Composers

He studied piano and composition at the Milan Conservatory, where later he taught composition. From 1958 to 1965 he took part in the Ferienkurse für neue Musik at Darmstadt. He spent the years from 1966 to 1970 in the United States, where he taught composition at the universities of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Washington (Seattle) and California (San Diego).
He is, as a composer, quite untypical, not only within the framework of Italian culture, but also in international terms, and he has been so ever since the 1950s and 60s. Some of the characteristic features of his work were already clear to audiences in those years of sound and fury, when Castiglioni followed a route utterly his own, avoiding the well-trodden paths of the period with alarming farsightedness. In fact Castiglioni anticipated choices and convictions which are only now gradually becoming clear. Musical considerations brought him to a point where the poetic result and the poetic force made a single, inevitable objective. His action was carried out with the stylishness that is both an existential and aesthetic trait in him: focusing on experiences of great significance, however distant, he has followed the most profound and challenging philosophy of the twentieth century. In the light of what we now know, it is quite incredible just how modern his position is, historically. An analysis of his scores makes it clear that his work has undergone a continuous process of evolution: a spirit of quest which has led him to alter aspects of his works, even quite recently. At the same time it is equally clear that his enormous output can be reduced to a single matrix, one that has never been contradicted or denied, but constantly explored in depth, examined and developed right up to the most recent and extremely dense works. In my view, it is precisely in the pieces of these years that Castiglioni, in seeming to have proceeded to strip down a musical language that was already restrained, has succeeded in communicating all the linguistic and poetic stratification that was imperceptibly being accumulated in his work. If I in turn wished to 'accumulate' signs and indices of a creativity which space does not allow me to investigate here in detail, I would point to a delicacy of touch, to the elaborate filigree, to the importance of timbre used as a structural element, and to the sometimes aphoristic writing of works like Movimento continuato for piano and 11 instruments (1959), Aprèslude for orchestra (1959), Tropi for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion (1959), Eine kleine Weihnachtmusik for chamber orchestra (1960), and Gyro for chorus and 9 instruments (1963). What is striking even in these early works is the beauty and attractiveness of the musical material - an attractiveness that is not contained in arabesques or decoration, but in the way the material is organised, with the basis of the laws and values of musical perception. Castiglioni has not considered himself to be above the lines of research which psychologists have pursued in recent decades. In fact we realise that music can and must be open to other areas of thought; it can and must become the vehicle and method of communication, as it always has been and cannot be otherwise. Castiglioni was one of the first of the avant-garde composers to understand that the material has its own voice, and he listened to it. Here we touch on one of the central points of his art: since Castiglioni considers humanity to be inseparable from nature, it stands to reason that in his work he does not take up positions a priori. This also accounts for the overwhelming, explicit attraction which mountain landscapes have for the composer, and in particular those of his beloved Trent. Castiglioni does not view nature in Romantic terms of the sublime, but rather as Goethe's macrocosm in which every living microcosm is reflected. His love for Webern, too, fits into an analogous aesthetic and moral concept. For Castiglioni, referring to nature is not a matter of contemplation or evasion, but a rigorous and totally involving undertaking. The promptings of psychology and phenomenological philosophy finds in his work an artistic clearness which synthesises the input from other areas of philosophy, as must be the case nowadays. Listening to the material's raison d'étre means above all understanding it, whether for its physical characteristics as we perceive them, or for its historic and linguistic facade. The religious texts and spiritual innocence, which are deliberately given prominence, conceal and contain an Enlightenment tradition which, by contrast, gives a fundamental role to the physical. In Veni Sancte Spiritus (1990) for soloists, chorus and or-chestra, the material is somewhat dispersed. The stress is on the horizontal dimension, a directionality of everchanging timbres which enfold, aurally, both the background and the lyrical snatches, with a very few