Non di più colpo che soave vento is both a response to the beauty of the playing by Swedish pianist Sissel J:son Lindh of her father’s, Björn, piano music, some night in Florence during 1993, and the beauty of the description of the gentle wind that, having reached the limits of the last circle of Mount Purgatory, Dante feels touching his face:

Longing now to search in and around
The heavenly woods — dense and green with life —
Which softened the new sunlight for my eyes,
Not waiting any longer, I left the cliff,
Making my slow, slow way on level ground,
Over the soil which everywhere spread fragrance.
A sweetly scented breeze, which did not vary
Within itself, struck me across the forehead
With no more force than would a gentle wind.
The branches quivering at its touch all bent
Spontaneously in the direction where
The holy mountain casts its shadow first.

Non di più colpo che soave vento, 1

Here the short pieces are played by New Yorker pianist David Witten.

Dante, Divina Commedia, Purgatorio (Canto XXVIII):

Vago già di cercar dentro e dintorno
la divina foresta spessa e viva,
ch'a li occhi temperava il novo giorno,
sanza più aspettar, lasciai la riva,
prendendo la campagna lento lento
su per lo suol che d'ogne parte auliva.
Un'aura dolce, sanza mutamento
avere in sé, mi feria per la fronte
non di più colpo che soave vento

Non di più colpo che soave vento, 2

Non di più colpo che soave vento, 3

Brazilian National Arts Foundation (Funarte) Composition Prize 2011, for symphony orchestra. Premièred at João Caetano Theatre, Rio de Janeiro, by the Orquestra Sinfônica Nacional, directed by Lutero Rodrigues.

Here played  by Orquestra Sinfônica do Paraná, at concert directed by Marcio Steuernagel, Teatro da Reitoria, Curitiba, October 2012.

A rosa trismegista, aberta ao mundo

2007 Klaviersonate, in three movements, is dedicated to the
New Yorker pianist David Witten, who premiered it. Here the recording of its première at Kasser Theatre, Montclair, NJ.

Its German title suggests my expectation that it may be heard as a classical sonata, but its movements were made in reaction to the beauty of three great plastic works:  Caravaggio’s Madonna dei Pellegrini; António Francisco Lisboa, Amos; and Rembrandt's Moeder.

Klaviersonate, 1. La Madonna dei Pellegrini

Amos is a soapstone statue of the prophet, which was sculpted by António Francisco Lisboa as part of Bom Jesus do Matosinhos shrine in Congonhas do Campo, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The shrine was built on a formerly unhabited hill, so that pilgrims had to walk up a path in the woods to reach the church, visiting, on their way, chapels, each one containing a Station of the Cross, represented as a Baroque theatre of sixty-four polychromed wooden statues. In the last chapel there is
Christ dying on the cross. Then some fifty meters walking over a cobbled
area, no garden, no tree, for the three days of Tenebrae. After that, overlooking a double flight of stairs, the twelve prophets, who, according to Christian thought, also prophesied the Messiah. Finally, the Church of the Resurrected Christ. Altogether, the foundations of Christianity in statues.

The wooden statues in the chapels tell us a story — that unfolds in time — of human sufferance and hope embodied in Christ. On the other hand, the stone statues of the prophets are outside time, inhabiting eternity. And perhaps being faithful to their Jewishness, they are not photogenic, or, rather, their meaning is not, paradoxically, in their image: once we have reached the stairs, the prophets grab and impel our eyes, imposing a rhythm to our sight, which leaps from one statue to another in a sacred dance. It was, first of all, the music to this dance that I tried to capture. Then there is the erosion of the soft soapstone by rain and time, the initial imprint of eternity on human works, that I thought to suggest through musical gestures that go across the dance, like the expressive gestures of tango dancers pierce the musical structure.

Finally, and most importantly, there is Amos’s prophecies. Amos says that  God’ message reached him as signs not as speech. And it is clear he knows that God must be sought through the fissures of the language:
“Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night:
that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the
face of the earth: The lord is his name.” 

Like Amos’s prophecies, a great many of 20th-Century art, was intented as a denouncement of the appearances. However, the desire for destroying appearances soon resulted in its opposite, in a passion for the spectacular effect of destruction, in an aesthetic of the destruction itself. On one hand, one may sit peacefully in the movies, eating popcorn, while Godzilla crushes New York. On the other hand, the effort of the ear — needed to give music a form — is futile in so many modern music, because the possible form is that of chaos and destruction. To a contemporary music theory of the affects only remain, virtually, the affect of the night and that of the neurotic, besides the affect of the chaos.

