“Forma formans”. An Investigation Into The Forms Of Time In Francesco Filidei’s Music

The dimension of time in Filidei’s poetic horizon is strongly interconnected with that of the sound as it is only through the life of sound articulated in a birth, a growth and a death that we can experience the passing of time. The musical form is shaped accordingly as teleological: every instant germinates from the observation of the instant that preceded it, in a continuum of instants that accumulate in the listener’s memory and with their repetitive nature prepare the appropriate context for the introduction of difference. Filidei’s compositional technique is based on inner listening and improvisation of specific musical and formal gestures that can be experienced in their primordial, physical, and ritual dimensions. Two perspectives have been adopted in this research to examine the evolution of Filidei’s compositional language, from the early works to the works from 2000s. The first perspective focuses on the “skeleton of time” and investigates (on the example of Toccata for piano) the relationship between the simple gesture identified by the process of producing a sound and the structure-gesture identified as a complex universe of single gestures merged in a more complex event from both spectral and temporal point of view. The second perspective investigates the “colour of time” expressed through harmonic and spectral dimensions of works composed in the late 2000s, such as Concertino d’autunno or Ogni gesto d’amore. Here a new technology for the organisation of musical time is set up consisting of the articulation of the global form through sections each corresponding to a note on the chromatic scale. The system does not affect Filidei’s modus operandi, which always remains linked to the writing of the instant after the instant, experiencing the need for the gesture towards transformation. Still, this new “object” which is the scale, gives the possibility to conceive and organise much broader architectures in time, as the analysis of Ogni gesto d’amore illustrates.