instrumental sections superimposed. It is the body which perceives, and in so doing it cannot be separated from a world of objects or ideas which are to be considered as closed, static, and given. The body has purposes, and lives in a delicate relationship between the internal and the external. And if the tonal system (evoked explicitly in works like Ode for two pianos, wind and percussion, and Figure for voice and orchestra) is only one of the possible meeting-points between man and nature, this implies no conditions to the discovery and invention of others. But they must be equally deferential, involved and embedded in a flow of perception that cannot be manipulated at will. Besides, it is not possible to divide processes of structural organisation from assimilative processes which historically have been sown in us, as Castiglioni demonstrates in Consonante for flute and chamber ensemble (1962), Synchronie for orchestra (1963) and the Figure (1965) and Ode (1966) which have already been referred to. The human faculty of perception comes to the fore: musical parameters are not something abstract, conventional and arbitrary. The rules of structure refuse to submit to the idea of a system of signs complete in itself. It is precisely by respecting the phenomena bequeathed by science and history that Castiglioni manages to achieve atemporality: it is not in the least static, but gives rise, after a process of refinement and negation, to ethical and aesthetic judgments which both incorporate nature and history and bring about their renewal. In Cronaca del Ducato di Urbino for six percussionists, from 1991, the speed of the contrapuntal texture creates an active and ever-changing surface. The lightness of the pin-point sounds is conveyed in a sharply-defined timbre-image. Once again, the timbre is not recherché or unnatural, but so closely connected to the musical ideas that it defines their limits of perception, simply heard and put forward. Having regained its own physical nature, the music follows directions which encounter other directions, at the point where the work is able to unleash them, picking up symbolic, ethical, aesthetic and scientific elements on the way. The attractiveness and crystalline qualities of many of his works, lead, often with subtle irony, to the utopian body of an aesthetic and scientific concept where nature is not the ineffable, but the essence of our very existence. (I am thinking particularly of the last episode of Inverno in-ver for small orchestra, from 1973, entitled Il rumore non fa bene. Il bene non fa rumore - Noise does no good. Good makes no noise.) Besides, in Quodlibet (1965) from Figure, the soprano sings some splendid words from Thomas More's Utopia. More provided the starting point for the utopian tradition and many seventeenth-century alchemical and Rosicrucian texts derive from him. Again, in Dickinson-Lieder for soprano and piano (1977), Castiglioni shares with us his amazement at verses by Emily Dickinson; these are precisely those lines quoted by Calvino in his Lezioni Americane as examples of 'a lightening of language by which the meaning is conveyed in a tissue of words that is so weightless that the meaning eventually takes on the same rarefied consistency'. It is certainly not by chance that these lines lead to a point where perceptive values function and communication begins. From here music begins to expand, leaving behind the confines of a rigid system of signs and spreading its own metaphorical content out into infinity.I have spoken of dense experiences in connection with the most recent works. This might seem rather provocative, given the ever barer texture, genuinely reduced to the minimum, essential gestures which characterise them. But it is precisely here, having accumulated experiences that have never renounced the structural system of indi-vidual and group perception, that music moves towards tensions that are outside music, while remaining incredibly interiorised. On the brink of silence, in the childish, amusing patterns that adorn the score of Grüezi, written for a simple, poetic and bucolic oboe, or in the flute Romanzetta - it is here that the moral strength of irony has penetrated. The characteristics common to these recent works - their concision, aphoristic quality, tiny forms and their transparent counterpoint and unexpected finales (almost 'signature tunes' - go together to create a sort of surreal minimalism, as in the Sinfonia a due voci for double bass and contralto. Irony and innocence mark a decisive moment in the twentieth century, a moment of great beauty and emotion, prefigured by Castiglioni in a period that is not perhaps so long ago after all. At this point, I am sure, the surprises which his catalogue have in store for us cannot be separated from what has already happened in his work. The genuine multiplicity of today has its basis in a fundamental unity.

Lidia Bramani (1992)
© text from the Catalogue by Casa Ricordi - Milan.