Deus ex Machina, Uncovering Aldo Clementi's System

DEUS EX MACHINA, UNCOVERING ALDO CLEMENTI’S SYSTEM1 MICHELE ZACCAGNINI 1. INTRODUCTION TALIAN COMPOSER ALDO CLEMENTI, who passed away in 2011, has left us with a substantial oeuvre. Though not a household name in the contemporary music scene, he maintains the solid reputation of a composer who over the decades produced a highly idiosyncratic yet consistently refined oeuvre.2 Clementi’s late period, usually identified as the “diatonic period,” consists of a collection of sound panels built on simple, diatonic melodic fragments: Clementi . . . moved away from the structuralism of his early works towards a compositional method based on the selection and subsequent polyphonic elaboration of modal and diatonic materials drawn from past European music, particularly the music of Bach and Brahms, but also Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Liadov, Chopin, Schumann, Mozart, Purcell, Dufay, troubadour melodies and Gregorian chant.3 I 138 Perspectives of New Music While some aspects of Clementi’s compositional procedures during his diatonic period have been brought to light and discussed in previous scholarship,4 others have only been objects of speculation. My research is concerned with unfolding the procedures Clementi used to choose his themes and their relative canonic transpositions, and with assessing the aesthetic criteria that led the composer to adopt and develop such procedures. I have had the unprecedented privilege of being able to study the composer’s autograph sketches for this purpose. My wholehearted gratitude goes to Anna Clementi for granting me the access to these sketches.5 In addition to unfolding the secrets of the composer’s process, this research is also concerned with providing an assessment of the composer ’s legacy in today’s musical landscape. I will ultimately attempt to reinterpret the composer’s oeuvre under a new light, bringing to the surface those qualities that make it aesthetically relevant, perhaps even seminal. In one of the most celebrated romantic Italian poems, L’Infinito, a hedgerow stands in front of the poet, impeding his view; eventually the simple hedgerow is all it takes for the poet to leap into an indiscernible obscurity, an infinite unknown. Clementi’s themes are related to Leopardi’s hedgerow, for despite their simplicity, they eventually destroy any recognizable trace of a musical narrative and bring the listener into an indiscernible, obscure mass of sound. The only way to truly appreciate Clementi’s late music is to abandon the moorings of the traditional dialectical musical narrative, viz. a dynamic unfolding of musical ideas, and accept its static and unfathomable complexity to eventually fall into what Leopardi described as a sweet shipwreck—un dolce naufragare. But poetic metaphors only apply to the description of the perceptual experience that Clementi’s music might induce. The description of Clementi’s compositional procedures, on the other hand, does not tolerate the intrusion of any such “poetic licenses.” In the second section of this article, a detailed description of the composer’s procedures will give the reader the opportunity to look over the composer’s shoulder while he is at his desk, planning his sound masses. And what will become apparent then is the uncompromising determinism that guided the composer’s hand, his precise and almost mechanistic ways of planning and putting sounds together. This article will focus on one important work of Clementi’s late period: Aus Tiefer.6 To expedite my assumptions about the composer’s procedures with the actual results, viz. the score of Aus Tiefer, I have relied on one of the modern algorithmic composers’ favorite tools: OpenMusic.7 Software like OpenMusic8 is effective in recreating Deus ex Machina, Uncovering Aldo Clementi’s System 139 Clementi’s process, and is also significant in showing the algorithmic nature of Clementi’s procedures and its resemblances to recent computerized processes commonly categorized as algorithmic composition or computer aided composition (CAC). 2. ERASURE OF CONTRASTS AND THE (IR)RELEVANCE OF THE COMPOSER’S PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS Clementi’s late production focuses on a consistent exploration of the idea of stasis. Each of the pieces of the diatonic period possesses an unmistakable duple nature: a smooth, uneventful surface and a deep, impenetrable complexity. Deprived of any clear contrast or sense of development, the complex textures are devoid of any forward-moving narrative. Clementi achieved...