"Mirrors"

Mirrors produce symmetries and make the world deeper.

A short, ironic musical theme, as a single arpeggiated chord, is mirrored through time. The short theme and its retrograde, taken together as question and answer, form a palindrome.

Palindromes are here and there in this piece, like a game of mirrors.

Written during the lockdown, the terrible March 2020 when Italians were closed in their homes, "Mirrors" is an homage to symmetry and to the way in which mirrors seem to enlarge indoor spaces.

In physics, "symmetry" is an invariance with respect to a change. As the physics Nobel Prize winner Franck Wilczek said, this is a "Change without a Change." In music, there can be mirroring of structures of counterpoint (as used by Luigi Cherubini) or invariance with respect to pi/2 rotations in one-page piano piece (Gaetano Giani Luporini), and mirror-playability of a violin duet (Mozart). The piece "Mirrors" (using vertical mirrors with respect to the score) is inspired by classic music techniques and by physics, whose transformations shed light on mysterious mirrors.

The score is in C. The piece can be performed with a flute or, transposed, with a flauto d'amore in A. "Mirrors" was composed for the flutist Ginevra Petrucci, who first performed and recorded it within the "Flauto d'Amore Project." The recording is available at https://flautodamoreproject.bandcamp.com/track/mirrors.