« indietro
Our life’s journey bristles with sounds.
Sounds of silence.
Sounds of loneliness.
Phantoms of unvoiced, ill-formed fears.
Deafening, hushed interior ringing in the ears.
Mute terror, careering, pounding, roaring though the
body.
Sounds of the journey.
The crackle of brush.
The even procession along strange paths.
Dread for the known and the unknown,
as in a dream,
coagulated groans erupt:
«Living man or shade, Have pity!»
As the journey begins
the creator implores the powers of heaven to inspire:
«O Muse, O genius of art, O memory...»
Music without sound translates into
shapes on the silent pentagram,
appears as a hologram of silent words
sung into notes on the string,
transparent, seen, then heard.
A composer’s dream:
To have music handed him by the creator of words.
Dante’s Hell: a composer’s heaven.
Atmospheres of day and night.
Nature’s noises, humanity’s hum and moan.
Infernal fires and stars of heaven.
The music of the spheres.
Translated words of il miglior fabbro –
From Dante to Pinsky,
through visions of Scanlan, n
ewly sung by Morgenstern –
Realize
A composer’s dream.
The opening music on the page refers to Robert Pinsky’s Canto I, ll. 2-5 : «To tell / about those woods is hard - so tangled and rough/ And savage that thinking of it now, I feel/ The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.» This snippet of the very opening music of the suite is quiet, but terror-ridden with its agitated tremolos, embodying at once the unsettling chromatic intervals associated with my Dante Theme, and the almost palpable fear coursing through the artist’s body. This leads immediately to Dante’s invocation in Canto II, ll. 6-9: «O Muses, O genius of art, O memory whose merit // Has inscribed inwardly those things I saw - / Help me fulfill the perfection of your nature.» Dante’s words are an emotional outpouring, almost song-like, imploring the ancient gods of the arts for the inspiration to tackle such a difficult task. That spontaneous invocation summoned for me song-like, hyper-emotional, deliberately tonal musical phrases. These are but two examples of my ‘translations’ of Dante/Pinsky into music. My written notes refer autobiographically and in a general way to the ease with which I was able to respond musically to the dramatic/poetic situations posed by the two poets, together with the guidance of director Robert Scanlan and the interpretive brilliance of violinist Gil Morgenstern.
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