Giochi della Mente - Mind games
"Tracce, giochi, finzioni" (traces, games, make-believe): the titles of each of the works by Fabio Cifariello Ciardi on this disk relate consistently and perhaps unintentionally, to the idea of absence, or rather, to the idea of a movement or a gesture which brings about the removal or erasure, (or simply the suspension) of a feeling, of a code, of a "thing".
Etymology also confirms this. The word "trace" in fact means "the remaining evidence of a state or of a fact", or the sign or indication, which is more or less decipherable, of something which is no longer there. In the same way, "game" comes from the formula (some would say "prayer") by which a real, concrete strategy becomes a "word", a symbol, or "something which stands in the place of something else". The word "make-believe" also easily relates to the meaning of "simulation", or in other words "making it seem that there is something which in reality is not there".
Cifariello Ciardi's compositions, rather than representing or describing a state of emptiness or lack, seem to describe a process, and in particular a dynamic, mobile movement which leads us, by way of a succession of subtractions from and approximations to "reality", to the formation of what we are led to think of as "mental images". These are images, icons which are made up by phenomena which in this case are essentially, though not exclusively, auditory and which are nevertheless constructed by the selective and regulative capacity of the "memory" and of the "continuative mechanisms" to which it is linked.
Obviously, every mental image, and also every sound image, as well as being the result of a complex series of selection and exclusion processes, has a well defined linguistic and compositional form. It therefore has, by its very nature, an immediate cognitive function. In other words, it is able to tell us not only what it is but also the process which has brought it from its origin, as well as being able to make us understand the "reality" which it describes.
If this is true (and the truth of this theory is the premise for what follows), then it is possible to formulate a convincing theory that the works on this disc contain, by implication, a sort of "catalogue" of processes which lead to the construction of many different forms of "sound image".
We know that in the experimentation process, but also in fact in everyday life, at least four different categories of "sound images" can be quite clearly identified.
First of all, consider those which we might define as "continuative sound images" - those images which remain inscribed upon the memory for a short time even after the sound has ended. They continue a melodic, rhythmic or tonal pattern even when there is a return to (relative) silence. Belonging to this category are some of those sound images which might superficially be defined as "quotations" but which in reality take the form, quite involuntarily, of a sort of double mnemonic "loop".
For example, the reference to the second subject of Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Flowers, which is quoted very obviously by the flute in Il Metagramma, is the result of a double mnemonic continuation. The first is the original form of the waltz as it appears in The Nutcracker Suite, while the second, which is closely linked and bound together with the first, stems from the new tonal form and the new sound context in which we have "rediscovered" it. From this "double exposition" we inevitably find a sort of "double estrangement" which is in fact the prevailing symbol of the piece which opens this disc.
However, not all quotations are, by right, continuative sound images. On the contrary, only literal quotations, at least from the melodic point of view, which emerge clearly and boldly from the music can, strictly speaking, be included in this category. This is something which is found quite rarely in the works of Cifariello Ciardi. On the other hand, in this category of sound quotations, we find rather more frequently those sound images which might be defined (on the basis of the research in the field of perception by A. Ahesen) as "eidetic sound images", namely images which we already have in our sound and acoustical make-up and which, to be understood, have no need for any particular type of external or contingent stimulation but only of a general musical understanding.
This is the case, for example, with the quoted fragments which appear in "Altre Tracce" and in "Tracce II". These have been subjected, so to speak, to a secondary elaboration.
The "Seguidilla" themes "stolen" from Bizet's Carmen, or "The Lady is a Tramp", or the "Radetsky March" never appear in their "literal" form, however elaborate that might be. On the contrary, they are dismantled, deconstructed and most importantly "filtered" using a series of sound figures consistent with the language and musical capability of the instrument which is being used at the time. For example, in "Altre Tracce", it is the notes played in the higher register of the clarinet and the trill and the sforzando in the lower register which become the true identifying points of the piece. In other words, the musical identity only becomes recognisable through the perception of a series of instrumental "properties" which we recognise independently of the contingent sound experience that we are experiencing.
