As Far As The Eye Can See (2008)
Program notes
The first idea of the piece begun by collaborating the italian poet Elisa Biagini and by reading her long poem Gretel, o del perdersi [Gretel, getting lost]. The text is a sequence of fragments which rotates around a female figure who walks in a non-defined place and gets lost moving away in a circular spiral move. My fascination was not directly in the poetical image of the text, but rather in the quality of the language. The Biagini’s poetical world has a strong relation with body parts and natural substances; it is made of everyday words, which lead to a powerful metaphorical universe: one single word provokes multi-dimensional connections with the whole (with other words, other layers of the poetical discourse, other parts of the body).The four main elements (stone, wood, bone, leaf) evoked in the text, and the way they cross the entire poem, suggest immediately a division of the percussion instruments in four different groups. Their disposition on stage refers clearly to that division, as well as the imaginary spiral movement of the percussionist by playing all the instruments. In that way, the piece has its compositional central point in the creation of a ‘Polyphonic Macro-Instrument’ and in its unfolding on the stage-space. The electronic takes the role of an extension of the original sounds and it is mainly based on sound synthesis processes.
