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profili - opere

Opere

Diego Minciacchi
Mentre noi corravam la morta gora
(1999)
(Dante, Divina Commedia, Inferno, VIII, 31)
per Elettronica

The project stems from one central idea: the conception and implementation of a sound object of principally Italian significance named after Dante's verse Mentre noi corravam la morta gora, whereby the use of Italian literature results in a strong socio-cultural form of expression.
The human voice expresses feelings in the most direct manner, relates words which can be understood for their own value without means of cultural references (such as instrumental stylism), relating semantic meaning as well as phonetic expression. For these reasons, I decided to use the human voice in Mentre noi corravam la morta gora extensively and sounds produced by other sources very sparingly (these sounds were recorded by myself on conventional instruments or taken from my personal library of travel recordings and concrete sounds).
For the conveyance of socio-cultural content, I chose to employ texts with a readily intelligible meaning. I selected passages by three Italian poets of our century, Edoardo Cacciatore, Emilio Villa, and Mario Lunetta. All of them are not only poets, but are actively involved in other cultural fields; Cacciatore was a philosopher, Villa created sculptures and paintings, while Lunetta wrote novels and texts for theater.
The second part of the work is devoted to Emilio Villa who represents a very special case among recent Italian poets. He wrote important translations from ancient Greek, Hebrew and Sumerian. His own poetry was enriched by his knowledge of ancient and modern languages, and he wrote not only in Italian but in Latin, Portuguese, French, English and ancient Greek.
His texts are here employed in fragments of various length (from a few words to over a page) and are arranged in an order that traces the path of the poets' activities in reference to their cultural and social ambiance.
I carefully designed the procedure of recording these texts. They have been read - not sung - mostly by poets and literary experts, as it was my specific intention to have them read by persons working creatively with words in their professional lives .
The principal objective in the electronic treatment of Mentre noi corravam la morta gora has been to preserve the best possible intelligibility of words, fragments of words, sentences, and entire texts by means of editing, layering, juxtaposition and mixture.
For each single part of the sound event an individual structural treatment has been designed to delineate its respective text(s) in all required levels of significance, in accordance with the poet's original context.
In the case of Emilio Villa the writing is linear and oracular. The poet's linguistic intention is carried out at a more basic level by processes in elementary grammatical functions and by employment of etymological allusions and trans-linguistic constructions. For this reason I chose poems in Portuguese, Latin, and for the last text, Italian, languages closely related to each other . I deconstructed and reconstructed Villa's texts, preserving only small units and distributing these units within acoustical space. Dealing with Villa, my concept of word and sound developed organically from the ieratic, sacral, and apostrophizing character of the texts.

All operations have been performed digitally using the Studer Dyaxis Macintosh-based post-production workstation in my personal studio.
Diego Minciacchi
November, 1998