Guido Baggiani
Fabio Cifariello Ciardi

Fabio Cifariello Ciardi was born in 1960, so, despite an already remarkable musical production, he would be entitled to be considered as a young composer.
But he seems, somehow, to elude this definition. If we consider for a moment the meanings involved by this term,we notice on the one hand, that the "young composer, by his very nature, has not yet entered "History" (a negative but reassuring circumstance) and on the other that he can guarantee for the good conscience of our being "Hic et Nunc", a certain innovative if not revolutionary trend. This scheme has been applicable for at least two thirds of our century. In the course of the last twenty five years a further semantic connotation has been added to the expression "young composer". Such an expression involves necessarily a scientific approach to the universe of sound. Science ensures a cognitive contribution to such an universe and so it can ensure it it to music itself. But placing and confining Cifariello Ciardi into this scheme would be doing him wrong.
We will begin by mentioning the fundamental starting point of the composers poetics not without warning the incautious reader that there is a great difference between poetics and work. The divergence of a work from the poetics which has generated it is always a sign of its vitality. We know it well:it is in the metaphorical beats between a project and its execution that there take shape vibratility, movement and even that motion towards "the time that will come" of each one of our creations.
Avowed target of Cifariello Ciardi's compositions is: "The play of memory".
More exactly we could say: The memory of music - the music of memory according to one of his essays, which is going to be published shortly.
Let us say, rudimentally for the moment, that Cifariello Ciardi's music makes expressly reference to an imaginary collective sound. An universal imaginary or supposed such, according to different gradations of probability.
In any case a life experience that belongs to us from the depths of our psyche on a preconscious plane.
Citations from musical history of our century? Apparently yes, actually (at least we believe it) no, not exactly. Even though each score enumerates with punctilious diligence the catalogue of the cited originals.
The literal citation, for its nature appears without veils, it asserts itself and it's an unequivocal sign of an expressive will held with steady hand by the composer who proposes it.
We don't demand from it the perception of a formal organicity in time.
It is not the case of this music, which we would rather define as being that main need of "sailing between Scylla and Charybdis" which has characterized, in various modalities, a great deal of the music of this century.
Risky sailing, where the message is continually in danger of suffocating in the smoke of an abstract code or of drowning into the mud of a concrete Kitch.
Let's open now, at random, one of Cifariello Ciardi's scores.
For instance: Metagramma, pantomime for 11 performers, composed in 1990.
The composer writes: "with the term metagramme we usually mean a puzzle in which are shown words of different meaning, that differ only for a vowel.
In this case my Metagramma is a kind of pantomime with the characters-instrument who have come to grips with four citations that differ from one another: ... only for one vowel.
The citations are: "Smoke in the water" of the Deep Purple of the most classical and saucy hard rock pieces, a theme from Tscaikovsky's Nutcracker, a theme by Duke Ellington, (thus still from a most popular jazz); and to conclude a piece from the famous tango "Jalousie".
Thus four citations very far from one another but refering to a sort of collective inconscious of almost planetary sedimentation. Their meeting point is the common intervallic skeleton formed by a descending fourth and an ascending third minor: (third major in the case of Jalousie:but in fact it is the vowel that changes) the game with its subtle misunderstandings, is repeated on the plane of durations and rhythms.
But what game?
Is it perhaps the one of Pierre MÈnard which, as Borges tells us, though it can be applied to a literal reconstruction of Don Quichotte, has reached opposed shores than those touched by Cervantes in the sixteenth century?
Pierre MÈnard was a fiction and could benefit from the terms of the Absolute.
Fabio Cifariello is a reality and must manage within the restricted spaces of the Hic et Nunc. "Here and now".
It is true: the themes used in Metagramma belong to our collective inconscious, but to reach it they may appear only after they have been cancelled, stripped, split, and any way offered by treachery, askew, almost asserting themselves through a mask that denies them at the very same moment at which it imposes them.
The composition is thus born on the basis of a careful and analytical decomposition.
The deconstruction is the basis of building, generating, making proliferate a sound material.
These themes, even though belonging to our memory, are deprived of their pregnancy and lead into a flow of sounds which even a careful ear would certainly not know how to decompose, how to perceive as a melodic profile or definable segment. These themes, on the whole, fit into another law of tensions and relaxations, of motions and stasis.
And only when this law has asserted itself as such, as essence of the work, we can, without fear of sinking into Kitsch, reveal the root from which it is born.
Not by chance in Metagramma music starts from zero and returns to zero. (We refer to the intervallic connotation). It starts from zero on a gong's indeterminate sound and returns to zero on the split fading away of an indistinct recollection from Jalousie's theme, lyng on a dark-grey indeterminate wave of a tam tam's sound.
The same theme, now entrusted to the oboe, dissolves and annihilates into a high register, it had appeared for the first time disguised in a cello's soft pizzicato in the low stop, at the end of a long proliferation of micro cells oriented with violence in a tensive vibration of registers, tones, and dynamics.
Someone says about our music: "the least result,with the greatest effort".
We accept this definition and we don't feel hurt by it. We propose it to Cifariello too and hope he doesn't mind.
And we remember that the wizard Don juan, so beloved also by those who have not had the chance to travel to Ixtlan, appreciated (so Castaneda tells us) the art of bowing to pick up pebbles of good fate, very small fragments but still revealing of our being; fragments set on our path to arouse an attention and a memory of our bond to the world.
In 1991-92 Cifariello Ciardi is in Paris to attend the Ircam's informatic music course.
A work for violin and electroacoustic support of diffusion into space will come out of it, and its title drawn from the renowned collection of short stories by Borges "Fictions" tells us clearly the composer's attitudes.
An attitude to (the) conjuring trick, where the musical objects are proposed and withdrawn from the listener in a continuos becoming of promises and frustrations.
Once more a navigation between Scylla and Charybdis where a flow occurs, a stream able almost magically of assuming (putting on) from time to time, maybe by surprise, aspects, profiles and images (pictures) already related to our memory.
The composer writes: each element is treated so, thanks to electronics, to move between two extremes: on one side a sound material clearly associable to the violin, on the other a material so transformed that it loses, for all, every violin connotation.
Of the same year are some works for instrument solo: particularly: Traces for bassoon and Other Traces for clarinet.
Of course we know that western music for instrument solo boasts a long tradition and is characterized by some constant aspects: among them in the foreground the play of a false polyphony, thus, somehow, the play of the perceptive cheat: a single source but more voices.
Otherwise said, if we allow ourselves a popular idiom, it is indeed the "game of the three cards" same that we can find in a suite for cello by Bach.
But if we refer that play to nowadays we find it laden with particular meanings.
Cifariello writes: "Altre Tracce (Other Traces) wants to explore two different kinds of virtual polyphony. The first refers to the effect of false polyphony thanks to which the listener has the impression he can follow two different lines... the other kind (polyphony of memories) refers to the wide utilization of melodic fragments which probably belong to the heritage of musical recollections of the average western listener.
The technique then is the one common to many solo compositions from the eighteenth century to nowadays; we are thinking of the sequence for violin by Berio, emblematic of many other works.
The writing provides an alternated distribution of pitches which are in a certain sense polarized around two different registers in such a way that our perception links together the elements which move within the same register Example: 

