Giuseppe Chiari - Intervalli LP

Edition of 200. Alga Marghen presents the historical Intervalli by Giuseppe Chiari, a world premiere of the complete cycle of 12 Intervalli. Elegantly performed and recorded by Reinier Van Houdt, this timeless composition from 1950-56 anticipates Minimalism by a decade as well as Conceptual and Systems-Based Composition while intersecting the perspectives that would soon be developed by Fluxus, the group Chiari would join in 1962. Giuseppe Chiari's Intervalli for piano still retain the charm of a discovery, even when considered in the context of their historical perspective. Composed within a time frame that extends throughout the entire first half of the 1950s, they are striking for the precocity of their compositional conception based on a radical reduction of musical parameters on mathematical and rational grounds. One might also be surprised to discover that Chiari's early compositions follow such a rigorous logical approach in the organization of musical material, particularly in light of the subsequent direction his work took, which established him, within the Neo-Avant-Garde, as the most resolute and determined exponent of gestural music, a genre thus free from any dogma or structural constraints. In Intervalli, Chiari focuses on the idea of a rational "arrangement" of the sequence of sounds and/or their simultaneity through a more or less controlled system of repetitions of variants or invariants, defined by their interval features and duration. The systematic processes of limiting and repeating musical parameters are elements that, by analogy, later came to the fore with the birth of musical minimalism. It would, however, be a stretch to regard Chiari's Intervalli as a driving force that will have a direct impact on the emergence and establishment of this current. Whilst minimal music employs the systematic reduction of parameters and their repetition to guide unidirectional development as a gradual process, Chiari's Intervalli move towards an opposing concept that "explores the relationships between sounds without any temporal hierarchy" in order to achieve "music that strips succession of its discursive power." A clear indication of an objective, almost atomistic conception of sound, aimed at deconstructing its syntactic homologation. Hence its conceptual relevance, which cannot be equated with the canonical currents of minimalism: a nuance that would subsequently predispose Chiari to an informal openness towards the performative gesture. The Intervalli cycle thus marked Chiari's first point of arrival, but also a point of no return, save for the final decade of his creative career, when a still surprising new recourse to musical writing was mediated precisely by a gestural instinctiveness. This first edition of complete Intervalli also includes liner notes by Gabriele Bonomo as well as the reproduction of some of the pages from the original score.