Anno 2022/1

A thirty-years experience as composer and teacher is the base for a number of considerations that intertwine the compositive research with some analytical techniques. At the core there are two ideas: the first is that an analysis should always start from a question on the sense of music and wonder what the heart of its invention is. The second is that an analysis is never neutral: it always offers an interpretation that brings with it, more or less clearly, a vision. If the analyst is a composer this vision is obviously influenced by his poetic, but the most interesting thing is the reverse relation, that is, in which way an analysis is able to become a powerful inspiration for composition.

The essay is divided into three parts mutually interrelated: two methodological sections and the central one of purely analytical nature. Preliminarily, the improvisational event has been transcribed through a retrospective score based on a transcription protocol (by software video-notation) in absolute durations, expressly elaborated by the author. On this basis, the musical analysis was conducted, aimed at detecting not only the intrinsic constructive aspects, but also the links between the formative criteria dependent on the compositional processes of the 20th century Western learned tradition and the audiotactile attitudes of the two musicians.

The new technologies, the spread of Internet and the social media and the resulting social and anthropological implications have undoubtedly influenced the processes of musical production and fruition, requiring a review also in the ways of observing them: recording and broadcasting media modify sound events ontology, providing a complementary and transversal perspective allowing them into the process of analysis both as a tool and as an object of investigation. This study explores some dynamics by comparing three versions of Matajola (a song coming from the oral tradition, area that is not at all free from these stresses) in the moment when the music making process takes place, the performance.

By working with materials and devices from the era of reproducibility (and often even with the “residues” of the cultural industry) hauntological music positions itself as a practice which is both expressive and “theoretical”. In this sense, it shares the strategy of art music, combined with specific elements that characterize the hauntological aural imprint. Starting from the conceptualization of the theme of hauntology in the context of postmodernism, the end of the avant gardes and the proliferation of nostalgia and retromania, this paper presents an analysis of musical hauntology, identifying both design aspects and process aspects employed in the creation of “ghostlike” sound works, in which multiple temporal levels are unraveled.