Luca Francesconi
Luca Francesconi is an Italian composer. He studied at the Milan Conservatory, later with Karlheinz Stockhausen and then Luciano Berio.
Early years
Luca Francesconi was born in Milan. His father was a painter who edited Il Corriere dei piccoli and conceived Il Corriere dei ragazzi, while his mother was an advertiser. Francesconi spent his early years in QT8, a working-class quarter in Milan. At the age of five he began to learn the piano. Although he was accepted into the junior high school section of the city's conservatory six years later, he pulled out. Instead, Francesconi opted to attend the junior high school in QT8.Education
We need to profoundly rethink and filter in a determined way the enormously rich potential that has been elaborated in the past and to use it for expressive purposes.Francesconi returned to the Conservatory of Milan in 1974, while he was still attending the Berchet Classical Languages High School, and explored the musical landscape, taking an interest in different sounds. He played in jazz and rock groups as well as in classical concerts. Francesconi worked as a session man in recording studios, and composed music for theatre, cinema, advertising, and television.
Francesconi attended the Milan Conservatory and enrolled in the composition course conducted by Azio Corghi. "From him I learnt the trade, the fundamentals, counterpoint and those things, professional seriousness and open-mindedness." In the meantime he continued to explore electronic music and in 1977 took time out to immerse himself in jazz at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen
The mountain is in front of us, and it is necessary to pass over it, with enormous force and patience. It's not enough just to contemplate it nor to sneak by it via secondary paths much less go backwards claiming that the mountain is not there.Donnerstag aus Licht went on stage at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1981. Stockhausen is a historical reference point: Francesconi admired him for his extraordinary organisational consistency, for his tireless search for a linguistic unity. He was also deeply struck by the visionary quality of this initial opera. He wanted to observe the composer at work, so he enrolled in the intensive course that Stockhausen held in Rome that same year. "From him I learnt rigor, at first imbibing it by osmosis, and then demythologising it."
Meeting and collaboration with Luciano Berio
Luciano didn't talk much about the more 'technical' and delicate aspects of his work as a composer. I remember that when he least expected it, I would fire questions at him point-blank, hoping to pick up some tips. His replies were like enigmas. They had something sacral about them and they required divining rituals to decode them.With Berio, Francesconi studied above all in the field, just like the workshop artisans of old, acting as his assistant from 1981 to 1984. He worked directly on the score of La vera storia and participated in the production as rehearsal pianist and second conductor/substitute maestro. In 1984 he collaborated with the composer in the rewriting of Monteverdi's Orfeo. He was also present with Berio at Tanglewood where he attended one of his famous summer courses.
Activities, works, research
In 1984 three of Francesconi's pieces, including Passacaglia, for large orchestra, were selected for the Gaudeamus International Composers Award in Amsterdam. This first important recognition on the international scene created a useful tie with the Dutch music scene and laid the foundation for further commissions. Meanwhile, in Italy, thanks to a commission from the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, Francesconi had the opportunity to seriously put into practice for the first time his idea of a "polyphony of languages": Suite 1984. The polyphony that I have in mind hasn't got anything to do with the "postmodern" or collage, the exotic pastiche, the provincial chinoiserie of our grandparents. Instead, it is a free fusion of ideas in a compact and linguistically very solid body that reveals its profound energies in its inner profundity and not in an exterior heterogeneity. Energies that come from the earth, from popular culture, from ancient African and Oriental cultures."In 1984 the Teatro Lirico in Cagliari presented a quartet made up of the pianist and composer Franco D'Andrea together with the group Africa Djolé led by the master percussionist Fode Youla from Guinea. The idea was then conceived that the music of this group be recreated in symphonic form by the 28-year-old Luca Francesconi for a performance by the theatre's orchestra under the direction of Francesconi himself, a recent product of rigorous musical studies, assistant to Luciano Berio and 'jazz student of D'Andrea', as he used to like to define himself. The concert attracted experts anxious to hear novelties and promising syncretisms of various musical civilisations, and it was a triumph." "Orchestra, African percussionists and jazz quintet: the choice of instrumental make-up itself contained in an explicit manner the generative nucleus of one of the principal aesthetic motors of the music of Luca Francesconi: the tendency to place alongside one another, following the rules of contrast and fusion, sounds and languages of highly diverse origins."
