Eikon (2004)
for large symphonic band and electronics
Duration: 10′
Commissioned by CRM – Rome

First performance: Rome, 02/03/2004, Teatro Palladium, “Identità e forme sonore”
Air Force Band, conductor Patrizio Esposito

Presentation

A national anthem is one of the most rooted musical elements in the community that produced and elected it. Like a secular icon, immutable and eternal, a hymn periodically relives on the official solemnity of civil rites, in the most diverse environments because they all belong to it, from squares to barracks, from stadiums, to churches, to concert halls … But in its synthesizing and enhancing collective feelings, adapting to their changing over time, even inspiring them, a hymn seems to have exhausted its purely musical values, belonging to another domain, as well as to others from musicians, extraneous, as a piece of music, to traditional aesthetic categories.
Accepting the challenge of measuring oneself as a composer with the national anthem implies the attempt to bring back to the music channel a sound phenomenon with a very high level of recognition and significance, heritage of collective musical memory to the point of appearing in some ways untouchable. . Bring it back to the field of musical invention to see if, looking in its interstices, in the cavities and stratifications created by time, it can happen to come across drops of stories, splinters inflicted by human events, fragments of memory …