Passato / Presente: Contemporary Sax & Organ Music – Lorenzo Ricchelli

The geometric concept of parallel is tied to the fascination of purity: a constant and immutable distance between two straight lines at every point.
Putting two objects in parallel is an operation which, logically, seems to be linear, simple and realizable in such a fashion that the geometrical definition is fully respected. However, an analysis made through a fixed-distance criterion and with no contact whatsoever loses its solidity when one faces the variable aural matter. By extending this reasoning, we can get to the study of the various proportions between the musical works, in a more general and proportioned sound parallelism.
Analogy and symmetry are words which approximate the value of agreement: a constant fusion and integration grounded on the exaltation of the reciprocal correspondences. Thanks to a bending of the intellect, then, the meaning becomes oriented towards an inclination to the encounter, and, more generally, to dialogue. Of course: each piece, on the one hand, maintains the signs of the time it belongs to, and, on the other, it expresses its own distinctive features. However, music has always been the expression of the world which produces it; its continuously evolving path is rooted precisely into the fertile ground of what preceded it, keeping the advantage of time past. This is therefore a balanced polyphony, moving between antiquity and modernity; a tortuous itinerary, articulated into intertwining relationships and links among the pieces, in order to highlight their common features, and finding the simple matrixes of their structural and formal development.
The passage from past to present, from the serene melancholy of what has been to the solid certainty of what now is, is realized also through the timbral variation in the instrumental destination, here applied to a non-original repertoire, with transcriptions from the orchestra to the organ, and from various wind instruments to the saxophone. If the use of other sources of sound becomes a valid strategy for recreating and evoking an ancient thought with modern means, the exploration of the sound goes beyond the boundary of distance and gets nearer to present-day, through the careful analysis of the phonic potential realized by composers of the twentieth and twenty-first century. In these works, experimentation is paired with a concrete and clear writing, moving between classical and contemporary forms, in a parallel dialogue with innovative freedom.