Equinoziale
for augmented piano
year: 2021
duration: 9'10'' c.a.
dedicated to Maria Grazia Bellocchio.
première: 15 June 2021, Milano (ITA), performed by Maria Grazia Bellocchio.
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program notes:
For several years I have been interested in border things and in particular in temporal boundaries.
We’re generally used to confer on boundaries the characteristics of beginning or end, therefore moments like the equinox symbolically become the beginning of a season and the end of another. However, I think it is more interesting to think of these borderline moments as moments of time in their own right, with their own identity that brings the weight of past and at the same time they can potentially become something new. This possibility of becoming is for me extremely more fascinating than the definitive act of becoming, since it contains within itself the natural principles of active evolution, allowing us to glimpse the possible paths, like shadows of a thought that has finally been realized.
In the Devonian period an animal called "Tiktaalik" was the protagonist of the evolutionary passage of life from water to land, it was neither a fish nor an amphibian, but a "being in transition".
The piano in this piece, with its preparations and augmentations, is a living and organic instrument, a boundary instrument, which let glimpse the sonic possibilities of an evolutionary story.
Here the piano becomes an instrument-tiktaalik.