Mario Baroni - A portrait of Fabrizio De Rossi Re I think that De Rossi Re's music has its roots in his passion for many different kinds of music, and in his capacity to render them compatible and to make them play together. But there’s also another aspect: the sympathy or, if you will, empathy for the potential listener for whom his music is conceived. I don’t know if these listeners are there and if so how many, but I know that his music seeks them, and I’m sure that, sometimes, research like this helps to create them, to make them real. What, then, does his music mean for these potential listeners? I’d say, first of all, that it wants to persuade them that, even today, a kind of listening which is not merely banal but also pleasing can exist. The pleasure of listening, in the concert music of the last fifty or sixty years, could indeed be there, but you had to conquer it under two conditions: first, an ear accustomed to the absence of consonances, of rhythmical regularities and points of conclusion in time – only those whose ears were accustomed to these ‘absences’ and who did not want to find what could not be there, could arrive at a real pleasure in this kind of listening. Second, the listener had (and has nowadays, too) to share that feeling of unease communicated by those kinds of music, a feeling that, symbolically, represented an unease of living. These two conditions tend to filter the listening by mechanisms of thought that separate it from the immediate pleasure of sound. Composers can be satisfied with these filters, but listeners have a hard time attempting to accept them. And even performers doesn’t make use of filters: they play trying to persuade and attract. De Rossi Re, as an enthusiastic musician – one that knows very well how many heartstrings music of any kind can tug in the mind and even in the body of those who love it–and also as a performer who has maintained, in composing music, the taste and the strength of the impact of sound, devotes himself to looking for these ways and understandings with his potential listeners. Is there anything wrong?
The secret of the cultural quality of the whole operation lies in the technical wisdom of writing. Especially – but not only – in some of the early works, he shows us how to deal with the orchestra with a subtlety he certainly learned at school, but also studied in the examples of the great masters of the Twentieth Century, from Ravel to Stravinskij, from Petrassi to Bartók and Ligeti. And even when he doesn’t deploy these skills explicitly, when he works on simpler palettes, the presence of this refined taste for timbre still has a place. Another important aspect lies in the form of these pieces. The sequence of the episodes into which they are divided is based on two principles that belong to all the music of the world (except for the ‘hard’ music of the past decades, in which they were intentionally excluded): the perceivable repetition of longer or shorter fragments, and the introduction of variants. These formal principles have an advantage: the listener can have the pleasure of recognizing and enhancing what has yet been heard, and he waits for the return of the known. But in the end the most important trick is to propose recognizable patterns and then to introduce changes that let surprise happen. Introducing changes and proposing surprises (a strange chord, an unusual rhythm or tone) is relatively easy: what’s difficult is to make these gestures able to maintain the attention to a certain level and let the listener be pleasured in listening and desirous to prolong the game. It’s at this point that we can measure the musical creativity of the composer. And I have to admit that, while listening to many of De Rossi Re’s pieces, I‘ve felt just that: a desire for them to continue. I also think that, aside from these compositional practices, one can see an invitation to savoir-vivre. The attitudes toward a radical negation of the world in which we live have by now come to an end and should leave the field free for some aspect of trust in human kind. That doesn’t mean we live in a beautiful world, that we are all happy and love each other; it means that we can devise together something different. But in order to devise something together we need a mutual understanding. So, this music neither abdicate in illustrating sad images, grotesque, ironic or bitter ones, nor in smiling sometimes. They live an everyday life, they tell and invite us to share it and change it. A last feature of civilization one can find in the compositions of De Rossi Re lies in the fact that they intend to speak to many: they can wink at well-trained musicians, but can also be listenable for those who have an unsophisticated ear. This is certainly a risk, and could make some critics’ noses turn up, especially the noses of ‘strong’ ones. The most difficult problem is to find the right balance: it occurred even to me, sometimes, to think that some pieces of his wouldn’t fit my taste. But I am convinced that knowing how to speak about everyday life,
and to many, is far more important, for the future of music, than finding out those admirable and prophetic proposals which once were appreciated and enhanced. But those proposals belonged to a world in which society was dominated by privileged social layers, and not to the ‘democratic’ world of today, in which the leading culture is far more varied, contradictory and wide-ranging. I know that many composers and critics wouldn’t agree, but I’d like to propose a game to them: try and imagine, with a certain plausibility, what the artistic trends will be in the near future.