Works

Fernando Mencherini
Un giardino a mente vuota (1995)
for Harp and Tape

Editor: Edipan
1� Performance: Ass. culturale secondo maggio - Atelier Musicale del XX Secolo - Milano - Auditorium G. Di Vitto - 02/1996

The title of this piece is from John Cage (from Silence). In the beginning, it wasnt so much that I was thinking about the garden; I saw lots of kettles on the fire, all coming quickly to a boil. The harp part has an effervescence similar to that of boiling water: the sonic material lives constantly at the limit of an uncertain tepidness (in which it is very difficult to find well- defined unity and proprtion, essential qualities for a garden), that doesnít so much create indeterminacy but rather a certain ineffable, not placeable quality, because of the speed with which it moves.
This piece is like discovering a whole world of ideal relations, examining this world from very close up. Like a garden, it is alive in its continuous evolutions and transformations. In this sense, the work takes on a particularly sensitive unity: the innumerable guitars in the tape part seem to lack any weight, drawing ìsinuous geometries. If, on the one hand, the thin sound moves with little clarity, on the other hand, it insinuates itself much more efficiently in the physical world of the live harp, becoming thus the imaginary support of its mental vegetation. [The Brandeis CyberArts team would like to thank Mike Dixon for his help in translating this program note]