(2010) electroacoustic music based on a poem by Edoardo Firpo with an appendix by Edoardo De Giovanni [3’]
Premiered at Miso Music Portugal, Auditório Philippe Friedman, Lisboa, April 15th 2010
Commissioned by Miso Music Portugal
This work was commissioned by Miso Music Portugal Festival for its 25th birthday. It belongs to a Cadavre Exquis made up by 50 different composers.
There are some similarities between Genova and Portugal, among these the sound of the language.
Therefore my present is Edoardo De Giovanni (half Venetian, half Genoese) voice reading a poem in Genoese dialect written by Edoardo Firpo. Each declaimed verse is like a blow to the West, jumbling up 25 different frequency components I am filtering from a sound recording of Duarte Lobo Audivi vocem de caelo. This is a masterpiece of Portuguese Polyphony from the XVI Century and it is a six-voice setting of a verse and response for Lauds from the Office of the Dead.
Although Edoardo did not know it, he added to Firpo’s poem a “coda” which hints at the world that is still beyond “the Pillars of Hercules”: I am grateful to him.
Idillio
Quande in te lunghe séje là da stâe
veddo a farfalla gianca ch’a se posa
in sce-o fiore da-o gambo lungo e fin,
e l’aa ch’a ghe fa veja un pô a s’imbosa
comme a barchetta sott’a-o ponentin,
e se barcollan poi tutti doï
mentre da l’erba vegne un son sottï,
a muxica che sento a l’è tanto ata
che no çerco ciù ninte intorno a mi.
Edoardo Firpo
When, in the long summer evenings,
I see the white butterfly alighting
on the long and fine stemmed flower,
and her wing swells like a sail
on a small boat under the westerly breeze,
and both of them then slightly sway
while a thin sound comes out from the grass,
the music I hear is so loud
that I do not search anything around me anymore.