, the progressive purification of the musical material can be seen in harmonic constructions based on an idée fixe of one note: Lied for thirteen instruments (“the process as self-generator of formal schemata”), Espressivo for solo oboe and orchestra, which is based on a proliferation around the note B, which acts as the generative core, Tema based on an A, or Jeux pour deux for harpsichord and positive organ (1973) on nine sounds (the letters of the name E. Chojnacka), and Spiri for ten instruments (1977) based on the composer’s name (F.A.C.D.).
In contrast to the preceding period, Donatoni had not adopted a new stance on material: “Toward the end of the sixties, I wanted to try out different, preformed materials, extracted from other compositions. This was a false stance: I imagined that the very condition of the material could give rise to something different. The most erroneous idea I had at that time was that form could be something immanent in material. So in Duo pour Bruno (1974-1975), I used two musical materials: one dynamic – a traditional song, [“La biondina in gondoleta,” which Bruno Maderna had woven into his Journal vénitien – and the other static – gestures 18”.
This (progressive) distancing from the way he had treated musical substance in the past marks a turning point in the evolution of Donatoni’s compositions in this period, which can be traced to the year 1976, and the piece Ash (“reducing control as a method with restrictive functions”), and then to the following year, with his Portrait (“amplification of multiplications on a single formalized musical substance”). In his play with the words ‘Constraint’ and ‘Contrition’ (which are near homonyms in Italian: Costrizione / Contrizione), Donatoni himself was defining this reversal: “If Constraint engendered submission to one Other than the Self, Contrition was born of submission to oneSelf as the Other […] Consciousness of being found and consciousness of losing coincide with the discovery of Self 19”.
Following the inner conflict that characterized Donatoni’s work in the seventies, of which Duo pour Bruno is one of the most representative examples, he revised his approach toward musical substance in favour of a search for invention that reintegrated the harmonic dimension, as in Spiri (ten instruments, 1977), and even more in Ruisseau sur l’escalier (cello and nineteen instruments, 1980) and Tema (twelve instruments, 1981), in which automatism became a pretext: it was in this (contradictory) relationship between the conscious and the unconscious that Donatoni succeeded in “repressing” all anteriority from the process. This voluntary amnesia made it possible to step back from automatism and to turn toward a richer inventiveness (offering us what is probably the best of his oeuvre), in the tension between these two poles: “My way of being is not dialectic but rather an alternation, an oscillation, in such a way that the one and the two repeating never produce a third term 20”.
Spiri seemed to embody a new preoccupation with perception based in repetition – Donatoni referred to a recurring but undeveloped “idée fixe” – which is sketched out by a clear and even seductive instrumental volubility: “Spiri’s ambiguity is linked to its success with the public, because objects in it are repeated, played an octave higher, flattering the audience’s weaknesses, without that being my intention. In this piece, I play on the ambiguity of invention and possession21”.
This is also a reflection of his penchant for forms based on the juxtaposition of panels, evident in the frequency of diptychs in his catalogue, starting with Ali (Due pezzi for solo viola, 1977), after which came Argot (violin), Nidi (piccolo) and Marches (harp, 1979), Clair (clarinet, 1980), Lame (cello) and Lem (double bass, 1982), Rima (piano, 1983), Omar (vibraphone, 1985), and Midi (flute, 1989), to name only the most representative pieces. Considering the same material from two different angles led Donatoni to explore combinations of works and instrumentations, while playing with alliterations: Lem was based on material from Lame; both were reworked in Ala (cello and double bass, 1983), then in Alamari (cello, double bass, and piano), which was based on Rima. This infinitely reflecting genealogy characterized many of his scores, among the most interesting that Donatoni produced during the last twenty years of his life.
This orientation gave rise to greater flexibility, even a new lyricism, which dovetailed with a two-fold interest in voice, which can be heard starting in his 1978 vocal trilogy – De près, …ed insieme bussarono, and Arie – or in Ultima sera (voice and five instruments, after Pessoa, 1980).
In the realm of opera, while Donatoni created Atem in 1984 by drawing together existing pieces, both whole-cloth and reworked, that were mostly orchestral (Sezioni, Per orchestra, Secondo Estratto, Doubles II, Voci, and Diario ’76), his opera Alfred, Alfred (1995) is based on a not-very-convincing representation of Donatoni himself in the silent role of a patient admitted to a hospital in a coma. More than a simple form of self-mockery, this opera was yet another representation of the composer’s depression and self-doubt, which he never hid22 – here, indeed, they took center stage.
Donatoni’s protean approach, expressed in a highly diverse body of work whose later part is the most fascinating, bears witness to his unceasing questioning, with ambiguities in his many orientations – which often contained a rejection of his recent past – all perfectly summed up in the subtitle of Antecedente X, a collection of his writings: “sulle difficoltà del comporre (“on the difficulty of composing”).
Do you notice a mistake?