Oltretempo |
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2024
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Members
Gianmario Liuni: piano, electric piano Giulio Visibelli: (themes and solo): flute in C, soprano sax, tenor sax and baritone sax Giulio Visibelli (ensemble): (ensemble): flute in C, alto flute in G and bass flute; soprano sax, alto sax and tenor sax; bass clarinet Marco Ricci: electric bass Martino Malacrida: drums
Milano - December 2024 |
PRESENTATION |
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The heart of the project is a musical reflection on time and its purpose or destiny beyond time. December 2024 |
A recap and elaboration of the liner notes on the reasons for the album
Taken from the book A-head Epifanie del divenire by Cecilia Scaglioni and Paolo Tenconi (published by OhM, Milan, 2026)
Oltretempo [Beyond-Time] is a concept album, i.e., a themed project, and the chosen theme is time.
As I proceeded with the compositions, I noticed that the theme of time always appeared almost unexpectedly when I was choosing their titles. Therefore, I decided to structure the entire project around this subject.
I'd like to open a parenthesis on titles in music. Personally, I would just prefer to use a number (Movement 1,2,3 etc., or something else), but I know that the title is a good suggestion for the listener, who can decide whether to keep it as a guide for understanding the music or abandon it for other images, concepts or suggestions.
Indeed, musical aesthetics clearly explains how a piece of music is the universal essence of an emotional experience, which, being universal, can be applied to multiple tangible or objective correlations (to put it in Eliot and Montale's terms).
I therefore focused on time as the theme with its cyclical sequence and linear flow, its flux and permanence, which is always subjective time and consequently based on memory and expectation.
At the beginning of my Liner Notes, I chose a quote from T.S. Eliot that I include here:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is irredeemable.
(T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, I)
In Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot left us an unsurpassed poetic meditation on time and its relationship with the eternal and therefore with time as a possibility of redemption for man.
Oltretempo is also the title track that defines the perimeter of the thought behind the project.
It is the existential gamble to believe or not, and in what way it changes the destination and meaning given to one's life.
If, recalling the great and beloved J.L. Borges, time often winds in unfathomable labyrinths, beyond-time is both our destination and hope, the Ariadne's thread of our liberation.
But, Oltretempo is not only interpreted in the sense of "beyond time", with an eschatological perspective, but also as the eternal, immanent within time. The eternal, here and now, if we want it, seek it, and recognize it, gives us the purpose that we nostalgically feel is missing, unless we are "distracted by distraction from distraction" (Eliot).
I Cavalli del tempo [The Horses of Time] is the title of the first piece in the Oltretempo project, and it is the literal translation of the title of the poem by Jules Supervielle (1884 -1960) - Les chevaux du temps - which I include below:
The Horses of Time
When the horses of time stop at my door
I always hesitate a little to watch them drink
Since it is with my blood that they quench their thirst.
They turn towards my face a grateful eye
While their long draughts fill me with weakness
And leave me so weary, so lonely and disappointed
That a fleeting night invades my eyelids
And I must suddenly rebuild my strength
So that on a day when the thirsty team might come
I may still be alive and able to slake their thirst.
The music expresses the impetuous and exhausting - and here, even blood-draining – rush towards the future, thirsting for meaning. But we must "rebuild our strength" so that time can drink in the nourishment of our blood, the symbol of life. Our commitment will give meaning to the thirsty gallop of time.
Il Tempo Edace [Edacious Time] is the subtitle of Cesare Cavalleri's biographical essay: Un Incontro [An Encounter] (Ezra Pound, Venice, March 29, 1971), which is part of the "Sintomi di un contesto" [Symptoms of a Context] collection (Milan, publisher Mimesis, 2019).
The image of time that devours and bites is a mirror image of the drinking horse in the previous composition with which I mentally associate it, and the mood of the composition is, in itself, explanatory.
The composition is based on a triple meter of 6/4 + 6/4 time that alternates with 5/4 + 5/4 time. During the improvisations, 12/4 time alternates regularly with 10/4 time, generating a hypothetical hendecasyllable (11/2).
Such a complex meter inevitably pushes the improviser and rhythm section towards impervious territories beyond any automatism.
Memorie Lontane [Distant Memories] is dedicated to recollection. Human time does not exist without expectation of the future and memory of the past.
Neuroscience says that nothing of what we experience is forgotten; we just need the right connections to retrieve it in the brain.
Psychology teaches us that we less likely to forget negative experiences than positive ones. Is that because we are perhaps unable to pay attention to the wonders and gifts of the present?
In any case, memory is connected to the heart: what we love is what we remember. But what, or rather who, do we really love?
Spring in Town, Late Summer Waltz, Autumn Cold Red and Winter Tree are the four seasons, representing the circularity of life, as necessary as day and night. It is a fixed point in contrast to the linearity and flow of Heraclitus' river.
Spring in Town is the vitality of springtime associated with the vitality of our great metropolis Milan.
Late Summer Waltz, a waltz in 3/4 time with a vaguely Latin flavor, is both the feeling of loss for an intense season and deep love that is experienced with regret and/or in patient expectation for its return after much time.
The image that guided me was that of an outdoor dance at sunset at the end of summer that already anticipates the coolness of autumn.
