Ensemble InterContemporain
Sébastian Vichard, piano
Vimbayi Kaziboni, conductor

ManiFeste 2021
Concert de l'atelier pour ensemble dirigé

Recorded on 19th June 2021 by IRCAM
Le Centquatre, Paris (FR)

Score published by BabelScores

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Original audio: https://medias.ircam.fr/x2aa168

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Floating artifice

Among the readings that kept me company during the quarantine was a book that I had bought some time ago, the contents of which I was familiar with, but which I never studied. I am referring to Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990). On page 6 of the original edition, the following can be read

[...] When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice [...]

That statement raised important questions that were absorbed by contemporary feminist, transfeminist, queer and LGBT* communities, helping those diverse realities to intercept new perspectives on their identity.
However, if we broaden the reasoning that arises from the application of these principles to the arts, in this case to musical production, we can pave the way to an idea of constructive research that involves composer and performer in various ways.
We could rephrase Judith Butler's sentence as follows

[...] When the constructed status of the instrument is theorized as radically independent from the organological tradition that produced it, the instrument itself becomes a free-floating artifice [...]

The composer is asked whether it is the instrument, which came to us as a result of a historical process of organological evolution, with its coded analogue timbre, the object from which to draw the sounds or it should not itself be the subject of composition. “Composing means building an instrument” wrote Lachenmann: the alteration of the instrument, to adapt it to the needs of our imagination, becomes a possible presupposition of the compositional process. The instrument is, as an object, a prosthesis of the performer's own body, which in turn can be imagined as a sound box. What if the synthesis between the sounds of the body and the sound produced by the instrument, as tradition has handed it over to us or perfected to meet the needs of the individual project, were not actually a possible answer to these questions?

Photo - Ivana Franke, Lovers Seeing Darkness. Ubiety Unknown, 2018 - MACBA, Barcelona (Spain)

https://www.ivanafranke.net/work/lovers-seeing-darkness-ubiety-unknown

LSD - Lovers Seeing Darkness (2021)

Divertimento Ensemble
Sandro Gorli, conductor

International Workshop for Young Composers 2022
ORSOLINA 28, Moncalvo (ITA)

Recorded on 4th September 2022

Score published by BabelScores

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Unexpected events of the case

I see you like this: the curves of your naked body fitting in
the rock’s natural form, the welcoming
boulder where you like to lay
- month of July year 2004 - 
for hours basking in the sun.

You eel, you dolphin, you seahorse,
joy and wonder of the nitid shape,
live profile of an animal fearing
neither destiny nor time. 

From Sensi diversi (2005) by Luca Baldoni

[I would like to thank Luca for providing the aforementioned unpublished translation of his poem]

The anamorphosis of the body that becomes one with the stone on which it sunbathes, detection of a process of conjunction with the Whole that perhaps refers to other poetic times and naturalistic aesthetics. A miniature that carves a happy memory in its gait. My writing work, not new, had started from those images, in which the ensemble instrument blends its composite and changing parts, now revealing them, now camouflaging them, in the same fusion process.
 Then an unexpected event.
 The death of someone who has partly determined your path as a musician, albeit for a short time, upsets the plans. Carlo Ciceri dies suddenly. And the original idea irremediably changes, a trauma pervades the writing, the process falls apart and the uniform matter becomes a cruel, martial and chaotic rhythm, the convex mirror, through which reality is recomposed.

Photo - The wall of the Cathedral of Città di Castello (Perugia, Umbria, Italy) eroded by the wind, 2022

La forma naturale della pietra (2022; rev. 2023)

Fabio De Sanctis De Benedictis
Electronics (tape)

Suoni inauditi 2023
Auditorium C. Chiti (Conservatorio Mascagni), Livorno

19th May 2023

- - - - - - - - - 

The myth of Apollo and Daphne is not a love story. It is a tale of violence, albeit induced by the revenge of Eros derided. The sun God's attempt to overpower the nymph daughter of the river Peneus is the current stained act that seeks to overwhelm everything that does not conform to his will. Daphne performs an act of freedom, of self-determination, escaping the rules that dictated her destiny of being a woman, a submissive creature. However, the choice of freedom requires a sacrifice: losing oneself to be reborn in a new form.

[…] quoque Phoebus amat positaque in stipite dextra
sentit adhuc trepidare novo sub cortice pectus […]

[…] so Phoebus loves she and, resting his right hand on the trunk,
he still feels trembling in her chest under that new bark […]

Publio Ovidio Nasone, Metamorphosĕon Libri XV - Liber I - vv. 553 - 554

In the metamorphosis Daphne continues to live clad in the bark of the newborn laurel, but if Phoebus feels her trembling from outside, what does she feel from inside?

