New Album Release - ‘Introspections’
An honest look inside, through the piano.
I often see the piano as a mirror. Sometimes there might be more truth in a reflection, and I always felt that whatever comes out of my piano is a dispassionate, objective, frustratingly true reflection of what’s going on, with me, with the world.
The piano has led me throughout the years to learn about reality, beauty, and myself. I was transformed by music many times, and my relationship with it was also transformed many times. Initially I would place myself on the receiving end, listening and enjoying all that music offered. The universe is filled with musical marvels ready for me to discover, great artists who turned the beauty they saw into music. Like a child in a toy store, I just had to be ready and willing to take it all in.
Later that relationship developed into one in which I was on the creating side, along with so many - great and non-great artists - making my own music and offering it to the world. Whether the results have been good or not, it matters less than the value of actively participating in the human endeavour of creating, which for me meant transforming my experience of reality into sound. Since then, every time I play I find myself on both sides of the equation, the music-maker who offers and the music-listener who receives. To play music is to open that dialogue.
Making music is the way we create reality and respond to it at once; far from being a self-centred, narcissistic activity, it leads us - I believe - to escape ourselves and open up to new ways of feeling, hearing, being. It’s the way we experience a moment of life and craft the way we relate to it. Making music ultimately relies on an effort to align with the beauty we long for in the world.
Investigation is the name of the game: motivated by playfulness and triggered by curiosity, to be an artist to me means to look into the unknown, to welcome a sense of loss while experience something new. Because to truly experience one needs to let go, I believe.
Every form of art is a kind of inner search: improvisation is possibly the most intuitive way to investigate our creativity. Throught improvisation we direct the attention inside and translate, in real time, our experience into expressive form. But the limits of improvisation are many: the necessary compromise between a perfect, beautiful idea and our instrumental ability to bring it into reality is a deeply problematic issue, one that anyone who has ever tried to improvise knows well.
My latest album 'Introspections' is NOT a work based on improvisation: the investigation has occurred in stages, throughout years. While many pieces were initiated as improvisations ('Margherita Volante', 'Letting Go') they later developed into fully written compositions. Some of them ('Nocturne', 'Breathing, Dancing, Loving', 'Under my Skin') allow to be more in the moment through sections of open improvisation. The piano is the stage where the play happens: love, loss, desire, pain, longing. The waltz emerges as a recurring character ('My Idiosyncratic Valentine', 'Chiara e Zeno', 'Margherita Volante'): legacy of the classical world, the waltz has been running in my imagination as a freeing, joyful, yet delicate and sophisticated dance. Each score will be posted and available on my website for anyone interested (the sheet music of 'Nocturne' is already there).
All the pieces in 'Introspections' were born from one fundamental impulse, which is to see how far inside I can reach. As I listen to it, my musical foundations emerge as rooted in classical and romantic piano repertoire: you may find a predilection for soft textures and delicate nuances; refined touch and tone control shape the musical intentions of ‘Introspections,’ or so I like to think. Anyway, I recommend listening with closed eyes...
My latest album 'Introspections' is now released and available to download (support independent artists!) or to stream on any music platform.
Thank you for reading, I hope you will enjoy my new music. More (actually a lot more) will be coming this year. Stay tuned. Much love.
Alberto