Autumn Cold Red and Winter Tree follow images: the first is the color of autumn leaves and the second is a bare tree surrounded by snow.
These two compositions are included in the second part of the project that pays homage to Philip Glass, the great composer from Baltimore; both are in fact preceded (as quotations) and inspired by two of his Etudes for Piano.
Il Tempo della Grazia [The Time of Grace] is a jazz ballad. With a classical introduction and references to Philip Glass, it sweetly conveys the new era of Grace.
For God shows himself with gentle sweetness: After the fire came the whisper of a light breeze. When Elijah heard it, he covered his face with his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. (1 Kings 19:12–13).
The coming of the Lord of Time, Jesus Christ, mysteriously divides time into a before and after him. The first is the Il Tempo della Pazienza [Time of Patience], a somber piece for solo piano in the last section of the work, and the after is Il Tempo della Grazia.
Il Tempo della Grazia is inspired by Verse 15 in Chapter 5 of St. Paul's Letter to the Romans: But the gift is not like the transgression. For if by that one person’s transgression the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one person Jesus Christ overflow for the many!
Evidently, the time of each of us is always - and can only be - shared and participatory, informed by the experience of others.
The beloved who loves me makes me aware of my specific identity in relationship to his or hers. It makes me aware of my strengths and limitations. It frees me from narcissistic omnipotence, giving me the treasure of my own existence.
From these premises, with my wife Tiziana in mind, comes Nel tuo è il mio tempo [My Time Within Yours], where I happily hum the melody along with the sax.
Oltretempo is the title track, and the opening considerations apply to this piece.
From a compositional perspective, the piece is punctuated by the accompaniment of a large woodwind section (2 Flutes in C, Alto Flute, Bass Flute and Bass Clarinet), whose music pays homage to the iterative writing process of Philip Glass.
Furthermore, the theme of this piece is divided into two sections: the first anticipates the central theme of the following composition for solo piano Time's Labyrinths.
The four compositions - Time's Labyrinths, Il Tempo della Pazienza [Time of Patience], Eraclito [Heraclitus], and Il Dono del Tempo [The Gift of Time] for solo piano - are inspired by and pay homage to my beloved Philip Glass, also through the use of some of the piano techniques that most distinguish him.
Time's Labyrinths is inspired by the dark and unfathomable existential labyrinths of J.L. Borges:
“I want to give thanks to the divine labyrinth of causes and effects." (Another Poem of the Gifts, from “The Other, the Same”, 1964)
Ultimately, we must accept that the path to our goals is not always straight. Life throws us unexpected obstacles: you have to turn right, then left, then curve around and go back and then forward again. Time passes and, in the end, we've drawn a labyrinth on the ground that, perhaps through grace alone, allows us to reach or destination.
Il Tempo della Pazienza [The Time of Patience] refers to Il Tempo della Grazia [The Time of Grace] and Verse 26, Chapter 3, of St. Paul's Letter to the Romans (Trans. CEI 1974). It is the time before the coming of Christ the Savior, but with patience, from the latin “pati”, we must understand the suffering of God faced with the rejection of mankind and the suffering of the Father for the distancing and loss of his Son, which leads him to "give his only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life" (Jn 3:16).
The poem of the same name by J.L. Borges, Heraclitus (“The Iron Coin”, 1976) inspired the composition Eraclito, which brings us back to the well-known observation of time passing, leaving nothing unchanged. Borges always discovers the human side (with which he identifies) of every philosopher, the origin, ultimately, of his philosophy.
The two-faced Janus watches over the river. Memory, the permanence of time within the soul, cannot forget a past love in Buenos Aires. Every poem challenges the irreversibility of time.
Heráclitus
Heráclitus is walking in the evening stillness
Of Ephesus. The evening has just brought him,
Without his having consciously decided,
Along the green bank of a river
Whose name and distinct course he doesn't know.
There is a stone Janus, and some poplars.
Eying himself in the fast flowing mirror
He brings to light and polishes the sentence
That the many generations of men
Will not let die. We hear his voice pronouncing:
Nobody can step twice into the waters
Of the same river. He pauses. And he feels,
With the astonishment of a sacred horror,
That he is both a river and a fleeing.
He wishes to retrieve, somehow, that morning
The previous night and evening; But he cannot.
He speaks the sentence once again. He sees it
Printed clearly in its future letters
On one of the printed pages of Burnet.
Heráclitus does not know Greek. And Janus,
the god of doorways, is a Latin god.
Heráclitus has no present and no past.
He is merely an artifice dreamed up
By a gray man on the banks of the Red Cedar,
A man who weaves hendecasyllables
So as not to dwell too much on Buenos Aires
And its beloved faces. One is missing.
But after three compositions that linger on a more painful reflection, I wanted to definitively clarify, with Il Dono del Tempo [The Gift of Time], that the time granted us is always, no matter what, a gift from beginning to end and, with T. S. Eliot, offers the possibility of redemption.
In conclusion, here is another quote from Borges:
I want to give thanks
[…]
For music, a mysterious form of time.
(Another Poem of the Gifts, from “The Other, the Same”, 1964)
Gianmario Liuni