The Great Academies, the Masters and the Students

A series of concerts curated by Antonio Caggiano

 

MarCH – JUNE 2025

The Great Academies, the Masters and the Students is a series of four concerts, scheduled from March to June 2025, which aims to celebrate the exceptional link between musical tradition and emerging talent. Each concert of the season sees the alternation of established masters and their promising students, all from the most prestigious European music academies. The series offers the opportunity to listen to performances that mix the past and the present, the consolidated mastery and the energy of young musicians, for a rich and engaging musical experience.

At the Edge of the Night: Fragments of Light and Shadow
The first concert of of the series features the young musicians of Trio Concept, a group of three extraordinary talents, currently studying at the Hochschule in Basel. The ensemble will explore a territory in which “sound seems to dissolve at the edges of perception, like an echo that gets lost in the night”, as they themselves affirm. Their musical offering “goes beyond the simple question of dynamics or instrumental writing”; it is a profound reflection on the fragility of music, on its elusive nature and on the alternation between light and darkness. The programme includes pieces by authors such as Lili Boulanger – who died when she was just twenty four years old, sister of the very famous composition teacher Nadia - Kaija Saariaho, Maurice Ravel, Salvatore Sciarrino and Wolfgang Rihm. Each piece tells a story of distance, transformation and mystery, giving the audience an experience suspended between the tangible and the intangible.

Virtuosity and Passion: The Double Bass between Past and Present
In the second concert of the series, Maestro Giuseppe Ettorre, double bass teacher at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena and first double bass at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, will be joined by his brillant student, Fabrizio Buzzi, currently first double bass at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, and by the pianist, Pierluigi Di Tella. This concert, in which virtuosity is the protagonist, will guide the audience on a journey through the world of the double bass, with a programme ranging from historical to contemporary compositions. It will start with Giovanni Bottesini, move onto Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler, up to the present day with a piece by Nicola Sani dedicated to Ettorre, which had its world premiere at La Scala in 2024. A concert that, thanks to the meeting between masters and students, will offer the audience not only a virtuosity of the highest level, but also a reflection on the transmission of musical tradition through the generations. An event aimed at lovers of chamber music and those who want to discover the double bass in a new, original light.

Repetition and Rhythm
The third concert of the series features the Chigiana Percussion Ensemble, a group in residence at the Accademia Chigiana. Made up of the best students of the summer advanced training courses, the ensemble boasts a notable concert career. In addition to participating in all the years of the Chigiana Summer Festival, its prestigious curriculum includes performances at the Ravello Festival, the Ravenna Festival and the MAXXI Museum in Rome. The programme will focus mainly, but not only, on minimalist music. Spectators will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the radical minimalism of the masters, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, protagonists of a musical revolution with their repetitive and hypnotic structures. The concert will continue with works by some of the main disciples of this movement, such as the American Julia Wolfe and the Italian Giovanni Sollima, who have pushed minimalism in new expressive directions. The piece by Friedman / Samuels, characterised by obvious jazz influences, will introduce an improvisational and rhythmic dimension to the performance. The energy and the expressive power of this group will make the musical experience a journey of high emotional tension.

Music from Exile
The season concludes with a concert by the clarinetist José Luis Estelles – teacher at the Hochschule for Music and Dance Köln, Conservatorio superior de Musica San Sebastian – together with the pianist Amedeo Salvato.

Music from Exile explores the musical production of composers who fled, were imprisoned or were persecuted by those in power for racial, artistic and political reasons. The concert opens with the Kaddish by Maurice Ravel, one of the oldest Jewish prayers, linked to the idea of loss, and continues with the Sonata by Moisej Vajnberg, a Polish composer who, to escape the Nazis, fled to the Soviet Union where, despite his friendship with Dmitrij Shostakovich, he was placed on the blacklist of artists accused of “formalism” and arrested in 1953. From captivity in Stalag VIII-A, where Olivier Messiaen composed Quatuor pour la fin du temps in 1940, we move on to the rhythmic and sonorous rainbows of György Ligeti, whose artistic production is decisively marked by his escape to Vienna in the aftermath of the 1956 Budapest uprising. In the same year that Messiaen composed his Quatuor, the Spaniard Julián Bautista fled from the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and took refuge in Argentina where he wrote the Fantasia Española of our programme. The concert ends with a mix of Latin jazz and classical music by Paquito D’Rivera, a Cuban clarinetist and composer, who has been a political refugee in the USA since 1980.

The season, The Great Academies, the Masters and the Students thus offers an extraordinary overview of the new generations of musicians who, under the guidance of great masters, are contributing to the history of music of our time. An opportunity to appreciate the talent, the passion and the innovation that animates the classrooms of the most prestigious music academies in Europe.

