Sonata

This is the first piece I have written that carries a "technical" name in its title, with an explicit reference to a traditional form: "sonata." But it is not a sonata, because today it is no longer possible to write sonatas following the model of "sonata form" as codified and sublimated by the First Viennese School—unless one limits oneself to anachronistic exercises in style. Nevertheless, this piece is based on a profound reflection on the architectural values of this form and their role in shaping the expressiveness of the musical content that takes form within it.
For two reasons. The first concerns time. New music, in its exploration of the unheard and of sound perception in new ways, must seek organizational strategies that structure time and provide its content with a compelling and emotionally engaging narrative. Homogeneity and heterogeneity, variety and uniformity of the elements that make up a piece, their abundance or restraint, their apparent complexity or simplicity—none of these would mean anything without an organizational logic that includes repetitions and returns, presentations in different registers, fragmentations and recombinations, transpositions into different harmonic realms (where "harmony" is understood in a broad sense, including its complement, "inharmony"). Form constructs meaning, creating its poetic dimension and particular expressive color.
The second reason is the relationship that the sonata establishes with tradition. Truly creative and innovative contemporary composers have not regarded sonata form as a canon to be adhered to, but rather as a fundamental archetype: a process that pushes beyond the known, that can lead beyond the pillars of Hercules of the already heard, and guide toward the unheard. Thus, after the sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and many other composers from the Germanic, French, Central European, Eastern European, and Balkan traditions, the continuous experimentation with its architecture has remained a constant (consider, in 20th- and 21st-century music, the astonishing examples of Berg’s Sonata, Schönberg’s Kammersymphonie, Boulez’s Sonatas, or Ives’s Sonata, to name just a few of the most well-known). The reason for such enduring interest and fertility, in my opinion, lies in the fact that the sonata is an extraordinary mechanism capable of tempering expression and forcing it into objectivity, placing it at a distance while simultaneously bringing it into focus. In this way, it prevents the self-indulgent and narcissistic outpouring of the "Artist" who celebrates themselves in the name of a supposed creative freedom based on "spontaneity," openness to the irrational, and instinctiveness. In the process of tempering, expressiveness is refined, as are the means through which it manifests: the artist’s dream becomes collective, capable of speaking for all; emotions become shared; personal signifying elements are sublimated; those of tradition reveal themselves in a new dimension or disappear into a time machine that no longer moves in a single direction, where past and future intertwine in multiple paths.
All of this was constantly at play during the months of work on this piece, amid fierce doubts and unspoken enthusiasms, calling me to a higher responsibility for having accepted the challenge posed to me by Filippo Gorini for his project Sonata for 7 Cities. Writing a "Sonata" today, after centuries of sonatas. And in Vienna, no less—one of the most historically significant capitals of the sonata. I would almost call it an exercise in ethical discipline in confronting this form: not a single note must be wasted, no expressive value can be squandered. The sonata is not chatter, confession, intimate outpouring, or fleeting vision, nor is it a hermetic aphorism, a prelude to the vanity of sound—it is a discourse as public as possible, concrete and captivating, yet addressing each listener directly and individually, should they choose to welcome it.

S.G. 19.2.25