Bio
Fabio Cifariello Ciardi (Roma 1960) studied composition and electronic music at the Conservatory S.Cecilia of Rome and musicology at the University of Bologna. His post-graduate studies were with Giacomo Manzoni, Tristain Murail and Phillipe Manoury in Paris at IRCAM, and with Franco Donatoni at the Accademia Nazionale di S.Cecilia in Rome. In 1991 he was selected for a one year Cursus de Informatique Musicale at IRCAM. In 1995 he was invited to EMS (Stockholm) as composer in residence.
In the fields of both instrumental and electroacoustic music, Fabio Cifariello Ciardi has developed theories and methods for the possible relationship between musical works and the long-term memory of the listener. His compositions have been awarded prizes at various international competitions: Porrino 1989, Cagliari; Russolo 1992, Varese; 1993, Prague; CD-selection 1993, Tokyo; 1993, Athens; Sonorous '93, Tulane (USA); XXV Concours International de musique electroacoustique 1998, Bourges (France); and are published and recorded by Edipan (Rome), RivoAlto-Casier (Treviso), Symposium-CAT (Trento), International Computer Music Association (Saint Francisco, USA), Musical d'Informatica Italian AIMI-Associazione (Gorizia), and Unesco CIME-Cultures Electroniques (Bourges, France).
Since 1989 he is involved in the study of the processes of memorization and recognition of sonic events and the aesthetic and ethical role of a "sonic common memory" in the post-modern age. On these topics he collaborates with the Psychology Dep. of Rome University "La Sapienza". On these topics he hopes to finish soon a book entitled Memory of Music, Music of Memory. F. Cifariello Ciardi is also interested in musicological aspects of twentieth-century music. He collaborates regularly with Italian Radio RAI RADIO 3, and teaches harmony and analysis at the Campobasso Conservatorium. He has founded, together with other composers, the Edison Study for producing and diffusing electroacoustic music.
The composer writes, “I consider my music to be the result of my study of musical control of the memories of listeners, and the capacity of recognizing familiar melodic fragments. This new compositional technique is not intended as an old neoclassicism, but as a symbol of the world of our time. The information that we receive today from the media is everyday more immediate, precise, and utilizes very different languages. In this situation, our memory is the last human instrument we use to know who we are and where we are living. I utilize very famous melodic fragments to create a dialectic play, a semantic tension, among known and unknown musical materials, even if the ‘genetic-code' of the melodic fragments generates all the material of the composition.”
Music
Altre Tracce for clarinet is intended as an exploration of two different kinds of polyphony. One is a ‘virtual' polyphony where our perceptive and cognitive systems segregate a single sequence into two or more melodic streams, each one with its own meter and dynamics. In order to succeed in this illusion of two (or more) clarinets, tones of the different melodic streams must not be played legato – each tone should be as clean and dynamically well-defined as possible. The second type of polyphony is a sort of ‘polyphony of memories' – the quick juxtaposition, superposition, and interpolation of ‘neutral' sonic materials (short term memory) with short melodic fragments that are probably stored in a common musical/cultural memory of occidental listeners (long term memory). These fragments are:
• the first subject of the first movement of Mozart's G-Minor (No.40) Symphony
• the most well-known theme of Rossini's Barbiere di Siviglia
• the second theme from the Overture of Rossini's La Gazza Ladra
• the Charlie Chaplin theme sung by Charlot in Luci della Ribalta
• the Seguidilla from Bizet's Carmen
• the second theme of Debussy's Premiere Rhapsodie for clarinet and piano
• the jazz standard “The Lady is a Tramp”