Klaviersonate, 2. Amos

I must have read, when I was a teenager, an essay by Manuel Bandeira in which he says:  “now I know who Rembrandt is. I know that beyond his painting there is in his works a quality that I discovered for the first time — his incomparable musicality. I always have been more sensitive to music than to painting. I always would rather be the author — if God would give me the choice – of a work by a genius of music than a work by a genius of painting. Today, however, I may say that I would not  exchange the work of Rembrandt for any music genius’s work, except, understood, that of Bach.” Sometime ago, I found by chance a 1965 letter by this poet — one of the greatest of the Portuguese language — to Gustavo Corção, a Catholic thinker. In it Bandeira quotes this essay to say that the expression ‘Rembrandt is the Bach of the painting’ belongs first of all to Corção. I do not remember reading Corção’s phrase anywhere before. However I could not agree more. I think, that is the reason the third, last movement of my sonata was conceived as a fugue. 

I first saw Rembrandt’s portrait of his mother soon after I lost my own. It is perfect: an austere and caressing representation of the love his mother had for him. But, even if the imprint of Rembrandt’s mother on my memory had this obvious biographical mark, nothing in my music is thought of as a direct expression of my life. Music is a game — the same cognitive game on which language, music, geometry, etc., find their origin. And the first player we all had to play with was our mother. This initial game is our introduction to the world — and the world, Adorno would say, is atonal: for a child any music is an enigma, but I had to make sure that my piece is, at first at least, an enigma for us too. Since the maternal game is open ended only at the child’s side, because the mother has it more or less structured according to the cultural experiences of hers (Rembrandt symbolized this by picturing the Bible his mother reads), I have chosen for the movement the hard, rigid structure of dodecaphony. But a maternal dodecaphony, if that is not an oxymoron, demands to be covered by ornamental sweets, by the delicacies of love.

Klaviersonate, 3. Moeder

For the portraiture of clouds and sky, for amplified alto flute and piano,
derives from the impact of some verses in John Keats’s Endymion:

Of lucid depth the floor, and far outspread
As brezeless lake, on which the slim canoe
Of feather’d Indian darts about, as through
The delicatest air: air verily,
But for the portraiture of clouds and sky:
This palace floor breath-air, — but for the amaze
Of deep-seen wonders motionless, — and blaze
Of the dome pomp, reflected in extremes,
Globing a golden sphere.
They stood in dreams
Till Triton blew his horn. The palace rang;
The Nereids danc’d; the Syrens faintly sang;
And the great Sea-King bow’d his dripping head.

“As through the delicatest air: air verily, but for the portraiture of clouds and sky”: with extended techniques for the flute and the piano which, often, tie in their sounds — the flute is percussive, the piano airy — and play melodies of fickle repetitions answering to the fragile breeze, to the music of the sea gods and their entourage, to the convoluted syntax, to the unreality of the palace in Keat’s version of the Greek myth of Endymion, the shepherd beloved by the goddess of the moon.

Here played by Valentina Daldegan, alto flute, and Beatriz Furlanetto, piano.

For the portraiture of clouds and sky

Sonâmbulas as flores, is a concertante piece for flute and small orchestra. Like much of my music, it takes as inspiration the myth of Orpheus: it is his singing that provides for a locus amenus amidst the chaos — as Ovid tells us in the 10th book of the Metamorphoses. But here Orpheus’ route is that of the Invenção de Orfeu by Jorge de Lima. 

The flowers are delicate but cold, the territory is mythical but real, imperfect and sorrowful: Sonâmbulas as flores / conservam pelo dia / as noites. / Os ouvidos das pétalas, / e seus lábios de olor / recordam-se / transidos e orvalhados, / indiferentes, frios, tão frios. / Jamais os dias quentes / poderão aquecer-lhes / os seus sangues noturnos / tão frios. / Agora nos jardins / espalham / nos silêncios intactos / suas presenças frias, tão frias. / São beijadas, porém / volvidas / à lembrança das noites / permanecem veladas / e frias.

Here played by Valentina Daldegan, flute, and the Paraná University Youth Orchestra, directed by Marcio Steuernagel.

