Most of all, thanks: both for the advice that you gave me many years ago to include contemporary music as part of my formation and for having first contributed, as far as I can remember, to that repertoire comprised of the now hundreds of pieces that is now an original and qualifying part of my activity. What did it mean for you to get to know the guitar as a composer? What did you and do you judge interesting in this instrument today? Were there problems or difficulties in approaching the instrument, or did it influence  your writing style?

Pippo Molino:

The thanks is reciprocal because if it’s true that a complete performer needs to know both the traditional and contemporary (and so I’m not sorry for the advice I gave you), it’s just as true that it’s a great opportunity to be able to write for a good and personal performer. For this reason, getting to know the guitar, for me, first meant seeing and listening to a good deal of antique and contemporary repertoire, then verifying with you (what fantasy brought me to try and then write down) by talking about it a bit and listening to it on the instrument.

The guitar is an instrument that in my opinion has at least two strong points: it’s complete, that is, there’s a lot of interest in it being played as a solo instrument, and then it helps whoever’s listening in the important attitude of real listening, through the use of delicate sounds that make a great use of variations in tone.

As much as and more than any other instrument, the guitar needs to be known: superficiality is not allowed for whoever writes music. When one is learning its particular traits, there comes a point when a capacity to think guitaristically sets off, just like it happens when, speaking in a foreign language, one begins to think in that language, ceasing to translate from the native one.

P.B.

Do you want to tell us precisely what your output consists of, for and with guitar?

P.M.

The guitar is decisively present if you consider that it’s not the instrument in my catalogue, either as solo instrument or as a component in ensembles. For solo guitar I composed Frammento A (1984), B (1985), C (1996), D (1993), E (2009).*

For groups: Ritornando for violin, viola and guitar (1986), Esodo 33 for soprano and guitar (1995) and Stién’ka Ràsin for medium voice and guitar (1996).

In the single act L’illusione (on text by Solov’ev), for reciting voice, baritone and instruments (2007), the guitar has a rather important part in certain points, together with the clarinet, decisively concertante. Per Cinque, for the Webern Ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, guitar and piano)(2009).

P.B.

From Frammento A to Frammento C – written after D – over ten years pass by, a period in which your writing style had changed a lot. Although, recently playing through Frammento A again in hindsight, I now found in it what is so evident in the latest pieces. Do you want to talk with us about this change in continuity and how it’s reflected in your writing for the guitar?

You say it well: change in continuity, also because for me it’s a totally foreign attitude (unfortunately rather widespread) to decide at the drawing board, a priori, which must by my style in a determined composition.

Every piece begins in me from a necessity to compose, but not only a necessity that we could call general, but particular, piece by piece, and therefore idea by idea. This is the adventure (not without fatigue!) that I face while composing.

You could say (I share your assertion) that my style has undergone a good deal of change in recent years; this transformation, though, comes about in the drama that I live every day between the idea or the urgent expressive need, the measure that I write and even the relationship with the other (it’s important for me) who will listen to me that I always establish that and I absolutely don’t want to avoid.

Among present styles in my guitar compositions, for example, I would say that when my work strived towards a synthesis between atonal music and some trace of tonality, the guitar often played those typical chordal tones, for the most part arpeggiated, that contain thirds and fourths but are out of context compared to the triads in root position or inverted; in more recent works that sometimes openly resume schemes belonging to tonal music, I willingly use incisive sonorities, while not necessarily dissonant.

P.B.

Both in the field of composition and in performance – the guitar is not an exception – it seems that the alternative today is between a rigor that often seems to me an end in itself and incapable of profoundly convincing reasons for it – and therefore explaining these reasons to others – and the search for the easy consensus through a lower-league show of effects.

Sometimes it seems that whoever really has something to say, not being reducible neither to the first nor second category, simply doesn’t exist because of this fact, at least at certain levels of communication with some exceptions – some notable and even praised, but not considered at levels of this depth. How do you see the situation?

P.M.

I agree with your judgment and the experience (that maybe you have, too) of finding myself rather rarely, in today’s production, on friendly terrain.

Bruno Canino, a great maestro that I had the fortune to follow for some years, often cited a proverb dealing with this matter: “Hell is paved with good intentions”. The problem is that there is often the intention to communicate and be authentic, but not the pleasure of recognizing the profound unity between the music that I listen to and the depth of my substantial questions concerning life, my sensibility.

I believe that this is due, for many years by now, to having lost the search for reasons for what one writes, putting one’s heart at peace, as opposed to the sacrosanct uncertainty of the success of the single piece, through the many contrasting attitudes with tradition mainly belonging to experimentation and the avant garde. But these two words, if they are missing the personal reasons of living and composing, become empty and insignificant words.

If, vice versa, one gets the courage back to not run away from tradition like worried adolescents and (piece by piece, page by page) face the musical and artistic needs that all music that he write entails, the music, interest and (why not?) enthusiasm is reborn, and with this, the possibility for the guitar to be itself (not necessarily antique, but itself). Sound is reborn; I don’t necessarily mean consonant, you can easily make use of consonance and dissonance, but sound is reborn.

And the appreciation of the audience! For what twisted pseudo-moralistic reason should we believe the contemporary dogma for which beautiful equals immoral, ugly equals moral or, even worse: beautiful is a category that people don’t know anything about and that can’t be expressed, creating a total relativism that conceals what I said earlier, that is, a duty to the ugly? (pain of retaliation: grind one’s teeth - or envy? – the success of Giovanni Allevi.)

P.B.

Can we wait for, even in a small-dose production that seems little or not at all worried about “cranking out” pieces in continuation, some other pieces for or with guitar? Is there something that you would like to do and you haven’t yet done in this sense?

P.M.

In 2009, I wrote a piece for quintet containing the guitar: Per Cinque, and one piece for solo guitar: Frammento E, which a Frammento F will follow shortly, linked with the preceding piece. So I seemed to have made a good come-back, don’t you think?

P.B.

*Frammento A and Frammento B are published by Edi-Pan and recorded on LP Edi-Pan by Piero Bonaguri.

Frammento C and Frammento D are published by Curci (sheet music with included cd recorded by Piero Bonaguri)