Antonio Caggiano
Artistic Director for musical activity at Dello Scompiglio

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24 maY 2025
AT 7.30 pm

Chigiana Percussion Ensemble

Repetition and Rhythm

music by Glass, Reich, Friedman/Samuels, Sollima, WolFe

Philip Glass, Opening, for marimba and vibraphone
Steve Reich, Music for pieces of wood, for five pairs of claves
David Friedman and Dave Samuels, Carousel, for vibraphone and marimba
Giovanni Sollima, Millennium Bug, for 4 percussionists
Steve Reich, Marimba Phase, for 2 marimbas
Julia Wolfe, Dark Full Ride, for 4 percussionists
Steve Reich, Drumming - Part 1, for 4 pairs of tuned bongo drums

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Chigiana Percussion Ensemble
Giulio Ancarani, Francesco Conforti, Roberto Iemma, Matteo Lelii   percussion
Antonio Caggiano  percussion, conductor

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The third concert of the series features the Chigiana Percussion Ensemble, a group made up of the best students of the summer advanced training courses at the Accademia Chigiana. The concert is intended as a tribute to minimalism, a movement that revolutionized 20th-century music, which thanks to a simplification of language, had the merit of bringing the public closer to the cultured music of the 20th Century. The programme includes iconic works by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, the main exponents of this movement. The other compositions in the programme, although belonging to a minimalist language, embrace different nuances and approaches, highlighting the evolution and expansion of this language, by presenting authors such as Giovanni Sollima, Julia Wolfe and the jazz influences of David Freedman and Dave Samuels.

Philip Glass – Opening for marimba and vibraphone
The opening piece of the concert, Opening, is the first from the collection Glassworks, composed by Philip Glass in 1982. This short piece, presented in the version for marimba and vibraphone, represents a kind of introduction to the composer's sound world and can be seen as an example of accessible minimalism, which plays with the repetition and gradual variation of rhythmic-melodic patterns that slowly evolve over time.
The main rhythmic element in Opening is the constant overlapping of triples (three notes per time unit) and duples (two notes per time unit). This combination creates a polyrhythm that represents the backbone of the composition. There is no real climax in the piece: its strength lies in the constant tension created by the overlapping of the two rhythmic patterns and in the ability to evolve without sudden changes. The dynamic part, although not extremely varied, must be played with care, as the piece develops through subtle variations in intensity that enrich the sound material without modifying its basic rhythmic structure.

Steve Reich – Music for Pieces of Wood for five pairs of claves
The second piece of the programme, Music for Pieces of Wood by Steve Reich, is one of the milestones of minimalism. After Clapping Music, Reich composed Six Pianos, Music for Mallets Instruments, Voices and Organ, and Music for Pieces of Wood in 1973.
Music for Pieces of Wood stems from the same roots as Clapping Music, that is from the desire to compose music for instruments that are as simple as possible. The piece is written for five pairs of claves, or wooden sticks, pitched to the notes A, B, C#, D# and D# an octave above. The piece is one of the most resonant Reich ever wrote without the use of amplification. The rhythmic structure is based entirely on the process of building or replacing pauses with notes, much used in Drumming. The piece is divided into three sections of 6/4, 4/4 and 3/4 respectively, in which clave1 (D#) keeps time with a persistent quaver and quaver break from beginning to end and clave2 (B) plays a different pattern per section. Clave3 (A), clave4 (C#) and clave5 (D#) assemble the same pattern as clave2 one at a time, shifted to different strong tempos. Once the last clave has finished assembling and the canons have been achieved, claves 3, 4 and 5 play the pattern in unison with clave2 for a certain number of repetitions, then they taper off in diminuendo and clave2 plays the next pattern. The procedure is repeated until we reach the last canon on the 3/4 pattern to end the piece, closing the patterns with the end of the clave2 pattern.

David Friedman and Dave Samuels - Carousel, for vibraphone and marimba

An interesting contrast to Reich’s rhythmic rigidity comes with Carousel, a piece by David Freedman and David Samuels. Composed in 1993 for vibraphone and marimba, Carousel introduces a more fluid and improvisational dimension to percussion music. Jazz influences are evident in its writing, characterized by exchanges between the two instruments, mixing technique and spontaneity. The piece plays with the timbre and dynamics of the two instruments, creating a dialogue that oscillates between moments of intimate reflection and rhythmic explosion.

Giovanni Sollima – Millennium Bug for 4 percussionists
Giovanni Sollima’s minimalism in Millenium Bug (1999) adds a dramatic and energetic dimension to the concert. Composed for four percussionists, this piece explores the anxieties and tensions associated with the transition to the new millennium, with a sound that evokes the idea of ​​a “bug” in the system. The composition develops around a sequence of pressing rhythms and contrasting dynamics, creating an atmosphere that mixes chaos and uncertainty. Sollima enriches the minimalist music with a strong emotional charge, making this piece fascinating for its overwhelming energy and rhythmic intensity.