see notes in score.

The pitches are associated by the listener in two virtual lines.
To this conjuring trick is added, according to Cifariello's technique, and poetics another conjuring trick: the polyphony of memories which surface troughout the duration of the piece in a dreamlike dimension, uprooted, or almost from the possibility of a real presence capable of being "incisive on the plane of conscience". And yet, says the composer, this presence is there to strengthen our mnestic trails and our "gestalt" capabilities.
And here, in our opinion, we must mention another element which generally contributes to give shape to this game of concealing and displaying: the permanent temporal mobility.
The composer does not talk about it whereas instead he declares with meticulous scrupulousness all the crumbs of fragments of historic memory which he has used.
Temporal mobility: polyphony of durations? The fact is that the continuous oscillation between the comprehensible and inconprehensible passes through a programmatic instability of durations, possibly combined with a capricious alternance between fixity and mobility of registers.
In this strategy of provocation: let us say decomposing, disguising, recognizing, until we provoke what has already been said, put in a historical context, but without saying it, we recognize a common trait and a familiar feature of all the culture of our century.
The distance between adducing and transducing is the key of the problem.
To those who, like us, reproache him for an excess of literariness in the use of such a creative procedure, Cifariello answers: "but in my work memory is a means not an aesthetic goal, in other words: a means to activate in synergy with other force lines of formal order.
Then also in other compositions for instrument solo like Tracce for bassoon or Altre Tracce for clarinet we find a wide range of citations that can reach from jazz to Rossini's Barber of Seville, from Bossanova to a theme of a Mozart symphony theme.
We have said it at the beginning of these lines: Cifariello Ciardi's generation has towards music a very cognitive attitude in accordance with a paradigm borrowed from science.
The work the composer does on these segments makes them operate in the framework of our memory only at the fourth or fifth level at the border between conscious and inconscious.
The literal citation appears didactic to us, sometimes scholastic, sometimes hazardous, sometimes like a gauged exercise of pharmaceutical taste rather than an allegory of mythical order, that element which is so important in the musical sphere.
For the same purpose it might be enough to cite the reference system to which those fragments belong without going into the object that is didactically displayed.
We must admit however that indeed a certain didactic vocation has been the basis, of the music of our century which is committed to transmit, together with the message also the code, or better rather the latter than the former. 
The issue remains open.
We would then like to title this writing on Cifariello Ciardi's work: "usefulness and harm of historic citation for music". And may people debate over the citation: citating...

								Guido Baggiani 1994