BETWEEN THE RUINS OF THE MEMORY
[by Alessandro Zignani]
It’s the usual fight between space and time, that permeates the entire story of human civilization. On one hand, a wasted and “narrative” principle, that functions for balance, on the other, an attempt to bring the confusing voices of nature to a normative (a hierarchy of signs).
Since Flemish times, the musical counterpoint lives with this contradiction, with their black notes and ascending scales to indicate the return of the soul to God (“narrative” element, spacious) and, at the same time, building the music by tonal unions: the nucleus of the energy capable of concluding in their horizons the resonant tensions in the same time in which the stars join the planets around them.
The music of Enrico Francioni lives with this balance. Francioni is a double bass player: well, his idea of music comes from the depth of matter. He sees in the sounds their “germinative potential”: the underground flows of ideas that can come to expression or can remain larval. So that, we can define the music of Francioni like a joining of genetic studies. For Francioni the music has the privilege of being able to forget the man; it should be a simple element of link between sound and memory.
In fact, his compositions are almost all reflective, like an imaginative mirror that divides the structure in two sections, the second of which, backwards, reflects the same themes in the first.
Francioni has the same ironic understatement as his music, sly and subtle, wanting to introduce through his music the question of conscience.
For him, the conscience exists only after the sensation. It is a fictional response to self-made problems, and a creation of man’s self-examination. Besides every sensation, what other idea exist? In the music of Francioni the fundamental idea appears at the end, after that the way of the song, with his too human contradiction, between analytical clarity and sentiment, has completed its own circumnavigation around the fundaments of the bass. In this sense, the music of Francioni is a tribute to Romanticisme, characterized by “a looking back”, that appears, significantly, in epigraphic form in the middle of Brahms “Sonata n.3” for piano.
It’s a game of echoes: each theme calls to the mind of the composer, who is also the first listener, the memory of other themes. The second poetical intention of Francioni’s music is the symbiosis between “the sound of nature” and “the sound of memory”. There is a third intention: Mahler, in the first bars of his first symphony, prescribes that the violins’ harmonics resonate “wie ein Naturlaut”, “like the sounds of nature”. At the end of each civilization, nature becomes a private, intimate code of each artist.
The third millennium is opening with a shocking flood of nature’s nostalgia. For Francioni, the return to natural is like a return to the physiology of the instruments. There are composers who think of musical instruments only as “an occasion to play”, without considering their “anatomical” characteristics:
the violinist Schuppanzig lamented to Beethoven of the impracticality of certain passages of the “Grande Fuga”. Beethoven responded: “I don’t care about his violin”. That’s the more evident example.
As double bass player, Francioni has the attitude of listening to the personality of the instruments. His music is characterized by lyrical qualities inborn between the folds of narration. The theme is like a column of fire, capable of vaporizing the air to the extreme regions, where, vibrantly, it opens a spark of harmony that human ears cannot hear. Francioni is one of the few composers who exist today capable of representing through sounds the memory, without losing the appreciation of the metaphysical character of the instruments. For him, there is only the memory of things.
Between the space and time of the music, however, through the horizontal and the vertical, Francioni chooses a third perspective: the prism. The music of Francioni has an ulterior model – this time, literary – in this “poetry of ruins”, that is found in Eliot and Pound. Like Phlebas the Phoenician, the sailor, who “died for water”, celebrated by Eliot, Francioni lives the music like “liquid suspension”, room of memory in which the echoes shake in every directions.
Forgetfulness, the loss of self, reconquest of self…We are talking about Buddhist Zen: a spiritual dimension well known to who, like Francioni, when he composes, has the habit to lose himself in nature.
Francioni’s music teaches us to reach the state of new attention. For this, his music must be greeted with enthusiasm like greeting a new frontier.
Enrico Francioni is a composer, performer and teacher.
As a composer he is active in electroacoustic and
instrumental chamber music, while as a double bass player he is attracted to contemporary production.
He is the founder of the "Fernando Grillo Project" which takes care of the recovery and enhancement of the work of the Italian musician....more
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