Sonâmbulas flores

Fifteen years ago, Graham Griffiths commissioned, to the first who had composed for his Camerata Novo Horizonte, a new piece commemorating the tenth anniversary of that important contemporary music ensemble. Between the composition and première, the world spun, the Camerata disintegrated, and the piece, composed for a very unusual formation— flute, bass clarinet, trumpet, viola, marimba and piano —, hibernated longly in the drawer. Revised for the 2012 Funarte prize, it is a concertante piece for each musician, a concerto grosso, inspired by a sixteenth-century  poem by François Villon, which in speaking of loss and longing, ended up by being ominous: “Ou sont les gracieux galants / Que je suivais au temps jadis, / Si bien chantants, si bien parlants, / Si plaisants en faits et en dits?”.

Première at the XX Brazilian Contemporary Music Biennial, Rio de Janeiro, October 2013, Maria Carolina Cavalcanti, flute; Paulo Passos, bass clarinet; José Ricardo Taboada, viola; Nailson Simões, trumpet; Katia Baloussier, piano; e Daniel Serale, marimba.

Ou sont les gracieux galants

Of late, in some of my compositions, I have been borrowing other composer’s ears to judge the results I have from playing with the set of rules I choose for each individual piece. For instance, in Talerè Phoné, I took up John Coltrane’s ears, in Glaciers, soleils d’argent, ﬂots nacreux, cieux de braises, Debussy’s. By selecting rules that Coltrane or Debussy would never use, I make sure that the resulting sonorities are different from theirs — otherwise I would produce pastiches — and so I have to answer in each particular moment, from knowing their music and by using my ear of imagination, “which melodic line, harmonic structure, or rhythmic development would Debussy — say — choose, given these possibilities I found playing my compositional game?”.
Thus, for Karesansui, I’ve borrowed Toru Takemitsu’s ears. And to make it possible for performers, if they so wish, to program my piece in the same concert as one by the great Japanese composer, it is scored for alto flute and guitar, like his Toward the Sea. And, since Takemitsu disliked dodecaphony, I’ve decided for a particular 12-notes row, that, split into three 4-note arrays, has in each array a minor chord — because the three upper strings of a guitar are tuned e-b-g. This gave me the melodic and harmonic frame of possibilities.
But for the rhythmic and phrasal structures, I had to make an effort to capture Japanese aesthetics in a deeper way, starting with the ideas of sawari, or the “apparatus of an obstacle” itself, as Takemitsu wrote in Confronting Silence — the intentional inconvenience that creates part of the expressiveness of a sound; and of ma, the intense, palpable silence that precedes a complex, refined sound. Refinement of a sound implies that its individual colour, its timbre, becomes a factor of composition, a practice that has entered Western music during the last 70 years or so, but I have attempted to direct its existence towards the acceptance of imperfection and transience that results in the beauty of balanced asymmetry — fukinsei — and of a territory of serenity — seijaku — amidst chaos. This was the inspiration for the piece’s name: karesansui is the Japanese dry, zen stone garden. Karesansui is dedicated to the guitarist Orlando Fraga, who premièred it, together with flautist Valentina Daldegan.

Karesansui

Live performance, with Jeferson Ulbrich, solo piano, and the Universidade Federal do Paraná Philarmonic Orchestra, direct by Marcio Steuernagel, at Teatro da Reitoria, Curitiba, Brazil, 4th July 2025.

Ainda que seja noite, notturno per pianoforte e piccola orchestra

Played by Sergio Monteiro Freire (who comissioned it), alto-saxophone, and Aglaê Friggeri, vibraphone. 
There is a passage in the Odissey in which Penelope, bitterly shocked by news about Telemaco, loses her voice, and strives to utter her sentiments. That is half of the inspiration, because multiphonics were comissioned. 
The other half is given by the jazzy instruments themselves: what if John Coltrane were to compose with contemporary sounds?

Talerè Phoné

Not to the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera house

Catarina Domenici, piano, world première, Capela Santa Maria, Curitiba, 17 September 2014.

(Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before,/
Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here,/
Not to the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera house,/
Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home/

Walt Whitman, Leaves of grass, "Italian music in Dakota"

Sounds, echoes, wandering strains

Brazilian National Arts Foundation composition prize 2016. World Première, Sala Cecília Meireles, Rio de Janeiro, 25 October 2017. Sergio Barrenechea, flute; João Senna, viola; Vanja Ferreira, harp.

Glaciers, soleil d'argent, flots nacreux, cieux de braises

La tempête ha béni mes éveils maritimes makes, with Glaciers, soleis d'argent, the 2nd half of my “Diptych Rimbaud”. The flute is the constant character, the scene has changed. First performance, Bologna Conservatory, 17.01.2020, Valentina Daldegan, flute, Nicola Baroni, cello, Valentino Marrè, vibraphone.

Mauricio Dottori

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