Intended as an element of the habitat created on stage, this work is my first musical attempt in creating something similar to what Flavia Mastrella does in theater plays with Antonio Rezza: fabricating artistic objects that inhabit the stage, but that are mutilated in some way, since they’re missing some parts and/or their usual context (as could be a door without a wall). This mutilation opens a field in which the interpreter’s subjectivity tends to manifest.

 

From a composer’s point of view, the task could be to carefully define the formal wholeness of each individual written element: this, to me, is what determines the effectiveness of the improvisation that comes out. I like to refer to this kind of elements placed in the interpreter’s habitat with the concept of forniture: firstly, because its etymology recalls the idea of something meant for a specific end, and that, in order to serve it, offers a few ways to interact with it (as suggested by J. Gibson’s theory of affordances); secondly because the concept of forniture raises at least two philosophical questions: how many legs do I have to take out from a chair for it to stop being a chair? how does an object conceived with a specific purpose comes to have an aesthetic value in itself.

 
 
 

Giulio Petrella, febbraio 2024