Invenzione/Analisi dell’invenzione. L’esperienza di una circolarità senza fine

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. Several examples, are given: the re-writing of analyzed passages in order to survey the discarded alternatives; the analysis of a Chopin’s prelude texture from which the idea of a piece for clarinets quartet comes out and, most important, the creation and development of the “space of returns”, a graphic-mathematical framework originally derived from the analysis of a Debussy’s piece that gradually becomes the tool able to master formal processes and their relative temporal strategies. The underlying philosophical approach is partially related with the Hermeneutics but mostly with Phenomenology that, through a metahistorical approach and the focus on the listening, allows the use of pre-linguistic categories that help passages of though from different and far contexts, and their transformation into ideas, ready to be transfigured and offered to creation.