Steve Reich – Marimba Phase for 2 marimbas
Marimba Phase is the version for two marimbas of Piano Phase. Towards the end of ’66, Reich recorded a short melodic motif on the piano, turned it into a loop on tape and tried out the phasing technique by playing the pattern himself on the piano over the recorded base. He continued along this path until, with the pianist Arthur Bixler Murphy, they played together acoustically on two pianos: one holding steadily the pattern and the other speeding it up.
He transcribed this new piece, calling it Piano Phase in conventional notation, with dotted lines between the bars to indicate phasing, a technique Reich would use constantly from then on.
In this piece, the two musicians begin in unison, playing the same pattern several times. At a certain point, while one of them continues on the same tempo, the other gradually speeds up, to a semiquaver ahead of the first one. The process is repeated, exploring various canons that the rhythmic pattern can generate. In Reich's own words: 'To perform Piano/Marimba Phase you have to memorise the musical material and put the score aside, as it is no longer needed; it would only be a distraction. What you have to do is listen carefully to see if you have gone one bar ahead or moved two by mistake. Everything is worked out, there is no improvisation, but the psychology of the performance, what really happens when you play, is total involvement with the sound."

Julia Wolfe – Dark Full Ride for 4 percussionists
Dark Full Ride: Music in Multiples by Julia Wolfe, written in 2003 for four percussionists, is a piece with a futuristic concept, but minimalist in sound quality. The composer, using only the drum set, transforms speed and cyclicality into sound. In the first movement, lasting seven minutes, Wolfe uses 4 Hi-hats and 4 suspended cymbals to create a rhythmic repetitiveness through the exchange of patterns between the performers. There is never silence in the piece; everything flows, like the sound of train tracks. The four performers play patterns that intertwine precisely, creating an infinite cycle of hits, always keeping the “sound fabric” taut until the end.

Steve Reich – Drumming - Part 1 for 4 pairs of tuned bongo drums
The concert concludes with Drumming - Part 1, by Steve Reich, from one of his most iconic works, Drumming (1970-71). Divided into four movements, the work explores different instrumental families: in the first, skin (four pairs of tuned bongo drums); in the second, wood (two marimbas and voices); in the third, metal (three glockenspiels, whistle and piccolo). Inspired by African music, Reich wrote this work after a trip to Ghana, during which he tried to discover the continent's musical secrets. Drumming marks the end of the pure minimalist avant-garde and paves the way for the fusion of minimalism and classical heritage, a synthesis that Reich would develop in later works such as Music for Eighteen Musicians, Tehillim and City Life, where the minimalist experience of the rhythmic process is increasingly combined with harmonic modulations, the dissociation of melody and accompaniment, and a formal arched structure. The general features of the composition still include series, using the gradual process and progressive metamorphosis of an initial musical situation that the listener can follow step by step, as in Pendulum Music from 1968. In Drumming, as in the pieces by the early Reich, a reminiscence of John Cage's anti-romantic aesthetic shines through, which aimed to get rid of all traces of the author's subjectivity. This confirms the characteristic of Reich's music, which combines the compositional and perceptual process: Reich does not hide any secrets in the structure that the listeners cannot perceive, and one of the reasons why this is audible is that everything happens gradually. Structural clarity allows us to understand the three main compositional techniques employed in Drumming: substitution, gradual phase shifting and the use of resulting patterns.   

The substitution of pauses with notes (pattern montage) or notes with pauses (pattern dismantling) within the pattern is a technique that Reich began to use with Drumming. The gradual shifting of phase, or phasing, was discovered very early by Reich, using magnetic tapes. Reich discovered this process in 1965 with It’s Gonna Rain and after Drumming, he no longer used it. Drumming represents the final step of the phasing process explored by Steve Reich, who uses all the percussion timbres in the composition. The resulting patterns, i.e. the new “virtual” patterns that emerge from the interaction between instruments of the same timbre involved in a tight canon made up of a short pattern repeated in a loop, have been defined by Reich as a kind of “perceptual law”; when listening to a pattern shifted and played on instruments of the same timbre, one quickly loses perception of the individual contours of the pattern, and mentally the material reorganises itself. In Drumming - Part 1, this effect is emphasised by bongo drums 3 and 4, whose task is to highlight rhythmic-melodic shapes not in a soloistic or decorative manner, but as a means of exploring different possible forms already present within the polyphonic block. The combination of these three techniques (montage-dismantling, phasing and resulting patterns) underpins the overall structure of Drumming.                                                                          

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