Photo - Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo & Dafne, 1623-25 - Galleria Borghese, Rome (Italy)

Memoria di Dafne (2023)

Felicita Brusoni, soprano
Lorenzo Commisso, bass flute
Vittorio Cirasaro, doublebass

Livorno Music Festival 2023
Galleria Cannoniera, Fortezza Vecchia, Livorno (ITA)

23rd August 2023
Live recording

Winner of the Peter Maxwell Davies Award 2023

Score published by BabelScores

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The fourth City of the Dead is called Argia.

The name must be pronounced with the accent on the i and dates back to the Greek Arghéia, «certainly pronounced Arghía in the postclassical era», corresponding to the ethnic adjective argheia, “of Argos”. According to Tagliavini, it is only indirectly possible to think of a derivation from argós, "white", "clear, brilliant" (the city of Argos could in fact mean "the white city"). That the proper name corresponds to the ethnic adjective also stands out from the fact that the most famous Argia was the daughter of the king of Argos Adrasto, wife of Polynices [...]

G. P. Giudicetti e M. Lizza Venuti, Le città e i nomi


Sister-in-law of Antigone, with her Argia disregards the law of Creon and renders the funeral honors to her husband Polynices, who died as traitor to the city that had welcomed him, exiled from Thebes. Argia is therefore the one who gives back to the earth, until she coincides with it. And Calvino adorns with her name a city deprived of air, an element that gives breath to the living, but filled with earth, with clay. By assonance, a rhetorical figure dear to the Italian writer, air and clay resound in the name of Argia. Humanity that finds space in her being full is submerged, like the bodies of Pompeii, entities obtained through negative.

[...] it's so dark [...]
[…] another negative stair rests on the stairs […]
[…] Humidity destroys bodies […]
[...] Of Argia, from up here, you can't see anything; there are only those who say: "It's down there" and all that remains is to believe it; the places are deserted. At night, putting your ear to the ground, you sometimes hear a door slamming.

I. Calvino, Le città invisibili

Dante, Ariosto, Nietzsche, Rilke come to mind.
Argia takes shape from the sound of the earth, a sound that comes from the depths, from which we seem to understand voices, calls, everyday sounds, as in pareidolia. The three instruments, as in an invocation rite, scour the earth that makes up the city with its swallowed inhabitants, almost immovable roots, restoring a phantasmagorical sound image.

Photo - Cover of the Italian original of Italo Calvino's Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities), published by Einaudi in 1972

Arghèia (2023)

Achrome Ensemble
Marcello Parolini, conductor

ACHЯOME and the new generation of the Eighties
Sala Piatti, Bergamo (ITA)

9th March 2024
Live recording

Score published by BabelScores

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I was born in the Po Valley, where fog was still a common phenomenon twenty years ago, a phenomenon that all in all already has to do with water. For a year now I have found myself contingently living in seaside places. On the cliffs of Calafuria, just south of Livorno, I experienced the phenomenon of the tide on the rocks for the first time. A movement of water that progressively devours the earth, as long as the moon exerts its strength on the aquatic element. This event which alters space over time materializes in the coming and going of the two imaginaries that have taken place in my writing, harmonic and inharmonic sounds, two horizons which, like all horizons, end up coinciding, articulating here like the wave that

[...] not knowing about the others
who preceded and followed her
and who were her advance and her surrender, she lost the surface and by retreating
into the deep waters she became confused
in her own body.

(Patrizia Cavalli)

Livorno/Siena - 24/07/2023

Photo - Sunset from Terrazza Mascagni in Livorno (Tuscany, Italy), 2023

Cicli di marea I (2023)

Clara La Licata, alto
Danilo Pastore, countertenor
Michele Gianquinto, bass
Divertimento Ensemble
Sandro Gorli, conductor

Rondò 2024
Fabbrica del Vapore, Sala Donatoni, Milano (ITA)

24th April 2024
Live recording

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Ghost poetry

 Anyone who knows the Baths of Caracalla is certainly aware of the disturbance they cause, even on a sunny day, multiplied a hundredfold in the Roman night. Ancient walls, gigantic, deserted ruins that bear witness to a golden age devoured by time. Pasolini portrays this place in several poems, a place abandoned after the Second World War, the scene of love markets, very different from the site found today by tourists curious about archaeology. The outcast humanity of the Italian capital roamed around those meadows in the darkness. Outcast but not guilty of any crime, simply made marginal by the power dynamics that tend to exclude from sight, from decorum, those who fall into poverty. A very current topic ever.

 Trionfo della notte is a staging of that phantasmagoria. Instruments and voices bring a waste soundscape to the surface. Words dissolved from meaning echo like ghosts of language. Music evokes the background hidden in the word, it directly articulates the sound image without pronouncing it, as in a ritual, first nature and then the human, which makes its appearance with disjointed words, as if spoken confusedly by that crowd of anonymous passers-by.

