Curiosity, liberty, consistency: I would like to employ these three words as guidelines for my approach to composition which, since the last decade, at least, inclines towards diversity as one of its main goals. Could this perhaps be a reaction, from an artistic point of view, to the loss of variety and peculiarity in nature and in our contemporary globalized world?
A piece of music nowadays could be considered as the synthesis of a multi-source or multicultural approach due to the conditions in which we experience culture and art (as a product of the cultural industry) and to which we become accustomed, or educated. In the artistic product this synthesis can be manifest or hidden. Artists offer different aesthetic answers to this phenomenon: cross-over or merging differences in a new melting pot, soundscape, neo-classicism or postmodernism, and the still active search for new, never heard sound universes being explored by new (or old) means.
For some - partially unknown or unconscious - reasons, I am tending more and more to conceive the composer as a multi-identity artist who, instead of finding a way to merge all the different aspects of his compositional inputs into a unique style (adopted for his whole production, or for a period of his artistic production), deals with the composing of different, peculiar pieces with a variety of inputs as if they were written by different persons: each one being a coherent result of the composer's curiosity and freedom; each one relating to the others in order to delineate a path which, step by step and at a high level, reveals the "global" features of his composing art.
History, both past and recent, offers plenty of examples of such multiverse artists: Stravinsky and Ligeti being among the most recent (and emblematic).
I insist on saying: pieces can be inclusive in the complex way we give birth to them, but exclusive (not showing the diversity) in their final result. This, however, is not what characterizes a multiverse approach to composing. The emphasis should, instead, be on the way a composer is creatively capable of generating different, peculiar and unique pieces, no matter whether they are exclusive or inclusive.
If I may use this strong image, the composer could be seen as the center of a solar system in which his compositions are the planets interacting together in a global, dynamic and coherent superior way. I am talking about coexistence (despite any differences or contrasts) as opposed to assimilation: aiming that the different identities together form an integrated system.
Fado errático, or the idea of a non neutral screen: the projected image is altered by the latency of the other images - less visible, but remaining - on the screen, which our perception has to deal with. A music that is heard above the other musics that we involuntarily listen to, a music that - actively - makes its way through the other, passive musics and that "asks to be heard" even before it is spontaneously listened to. In Fado errático, that overturns the normal condition of globalized listening: it forces consumer music to be heard through contemporary music (whereas contemporary classical music - the so-called art music - is normally listened to as a moment of purification or separation from the "triviality" in which the world that surrounds us is imbued).
