20th Century & 21st Century Fantasies And Romances, For Flute And Piano – Rita D’Arcangelo

Western Classical music has established an increasingly pronounced hiatus between “composition”, “performance” and “improvisation”. On the one hand, there is the “creator” of music, who writes down a score with instructions for performance; on the other, there is the player who realizes these instructions and actualizes the music. Improvisers share some features with composers and some with performers: they play their own music, but, generally speaking, this music is not written down beforehand, at least not with all details. However, this misleadingly simple scheme is highly deceptive. No composer, actually, writes down all details of a piece; no performer simply executes the instructions without a creative component; no improviser starts from scratch with no pre-established structure or reference. Thus, even in today’s very organized musical world, the boundaries between these three distinct figures are not as neat as one might imagine. Still, they are much clearer today than they were even in the recent past. For centuries, musicians in many “cultivated” and “popular” traditions around the world have intended the transmitted “music” (be it a tune, a harmonic or rhythmic scheme, or even a composed piece) as a creative stimulus rather than as a set of instructions. It was not just admissible, but rather necessary to intervene on that heritage with a carefully balanced mix of respect and innovation. A performer who simply played “the notes” received from tradition could be dismissed as unimaginative and arid; one who went too far from the established model could produce a music felt as unintelligible and nonsensical by his or her contemporaries.
Fantasy was prized as an appreciated value by listeners, as happens today with jazz improvisation and in many non-classical traditions. Not only it demonstrated the performer’s creative artistry; it also showed his or her technical accomplishment and knowledge of the structures of the musical language. Only those who master the finest nuances of a language can venture to create extemporaneous poetry in that language, and the same applies to music. Only those who are perfectly skilled in all of the trade secrets of instrumental technique, of harmony and counterpoint, may be really free to improvise without risking catastrophes.
Both performers and listeners, however, will feel on safer ground if there is a clear and known starting point, which may be – as said before – a known tune or harmonic scheme. For ages, the art of “diminution” grounded itself precisely on this principle: the notes of a tune were understood as markers of a musical space, and the space delimited by them could be “filled” in a variety of ways according to the performer/improviser’s skill and taste. This is the principle behind the Theme and Variations, but also behind many Fantasies and similar works.
This Da Vinci Classics album leads the listeners in the discovery of a largely unknown repertoire, and, particularly, of a style of making music which may seem to have disappeared from today’s “classical” music world, but – as will be seen and heard – is instead very much alive. The twentieth century mainstream classical music school saw an increasing tendency by the composers to over-determine their works; performers were gradually relegated to a role of mere executants of scores which left very little to their own creativity and freedom. By way of contrast, numerous composers in that century – and also today – cultivated a more old-fashioned “alliance” between creator and performer. Instead of seeing the player as an enemy which had to be subjugated, they wrote pieces in which performers could display all of their musical and technical skills, but also their own fantasy and inspiration.