OUVERTURE

The Centro Internazionale per la Ricerca Strumentale (CIRS) of Venice, lead by Claudio Ambrosini, has been the promoter of a widescale project for the integration and exchange of instrumental knowledge and techniques in different kinds of music since the early 90s. This activity - significantly entitled Ouverture alluding to the intention of opening far different areas to musical intersections - featured the participation of composers and instrumentalists of every nationality, coming from different backgrounds in the area of contemporary music (jazz, new world, progressive, etc). The composers were asked to write new works for the Ex Novo Ensemble together with one or two soloist hosts. The main purpose of the project was to create an interaction between musicians coming from different cultural and geographical areas, avoiding the mere collage of heterogeneous musical languages and the ”undifferentiated” improvisation. This interaction would be conducted and managed by the composer. It was made clear since the very beginning that the ordered scores would provide some written sections to be followed by the ensemble’s musicians, and other “open” parts sketched out for the soloist’s improvisation. The modality of interaction between the soloist and the instrumental ensemble was to be defined in accordance with the procedure expressly conceived by the composer, who was to choose the most appropriate kind of notation in the range of contemporary musical languages - graphic, symbolic notation - or the traditional musical notation. Last but not least, the ensemble’s director would play a leading role in the final realisation phase: by supervising the “live” co-ordination of each piece, balancing the different roles with his gestures, inviting the performers to go deep into their playing or to synthesise their interventions, suggesting new matching and mixtures, and so on.
This recording contains a first selection of the numerous works received, particularly those requiring the sax solo, played by the Venetian Pietro Tonolo. With his contribution to this enterprise, the Ex Novo Ensemble of Venice, by maintaining the same initial musician’s composition, will celebrate his almost twenty years of activity in contemporary music.

The opening piece was composed by Tommaso Vittorini (1955), composer, arranger and a well-known saxophonist of the Seventies, who formed and conducted one of the first big Italian jazz bands, “Il Grande Elenco dei Musicisti”; today he is the director of the Eliseo Big Band of Rome. Written for six instruments (flute, clarinet, violin, violoncello, marimba and piano) and solo sax, his Waycold is characterised by a fascinating melodic allure enriched by a continuous rhythmical ambivalence (the beat is 3/4 but the proceeding is quietly binary). In the composition there are two sections: one with the sax fusing with the other instruments, end the other where the soloist works out his improvisation on the basis provided by the composer.

The second work is of the pianist and composer, Giorgio Gaslini, whose poetic is based on “total music”: a language that holds inside the power “for the development of the potentialities of creative genius, and not a list of assurances about oneself or the world based on the reassembling and the repeating of statements”, as Giampiero Cane affirms. The name of the piece, Trio, recalls the group’s formation (piano, cello and percussion with the obvious addition of the saxophone) and the piece’s structure in three parts. The refined initial sonorities, floating in evocative indefiniteness, are then gathered in the final peremptory conclusion.

The author of the third piece is Corrado Pasquotti, composition teacher at the Conservatory of Venice. His compositions ham been performed in prestigious institutions (Ircam of Paris; Biennale of Venice, Rai of Rome, New York Lincoln Center, etc.). The score of Take five collage, for string trio, sax and drums soloists, is formed by two sections, overlapped at the moment of the performance. The first, played by violin, viola and cello is a without bars continuum that, cyclically repeated, composes the sonic background of the whole piece. The second one recalls the famous melody of saxophonist Paul Desmond’s Take Five, in a 5/4 meter, and is played by sax and drums. Rhythmical-melodic fragments of the original jazz composition are exchanged between the two soloists. The sax plays a free improvisation as well.

Realised in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts, Plus que la Plus que lente was been composed by John Rea (1944), professor of composition, theory and history of music at McGill University of Montreal. He has recently re-orchestrated the Wozzeck of Alban Berg for 21 instruments. The piece is written for six musicians (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion instruments and piano) and a soloist sax, and is subdivided into four sections bound by the soloist’s cadences. The first section (Scorrevole) is characterised by the rhythmical figures of flute, clarinet. violin and cello, which seem to get thicker (starting from a couple of quavers till two groups of four demisemiquavers each) against the soft sense of expansion produced by the metronomic slowing down. In the second section (Azzurreggiandosi), the beat turns into an omorhythmic pizzicato over which the soloist plays in a blues way “just like - explains the author - a musician would do if he were playing only for himself, after playing in front of the inattentive eyes and the absent ears of some bored hotel guests.”

Born in San Francisco, John Celona (1947) was a pupil of Onderdonk, Xenakis and Gaburo. He has played the tenor sax with Carlos Santana and Sun Ra; today, he teaches composition at the University of Victoria. His piece, Basilica Nuova, for six instruments and a solo tenor sax, is in a rondeau style (ABAC ect.): section A is formed by an instrumental tutti - characterised by tangled and insistent lines - and is alternated with other parts constituted by fewer instruments whose mixtures are always changing and whose sonorities are mainly softer. In this atmosphere, the solo contribution of the sax, though his improvising style, is nevertheless thoughtfully calibrated by the author in each section. The piece was written with the help of Timbre Space, a new Macintosh software for composition. The synthesis of sound is in real time and the orchestration was created by John Celona and John Wright. The title, referring to the electronic composition theory that aims to achieve an almost architectural dimension, is also a play upon words on the term ”bossa nova” and an homage to Venice: a place of amazing beauty and residence of the Ex Novo Ensemble that frames this last work with two free improvisations.