“A Walk Through a Musical Garden”: Compositional Paths in Maderna’s Late Works

Summary

Thus, as Kretschmar says in Mann's Doktor Faustus, Beethoven's late works often communicate an impression of being unfinished …

Three-Dimensional Music

Bruno Maderna's musical production is characterized by a continuous experimentation with compositional techniques that make him an exemplary case in the rich and articulated panorama of the late twentieth century. It moves on multiple levels that intersect each other: from research on a conceptual level to the choice of instrumental formations up to performative solutions. The famous expression “selva foltissima” (thick forest), proposed by Massimo Mila in the aftermath of the composer's premature death to define his catalogue as a whole, reveals labyrinthine undertones if one goes so far as to consider both the close connections that exist between different works, and the specific compositional choices, which often present issues that call for particular theoretical reflection.

Within these processes, his precocious and varied familiarity with different technologies plays a very important role. He was equally at home with traditional composition on paper, electronic and mixed music, radio drama, and also audiovisual products. Even his rich production of functional music – such as radio and television background music and film soundtracks – always became a training ground of primary importance whose results had repercussions on the more specifically creative side. Just as fundamental was his intense activity as a conductor, which began at an early age and continued at a top level right up to the last days of his life; even though, at the time, his conducting was often perceived as a “distraction” from his work as a composer, it instead represented a factor capable of stimulating particular creative activity in certain stages of his full maturity.

His remarkable mastery on a technical level was accompanied by strict control of the compositional phases. In the compositions of the 1950s, which marked the consolidation of his artistic personality, we find an abundance of preparatory materials that reveal extremely meticulous planning; these were gradually modified, sometimes decreasing in number, in the works of the following years (in what constitutes almost a second phase of his production), where procedures of controlled aleatoric music, personal collage techniques, and reuse of the same materials on several occasions were advanced.