Aldo Clementi, 1925 – 2011

Composer Aldo Clementi, the last representative of the historical Italian school along with figures such as Maderna, Berio, Nono, and Donatoni, died on March 3 at the age of 86.

Overcoming serialism and structuralism, Clementi developed a compositional methodology based on short fragments, often diatonic, sometimes historical, whose melodic significance, however, is cancelled out by a massive stratification in canonical form, with transpositions and metronomic variations, until they form a continuous flow of sound.

Here you can listen to the Fantasia su roBErto FABbriCiAni (1980/81), for flute and magnetic tape, based on a reduced material, a series composed of notes taken from the performer's name: Bb, E, F, A, Bb, C, A.

In this piece, one of two Clementi works on which I had the pleasure of collaborating by creating the electronic part, the flute, played live, emerges, discreetly, from a sonic magma created by the superposition of four fragments recorded by the flute and superimposed several times, via computer, with even microtonal transpositions.

Aldo Clementi – Fantasia su roBErto FABbriCiAni (1980/81), for flute and magnetic tape.
Roberto Fabbriciani, flute
Tape made by Mauro Graziani at the CSC Un. in Padua.

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