1984–1990
Francesconi's first record, an LP recorded in the United States, contained Viaggiatore insonne, on a text by Sandro Penna. "Francesconi's attitude as a composer is in fact similar to that of a tireless traveller, who explores linguistic spaces in search of their ever-shifting confines, and who conducts an etiological study to determine the confines between noise and sound, between instinct and reason."The new piece Vertige, for string orchestra, was performed in Strasbourg. Francesconi composed various works for ensemble which were performed in Cagliari, Paris, Città di Castello, Middelburg, and Brussels.
In 1984 Casa Ricordi became Francesconi's publisher and since then has published all his works.
In 1985 he was invited to the Festival Musica ‘900 in Trent for a series of public conversations with Franco Donatoni. This meeting proved extremely important; talking with the great Verona composer, both in their public conversations and during train trips together, Francesconi felt that he reached a solution for a number of unresolved problems. Plot in fiction, dedicated to Franco Donatoni, was in many ways the happy outcome of this experience.
Plot in Fiction
The really difficult thing is to write works with a rich and articulated complex of meanings and events: works, that is, that are capable of assuming a linguistic structure, of being a world, but whose complexity is transparent.Plot in Fiction, for oboe and cor anglais or clarinet and chamber group, constructs its sonoric line around key notes within a rigorous formal framework. "The point here is to find the "plot" in the "fiction", the narrative line that twists and turns through the complexity and intricacy of a "mass of everyday symbols". What's involved is an architecture that guides the listener within the composition: the search for a compositional transparency, based on pure energy, directly perceptible, without any need to exhibit the mechanisms underlying it. The piece was performed for the first time at the Festival Musica '900 in Trent by Ensemble Musique Oblique under the direction of Sandro Gorli; the soloist was Diego Dini Ciacci.
Mambo
At this point I would say that it is no longer possible to talk of a language devoid of code or morphogenesis, i.e. of a language that comes into being while the aesthetic event is being produced. It's necessary to also come to terms with a substratum, with what I call semantic pressure, that is with history.Mambo, for solo piano, is Francesconi's most jazz-like piece, and it reveals clearly his search for an ever-uneasy equilibrium between sonoric materials, gathered in their primitive state, and the evocative power of history, from which the composer cannot remove himself. In the piece there is an overlap of a rhythmic ostinato in a low register, a series of ascending-descending diatonic lines, and, finally, a sequence of pounding 4-note chords. In this continual 'friction of contraries' resides the aesthetic motor of Francesconi's music as well as the powerful charge of sonoric seduction that his works carry. Francesconi exploits as a precious resource the capacity for intense analysis developed in Western culture. He takes a shared musical reference and dissects it remorselessly until he lays bare further possibilities of development, of transformation. Wielding its 'semantic pressure' as though it were a picklock, he presses further and further inwards, towards the energy-bearing roots of sound.
AGON, centre for music research and experimentation
It's important for composers to confront the use of computers face-on; even empirically, at a basic level. To search for, study, and promote new means through which to communicate with them, new interfaces. It's important for them to help to lead mankind back to the centre of his machines.In 1990 Francesconi founded AGON with two great utopian visions in mind. The first was that it is still possible and desperately important to work together, cooperatively, imagining projects to realise together with others, to exchange experiences, ideas. AGON came into being as an organism with a public identity: "it is not my or your studio"; it aspires to be a place where it's possible to talk, meet, and not just pursue one's own interest. The second utopian idea was to start from below and not from high-tech; to depart from the musical needs of composers with a view to stimulating a different relationship, simpler, "less terroristic", between real musicians and machines. Handling electronics also serves, according to Francesconi, to recuperate a physical, auditive approach to musical composition, which, if limited to paper and pencil, runs the risk of becoming too speculative, weakening the direct relationship with the sonoric material. AGON has for many years been one of the most active centres in Italy for music research and production.