Photo - Night view of the Baths of Caracalla (Rome, Italy)

Trionfo della notte (2024)

Portrait of a world on fire

[...] the Fire will come and take over all things [...]
Heraclitus, p. 8

 That the contemporary world travels on a clinamen is an awareness that we have had for a long time. That this climate is incandescent, bringing about change, is a further awareness that we must ignore. Paul B. Preciado reminds us that the world is on fire and with it the coordinates that Humanity has tried to make stable in its History. Space is on fire, both due to anthropization that cements it or wildly deforests it and due to the inexorable consequences of ongoing climate change. It is also on fire due to the exceptional event that was Covid, which eliminated our relationship with the world, accentuating the isolation in our daily living world, which is not always peaceful. Time is on fire, it is dissolved, it is out of control (The time is out of joint from W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V) and has been so ontologically for a century, that is, since Einstein explained to us its total physical relativity.

 Going on fire is not a nihilistic act, but it is changing. In the act of changing, two things are interesting: the process that attacks the ancient matter and the hypotheses of transformation.

 Dysphoria Mundi is the staging of a resistance on the part of the ancient to survive the inevitable mutation that generates the new. How can sound make the changeable? One might respond that it already does so in itself. Spectral analysis has taught us that no sound object is stable and static, but that they live a life of their own, energy that mixes the harmonic and inharmonic components of the spectrum, creating autonomous perspectives. A note is never just a black or white dot written on a line or in a space, but it is a spectromorphology. This internal mobile nature of sound has already given significant results in recent decades.

 Dysphoria Mundi does not question the origin of chaos but starts ex abrupto from the magmatic process of change, lingering on the hypotheses of arrival: a new minimal cosmos, a tamed complexity, the prevalence of the formless, etc...

Photo - Drawing by Paul B. Preciado for Dysphoria Mundi

Dysphoria Mundi (2024)

Text from Lamento perduto di Agave by Guglielmo Bagella (Promethéus)

Virginia Guidi, voice
Caterina Ravenna, piano
Alice Romano, cello

Conservatorio di musica Santa Cecilia, Sala Accademia, Rome (ITA)

24th January 2025
Live recording

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The Bacchae is the last tragedy written by Euripides. Its written tradition leaves some gaps in the poetic text, the content of which can be partly reconstructed from the summaries of the tragedy made by commentators of antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Guglielmo Bagella, a young Italian poet, carries out a false restoration operation, where he reifies the ancient summaries and makes the gap in the Exodus poetic again. The result is a tense and desperate dialogue between the choir and Queen Agave, who, having recovered from the divine possession of Dionysus, discovers that she has murdered her son Pentheus.

Photo - Melpomene, Muse of Tragedy from Sarcophagus of the Muses, 2nd century AD - Convento do Carmo, Lisbon (Portugal)

Lamento di Agave (2024)

Ensemble Recherche
Rut Schereiner, conductor

ESML - Escola Superior de Musica de Lisboa
Auditòrio Vianna da Motta, Lisbon (Portugal)

Recorded on 31st July 2025
Live recording

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 Behind the somewhat classic generic title of Ottetto lies the long relationship that binds me to Sardinia: from my childhood summers, seventeen spent on the beach of Badesi, in the north of the island, to the year spent in Sassari teaching at the local Conservatory. In particular, this last prolonged stay dates back to a more attentive interest in the traditional musical heritage of Sardinia, still today of oral tradition, varied and very prolific. And it is a mottettu in the form of a lullaby entitled In sa matt'e su spiccu (On the lavender plant) that acts as the underlying theme of the piece. The source of the melody is the book Canti di Sardegna by Giulio Fara (Ricordi, 1926), a collection from which other authors of the 20th century Italian have developed materials.

 To accompany me in writing, two images were intertwined: the first is linked to water, an element typical of any island, and how this element can intervene to distort sound waves; the second image is that of a music box, an object linked to a bygone era, which usually has the task of reproducing famous or forgotten melodies. 

 The piece therefore stages the echo of a popular song reproduced by an old, dilapidated and slow music box whose sound is filtered by the water.