Thus, in these works, we are taking part in a sort of two-part polyphonic game (it could be called a "two-part invention"), between the "familiar" and the "unfamiliar", in which the two lines continually cross over each other and merge together. In reality, the music we know (Mozart, Rossini, Bizet) is presented as being "unrecognisable" and is made recognisable only through its translation into the "familiar" language, though apparently never heard, of the clarinet, the bassoon and the double bass. In Tracce II, there is a doubling which produces a particularly interesting result when strains of a bossa nova by Jobim and a Duke Ellington song merge together, becoming perfectly unrecognisable, while at the same time in the lower register we hear a sharp, rasping, piercing melody which descends upon the "familiar music" with a cold, grim light, suddenly making it clear and transparent. There is a third category of sound image which plays an important role in this series of pieces.
This category relates to those images which we might described as "mnemonic" or relating to thought - those voluntary images which we recall to mind when we need to identify with a thought experience or a sound experience. For example, it would seem to be precisely this compositional process which has produced a work like Il Gioco delle Gabbie (The Cage Game) which is so deeply and inescapably influenced by the sound of the harpsichord. No precise names or works are woven into the theme in this particular case. Instead, it restricts itself to creating the external parameters- of an historical or aesthetic idea (perhaps there is also a visual or theatrical suggestion) - in this case, an antique pastoral scene, using colour and idioms which are close in form to 17th Century French music. The "early" stylistic forms, using harp and lute, are presented as dazzling bursts which explode and implode through a process of accumulation and saturation of the musical material. In this way the formal framework remains clear and elegant but becomes filled, so to speak, to the brim, with the dissonant clash of extraneous, jarring, uncompromisingly alien musical ideas, such as, for example, certain faintly jazz-like flourishes.
This layout is somewhat similar to what we find in Finzioni, where the presence of familiar music (Brahms, Dukas, Gershwin....) becomes no more than an indistinct background noise which is interspersed, complemented and contradicted by the continuous virtuoso violin solo. Here again, the historical parameter of this piece of 19th Century bravura, calmly lacking of any sort of improper expressive preoccupation, seems to remain miraculously intact. In fact, the sound material becomes progressively and inexorably denser (thanks also to the processing of artificial sounds), while the violin passage becomes increasingly shrill, sharp, more vitreous until the transcendental virtuoso ecstasy is frozen into a narrow "tunnel" of sound.
However, the sound images which are linked to the mental process at the most complex level are the so-called "imaginary images". This apparently tautological definition is, in fact, quite a clear one. These are images which have a truly "creative" form which we build up in certain "limited" circumstances.
These occur, for example, when the bounds of consciousness are particularly high or, on the other hand, the level of awareness is particularly low, as in the case of various states of wakefulness or indeed of dreaming. The sound images of the last work on this disc, Games, relate to this rich and boundless state. This time, "suggestions" of an imaginary, hidden scene are taken from the catalogue of imaginary sounds - footsteps, a cough, an opening door, then the burst of a rock concert, the jingling of a pinball machine, the cutting slashes of a metal whisk, hammers striking anvils, and still the solo cadenza of a double bass, the distortion of an electric guitar and finally, in conclusion, the footsteps, cough and door once again. The skeleton, the palimpsest of a piece of theatre of the absurd is thus performed, where the sound images, the sound icons are conceived as if in a dream, intent on denying what they seem to affirm. The concrete, material sounds of articles, of objects, of gestures do nothing but peremptorily declare that they are immaterial, non-existent, inescapably absent.
The sound references, the traces, games and make-believe which run through the compositions of Cifariello Ciardi, therefore have no goal, no destination, nor any secret route or hidden direction. They finally end up in a vast, complex, topography of sound images which synthesise, as in a controlled chemical reaction, the crucial, "catastrophic" experience of the act of listening with the active enzymes which produce rhythm, tonality, sound - in other words, synthesising sound molecules through the process of composition. In other words, they translate "sound objects" into "bodies of sound". And it is exactly this process of continuous and reciprocal conversion of the listening experience into the compositional experience which, in the last analysis, is the "earth and blood", the object and the practice in the musical thought of Fabio Cifariello Ciardi. It is an "endless metamorphosis" which Peter Handke, in his short poem "Transformations during the course of a day", which provide the text for the verses and images of Tracce IV, unintentionally describes with an image of miraculous precision: "how then I am observed through binoculars - I'm an object/Then someone trips over me and I become a body".

Guido Barbieri