Shedding Some Light on Donatoni's Lumen

SHEDDING SOME LIGHT ON DONATONI’S LUMEN GUILLERMO LUPPI INTRODUCTION: BRIEF CONTEXTUALIZATION OF LUMEN HE PRODUCTION OF THE ITALIAN COMPOSER Franco Donatoni extends precisely throughout the second half of the twentieth century , his first work being from 1950 (String Quartet no. 1) and his last one from the year 2000 (ESA [In Cauda V], for orchestra). We can divide his works into three different periods, according to his own words. First, the negative period, which extends from his first works until the end of the 60s. Next, the transition period, which occurred during the 70s. Lastly, the positive period, which began in the 80s and continued until the completion of his last work. The present work is from the year 1975, therefore occurring in the middle of the transition period and of his career. The 70s were a very difficult time for Donatoni. With his approach to musical composition, he entered into a crisis: he no longer felt any enthusiasm for serialism, aleatoricism, or combinatory automatism, where the composer had no subjective involvement (Wright 2000). The death of his master and friend, Bruno Maderna, in 1973 also contributed to Donatoni’s depression. As a result, he stopped T 180 Perspectives of New Music composing and became a copyist. We encounter this crisis reflected in the amount of works composed between 1971 and 1974—only six for this otherwise prolific composer. Nevertheless, after the end of the year 1974, he regains his passion for composing. As a result, he adapts his approach towards musical composition, as reflected in the techniques employed and, consequently, in the resulting sonority: his works after 1975 become much more confident and intense in comparison to his first works, in which he cared mostly for the logic of the musical process rather than in its expressiveness. Post 1975, he starts to develop a more ludic, imaginative style, where the first impulse of the musical idea has its own strength and creates its own path through the composition. This is what Donatoni later called L’esercizio ludico dell’invenzione (the ludic exercise of the invention). This exercise manifested a positive point of view in converting the compositional activity not into something hermetic or esoteric, as in his negative period, but instead into a playful space. This change of mindset led Donatoni to compose many works that highly impressed international audiences. Those of utmost importance were: Ash (1976), Jeux and Spiri (both from 1977), and, of course, Lumen, written in the memory of Luigi Dallapiccola, which is less known than the three other works. The materials used by Donatoni in this period were frequently minimal, consisting in a very compressed idea or gesture, which is to be found attached to the continual process of mutations. As we will further explore, the composer classified his procedures in a very precise way, and even if these characteristics are more explicit in his works after the 80s, we most importantly encounter many of them in Lumen. IMPORTANT IDEAS PRESENT IN DONATONI’S POSITIVE PERIOD One of the composers that Donatoni admired the most was Béla Bartók. In one article from the year 1982 entitled “Presenza di Bartók,” the Italian composer esteems the String Quartet no. 4 because of the presence of the following four characteristics: 1. Its cellular exposition and organic growth; 2. Its expansion without a development of the materials; 3. The juxtaposition of organisms, mutations, and evolutions; 4. Static pulsations and tone continuity. Shedding Some Light on Donatoni’s Lumen 181 Even though if this article was written seven years after Lumen, and considering that the first half of the 70s was a time of personal crisis and research of new expressions, in the present work we find most of the characteristics that Donatoni pointed out from Bartók’s string quartet in a somehow prophetic manner. The Italian composer gets further than just an abstraction of a few ideas, and decides to develop them in a very personal way. For example, from the idea of “juxtaposition of organisms” he created the notion of Codes, which are: “compositional tools that serve to keep not only the stability but also the [musical] movement. . . . The dichotomy between the stability...