Stasera

This guitar piece is based on the following short poem, written sometime around May 22, 1916, in the trenchs of the first World War, by a young soldier who would became later one of the most important italian poets of the XXth century, Giuseppe Ungaretti.

I don't know for sure if Ungaretti was at that time familiar with the traditional japanese literature, but for me this little poem, for its structure, the quality of the images it conveys and the general mood is very close to the traditional 'haiku', the seventeen sylabes japanese poem which flourished under the influence of Zen around the XIV century. I had been fascinated for years with those highly synthesized forms which, of course, I could only read in translation and, way back in the late seventies, I tried my hand in some kind of musical equivalent of them, coming up with a series of little pieces for flute, alto sax and piano.

This time, however, and under new language influences and necesities, I was interested not so much in conveying through the music the feeling, or the general mood of the poem, but in reflecting somehow, through the structure of the piece, the linguistic, semantic and, so to say, 'sonic' structure of it.
I began by simply counting the words, the letters, and trying to find some pattern, some kind of statistical indication of the way to follow; by this operation I learn, for instance, that the letter 'A' appears most frequently (13 times), and the letters 'C', 'D' and 'U' only once; also, that the poem can be written again just in numbers, as follows:

which gave me the series 11-10-7-6-3-2 (which I see now as an interesting intervalic set of 1-2-5-6-3 , but not in that moment!) and also the numbers 9 (words) and 54 (letters).

One very central feature that I began to see then was the axial function of the word "Stasera", also the title of the poem, dividing the whole in a very elegant relationship of 5:3 (G .S. , of course) and being the focal point on which converged the main two nouns and protagonists, so to say, of the drama: 'balaustrade' (passive), and 'melancholia' (active), being 'stasera' a kind of neuter field of interaction of the two precedent.

Also there is the fact that this word, being the apocopation of 'questa sera' (this afternoon) has a coloquial flavor which is missed in the translation; last but not least, being of seven letters immediately permeates it with all the properties (phanthastic or real) usually associated with that number, and also of its relation with nine (the total of words in the poem).
All those considerations made clear to me that the piece would be in seven sections and that this 'axial' element should be present, in some way or other, in each of that sections; having set, to some extent, these outlines, I began to work the details.

The first 'detail' I considered concerned pitches and durations, which I wanted to derive all from the letter/words pattern; I assumed that the most frequent letters should be assigned to 'easier pitches', which for me in the guitar could mean open strings. Also I assumed that these frequent pitches should be shorter in duration, to balance their most pervading presence. To avoid an absolute rigidity to this distribution, I assigned an intermediate duration to the most frequent pitches, represented by letters A,R and I; a very short duration (in general, grace note) to the medium-frequence presence pitches-represented by letters E, L, S, T and P-, trusted to the open strings in ascendent direction; and a longer duration to the most 'rarer' pitches, which carried in general the accidentals. Finally, in the assignation of the pitches I followed a rather bizarre procedure, beginning with the traditional lettering of the sounds (guided perhaps for the very beginning of the poem, B-A ..., which in musical terms is impregnated of tradition) and following after in a kind of mixed intuitive/random procedure; the outcome of all these manipulations is showed in the following example:

Once stablished this 'translation' principle, it only rested to write the piece (!?); the first section is pretty easy to follow in the score; after each 'word' come a rest of an eight note duration, and after each 'verse' a quarter note. There are two exception to that: between 'per/appoggiare' and 'la/mia' there are no rests at all; maybe I was a little upset with the repetitions of two ten-letters words and two three-letters words, so I just transformed them in two new units of 13 and 5 letters, new, refreshing numbers... ; dynamics and articulation were -I think- pretty much free, suggested by the shape of the phrases and other considerations relative to the content; almost the same must be said concerning the register choice, only that here the repetition o£ the same note, in general, automaticaly produced the register shift -see the A in the very beginning-

Now, this first phrase was my material, the thing I had to transform still six times before arrive to the double bar ...As I was confronted with seven units, one of each, -the fifth, the box called "Stasera"- I wanted to play a central role somehow everywhere, I considered it as a separate thing, and assigned to the remaining six 'boxes' the following series of numbers

1-4-2-8-5-7

which is the periodic series of decimals obtained by division of unity in seven.

The second phrase is constructed with the same durations of the units in phrase one, only that permutated in the order given by the multiplication of the above series by 2:

2-8-5-7-1-4

so the overall duration of the first 'box' of phrase two is the same as the third of phrase one, 19 thirty-seconds; the second is like the former fourth, 26 thirty seconds, and so on: the 'special box' is still in the same place, between the fourth and the fifth, but has suffered the substraction of one 32nd (the 'tambura' stroke).
In terms of pitch, the multiplication already operated suggested the transposition to the ascending major second, so Bb-A-F# is now C-B-G#, etc; the texture of the melodic line is replaced by long notes of the assigned durations with grace notes meant to 'using up' the remaining pitches and arrive exactly at the end of the sustained sound (not easy to play!)

Phrase three multiplies by 3 the series, so we now have:

4-2-8-5-gap-7-1

wich gives us the durations of the boxes in a new array filled now by chords, all separated by the same rest of quarter note; the gap is always in the same place, filled by the'Stasera' box, now decreased in one more 32nd. The pitch series has climbed one more second.

In the fourth phrase the series will be:

5-7-gap-1-4-2-8

and is notorious how the coincidence of an originally 'long box' with a new one of only two pitches creates big gaps of silence (see beginning of page three of the score).

The procedure goes on in a pretty consistent way, making exception, of course, of some deviations due to choice, distraction, or little auto-rebellions against the system, just for laziness, sportiveness or the half-belief that perfection is not an human atribute (cf.J.L. Borges); let's only say that the multiplication process is carefully finished and the transpositions -if we call the pitch-series of the first phrase '0'- are 07 for phrase 4, O8 for the fifth and O11 for the sixth.

As the multiplication process and the 'travel' around transpositions -some of them, not used, were not practicable for some reasons- was over, for the seventh section was necesary something new and, at the same time, recalling; in short, a kind of recapitulation. So, it began as a recap, but each time a pitch is going to be repeated we jump to the next transposition -in the same order as used in the former sections; the rests are now the durations of the original 'boxes' in its original order, too (1-4-2-8-5-7). Over this layout is overimposed a pattern of alternation of registem and dynamics based on the permutations of numbers one to four; in this example:

it is possible to compare the original "series" of section one with the one resulting of the 'transposition using transpositions' and the final one after the operation of dynamics and registers alteration -also is shown this last pattern of permutations of four elements-.

The last phrase of the piece, or "coda", is the presentation of the contents of the box 'Stasera' in each of the first six phrases -the seventh lacks the "gap"-, and the last two chords -permutations of the same word- are added 'for pure musical reasons' (?); being eight instead of nine makes me a little upset, now that I think of it. May be the missing "gap" in the recap, as mentioned above, should be balanced with an extra 'pure musically generated' event, which will add to the requiered nine.

Maybe ...I have to think it over!

J.G.N., December 1989.

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