Andrea Vigani (1970)

Graffiti I-IV (1995)

for string quartet

  • General information
    • Composition date: 1995
    • Duration: 8 mn
    • Publisher: Tau Kay
Detailed formation
  • 1 violin, 1 second violin, 1 viola, 1 cello

Premiere information

  • Date: 1 November 1996
    Location:

    Pays-Bas, Amsterdam


    Performers:

    Utrecht String Quartet.

Program note

The score is written in a mixed notation in reference to its happening inside its time, it gives the performers a number of “sonorous cells” belonging to different types of musical syntax (from tonal chords to Jazz situations, from modal passages to typical structural music concatenations, etc.), inserted inside a “temporal grid” that is delimited by traditional bars with metronomical indications, or by indications in terms of seconds.

These “cells”, are taken out from their original historical / syntactical context and replaced into a new temporal dimension (J.Cage : “Contemporaneousness means that a unique thing that presents itself to us, no matter how far its origin is, aquires a full presence thanks to the rapresentation in the temporal “now”).
This new present temporal dimension - a new historical / syntactical context - isn’t subject to laws pertaining to any of the original syntaxes of the different cells (tonality, counterpoint, twelve-tone music, algorythmic systems, etc.) and neither to the sum of two or more of these wholes of regulations.
This new present temporal dimension can inted be componed with a Graffito, formed by forms and signs coming from different cultures, linked by a simple process of bringing them together.

We have therefore come to understand what the new syntax is, in which the “sonorous cells” are replaced : the Form.
Usually, language, grammar and and syntax “generate” the form, while, in this case, the form is the “rule” that regulates the syntax, and consequently, the relationship among the different “sonorous cells”.

At the beginning we have noticed that this piece - in reference to its happening inside its time - is written in a mixed notation, then we have a margin of “temporal fluctuation of sonorous events” and, conequently, a “formal fluctuation”.

Now as we have already seen, the form is the syntax of this piece; we however have also seen that the form is not “fixed, stable”, this way we have a real time construction for every performance, both for a new piece syntax an for a new form.

The performers will have to “reconstruct” (repaint) the “Graffiti” and underline, more or less, the way of alternating, of superimposing and of changing of the two main “musical situations” :
1) Bakground-surroundings-aura-uniform
2) Elements set on different musical levels.

In this way the performers will recreate an emotional-temporal-remembrances-experiences-contaminations of the two past main “musical situations” (iconography) will form a present new “musical situation / emotional state”.

Andrea Vigani