Photo - Giuseppe Biasi, Mattino in un villaggio sardo (Morning in a Sardinian village), 1912 - Pinacoteca Nazionale, Sassari (Sardinia, Italy)

Ottetto (2025)

Members of Quartetto Prometeo
Giulio Rovighi, violin
Massimo Piva, viola
Francesco Dillon, cello

Chigiana International Festival and Summer Accademy 2017
Final Concert of Composition Course (M° Salvatore Sciarrino)

Recorded on 22th July 2017
Palazzo Chigi Saracini, Siena (IT)

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We must remember [...] that we are born revolutionaries, liminal, different in the spirit and in the flesh.
from Diritti, in Sensi diversi (2005) by L. Baldoni

Writing is just debris.
from Prologo, in di&con Daniele (2011, unpublished) by M. Chiamenti

Photo - Tranquillo Cremona, Edera (Ivy), 1878 - GAM, Turin (Italy)

Trio no. 1 (2017)

Duo Tubi&Corde
Marco Bonetti, bariton sax
Guido Boselli, cello

Recorded on 19th October 2017
Auditorium del Conservatorio di Como, Como (IT)

Photo - Michelangelo Merisi called Caravaggio, Seppellimento di Santa Lucia (Burial of Saint Lucia), 1608 - Santuario di Santa Lucia al Sepolcro, Siracusa (Sicily, Italy)

Studio da Caravaggio (2017)

Satira in one act
music and libretto by Marco Benetti
from an idea by Mario Mieli

Davide Gasparro, TV announcer
Maurizio De Vittorio, Romeo (tenor)
Francesco Bossi, Alfredo (bariton)
Ramiro Maturana, Paolo (bariton)
Federico De Antoni, Felicia (bass)

Ensemble Laboratorio
Guido Boselli, conductor

Mattia Olgiati, audio editing
recorded on 22th & 23th June 2019
Teatro Elfo-Puccini, Sala Bausch, Milan (IT)

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Three gay guys and an MtF transsexual woman sit in the living room, watching TV, waiting for a Straight Pride. Meanwhile they converse with each other, building a pungent satire of heterosexuality (and perhaps homosexuality too). Mario Mieli, with other friends, imagined this dystopia in the Milan of the ’70s, bringing on stage his show La traviata norma in the Lombard capital and in other Italian cities.
It is starting from this idea that the libretto of this homonymous short chamber opera has been elaborated, reduced in duration, in some political positions that today could be considered anachronistic, and in the choral dimension developed in the original from the songs accompanied by the guitar between one scene and the other. The choice of the text, dictated by personal interests devoid of a contingency of political nature, nevertheless takes on a decidedly civil dimension in our time like never before, when, while on one hand science has definitively denied sexual orientation and gender dysphoria to be a pathology, on the other hand political and religious extremisms persist (and awaken), which would like to “punish sin as a crime, and to forgive the crime as a sin” (cit. Salvemini) in defense of imaginary absolute values, non-existent in the world of multiple ongoing relationships that characterize contemporary human society.
The chosen form is the out-of-date one of the opera, more suitable than spoken theater, as in it the implausibility of characters expressing themselves in singing stands out. In this dimension, every situation and every joke becomes plausible and achievable. The contact with everyday reality is television, a device that builds our sound landscape and that exerts its power by taking over our discussions in an unexpected and all-encompassing way. The act of liberation from this filter on the real is like a reawakening of the hypnotized spectator, who decides to re-appropriate his freedom by switching off the device and getting his hands dirty when he returns to the world.

Text by Marco Benetti
Translated by Lorenzo Casati

Photo - Giovanni Rodella, Mario Mieli, 1977

La traviata norma (2018; rev. 2019)

Coro della Facoltà di Musicologia di Cremona
Dir. Giovanni Cestino

XVI Festival Internazionale della Musica Corale "Nella Città dei Gremi"
Recorded on 12th July 2019
San Giuseppe Church, Sassari

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Ave maris stella
Dei Mater alma
Atquae semper Virgo
Felix caeli porta.
by Venanzio Fortunato (?) or Paolo Diacono (?)

Ave del mare Stella,
Madre di Dio pregiata,
Vergine alma, et beata
porta, che n’apri il ciel lucente e bella.
by Francisco Soto de Langa

https://cfm.cr.it/progetti/xvi-festival-internazionale-della-musica-corale-nella-citta-dei-gremi/

Photo - Clerks singing Ave Maris Stella from BL Add. 49999, f. 58

Ave (2018)

Marco Benetti is a composer, pupil of Giovanni Verrando and Salvatore Sciarrino. He completed his studies at the Accademia Naziona di Santa Cecilia in Rome (Master's course in composition; teachers: Ivan Fedele and Alessandro Solbiati). His compositional activity has led him to present projects at international festivals such as Biennale Musica (Venice), ManiFeste (IRCAM - Centre Pompidou), Macerata Opera Festival, IMPULS (Kunstuniversität Graz), Festival 5 Giornate (Milan), Festival Mixtur (Barcelona) and to collaborate among others with Ensemble InterContemporain, Divertimento Ensemble, Schallfeld Ensemble, Ensemble Recherche, ACRHOME Ensemble, ContempoartEnsemble. He teaches Theory of harmony and analysis at the G. B. Pergolesi Conservatory in Fermo (Marche, Italy). His music is published by BabelScores. He is interested in sound as an unstable, fluctuating, queer phenomenon.

Marco Benetti

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