Radio Papesse

In this weekly program of A Classical Education we lend the ears to and we invite you to listen to italian composer Silvia Borzelli’s pieces. Here it is our streaming schedule:

Tuesday, June 14th
11AM
Sur-itinéraire (2008-09) | Played by Nieuw ensemble
Own pace (amnesia 3) (2011) | Performed by Co2
6PM
Stalagma - Anna Politkovskaja in memoriam (2007) | Played by Emanuele Torquati
Amnesìa del paesaggio (2010) | Performed by ASKO/Schönberg ensemble
Verso amnesìa (2010) | Performed by Romain Dhainaut

Thursday, June 16th 11AM
Stalagma - Anna Politkovskaja in memoriam (2007) | Played by Emanuele Torquati
Amnesìa del paesaggio (2010) | Performed by ASKO/Schönberg ensemble 
Verso amnesìa (2010) | Performed by Romain Dhainaut
6PM
Sur-itinéraire (2008-09) | Played by Nieuw ensemble
Own pace (amnesia 3) (2011) | Performed by Co2

Composer's Notes - Amnesia Cycle

Without oblivion, memory would be over saturaded. With the compositions of the Amnesia Cycle I'm interested in exploring or representing the idea of memory loss, transformation and/or its re-codification.
The pieces are structured so that repetition - in its medio-format - could work as a repeated pattern but each time with different obstacles and interruptions; what makes them different one from another is the musical or extra-musical idea of forgotten materia and its ways of opposing or longing for amnesia.
 

Own pace (amnesia 3), 2011
Pace in English means rhythm, step, velocity, stride.
Flute and bass proceed together continuously coding and recoding a basic material now gone forgotten.
I'm interested in this process of re-codification: reworking on the fragment that has not been lost, its reduction or explosion. Differently form an old deteriorated manuscript in which the recoding process would help completing/recontructing the missing data, in Own pace the reconstruction of what's missing is not important, what matters is the direction towards it: the two instruments proceed letting their pace be both their journey and destination.

Amnesìa del paesaggio, 2010 
The english translation for amnesia del paesaggio is landscape amnesia. It's a concept used in environmental history to describe a phenomenon (or disease) that can affect human societies and in particular modern societies, who lack a collective memory of well-known landscapes and environments with the passage of time. This phenomenon is due to a sort of creeping normalcy, a gradual change deforming the identity (and sometimes dignity) of a landscape.
I was especially struck by this phenomenon and my intention was to focus on this idea of amnesia in music; I tried to describe a sort of problematic recollection of memory through interruptions, repetitions and deviations of a specific musical landscape.
The use of the reverb unity, balanced with the natural reverberation of the room, is constantly present throughout the entire piece in order to create an arti?cial space, a redundant overstated depth.

Verso amnesìa (2010)
Verso amnesia literally means towards amnesia. In Italian, the word verso, may also have other several meanings as: a single metrical line in a poetic composition (verse); the significance of against, in contrast to something (versus).
Therefore, we can imagine the whole piece built around a verse, conceived towards and/or against something subject to amnesia.

Sur-itinéraire (2008-2009)
In this piece I imagined and described a route, an itinerary. The protagonist of this journey is a sort of musical character whom I have called ego. It presents itself at the beginning of the piece and its musical profile appears unstable, overabundant, but at the same time contemplative – almost stunned. It acts inside a sort of trajectory, musically characterized and recognizable. This trajectory will lead it, throughout the arc of the piece, into three distinct and contrasting places. I imagined them – the spaces - as formal/musical spaces, autonomous and not relational, functioning as mechanisms: they are spaces which are similar to those which the French anthropologist, Marc Augé, defines as non-places of the sur-modernité (hence the use of the prefix sur in the title of the piece). These spaces don't interact with the ego but simply hold it and they let it enter into their mechanism and function. They are “places of people without a place” but, at the same time, they are the places of our time, simple in their complexity which cannot be interpreted in only one way.
Inside them, the ego disappears only to resurface again, but every time changed, more aware. The last non-place is that one which, different from all the others, resembles the ego, which, passing through it, will end its journey. After a sort of explosion/implosion, the ego's profile will re-emerge, but this time with characteristics of a self; it will be intimate, gathered in and alone.
Musically, I wanted to work mainly on an idea of strong formal and linguistic counterpositions, in the juxtaposition of homorhythm and out of sync, pianissimo, breathy and squared, compact, repetition and difference.
The prefix sur, helps to define just this: an excess, in this case, of contrasts, of identities in the attempt, however, of not creating a mere disjunction but a complex continuity.

Stalagma - Anna Politkovskaja in memoriam,(2007)
The persistent falling down of a drop and its settling on the ground; its obsessed and cyclical representation as expression of a warning and a scanned representation of Time which tries to free himself from oblivion and silence.
This piece was born by the necessity to confront myself with the memory of Anna Politkovskaja (30 august 1958 –7 october 2006), with her words/actions and her murderer still unpunished; this is not a celebrative piece but rather a way to affirm and amplify her presence.