PMCE - Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble - Kaija Saariaho Maa (2022)

The new album by Parco della Musica Records features the PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble, the ensemble produced by the Fondazione Musica per Roma residing at the Auditorium Parco della Musica engaged for years in original live projects and in the performance of songs and works by contemporary music composers. In the album the PMCE engages with the composition MAA word which means "earth" whose score is based on the idea of ​​musical metamorphosis and transitions from one material to another. It is a work by Kaija Saariaho which was used by Carolyn Carlson for her own choreography following a commission from the Finnish National Opera. The first performance of the work took place on October 31, 1991 in Helsinki. This score does not develop a real dramaturgy, rather it is built around archetypal themes, as evidenced by the titles of the individual sections: doors, gates, windows, new worlds, travels. The music is cloaked in deliberate mystery in which numerical symbolism plays its part: the number seven of the group of musicians on stage, the seven pieces that make up the score; even the individual parts are each divided into seven internal sections: each of these places the accent on a specific aspect of the musical material, which in turn has already been treated separately in the previous pieces. The entire composition is based on the idea of ​​musical metamorphoses and transitions from one material to another, with the resumption of elements that are found in different pieces and differently treated and contextualized. Each of the pieces that make up MAA is written for an ensemble derived from a total of seven instruments, with the exception of pieces no. 1. – Journey - and n. 5. - Window - which are acousmatic. These two tracks, both made in the Finnish Radio Experimental Studio, make use of instrumental sounds and natural sounds, such as footsteps, wind and water, all transformed with electronic treatments. If we examine Kaija Saariaho's music as a whole in the light of the parameters that individually contribute to the production of meaning, timbre stands out as the most important dimension of the aesthetic perception of his work. But, in reality, the composer's language attempts to break down the type of schematic divisions that are often used following a reading based on the examination of the individual parameters. As with her fellow composers (mostly French) defined as "spectralists", the boundaries between harmony and timbre and between harmonic and inharmonic sound are pushed by Saariaho to the breaking point: her music moves along the continuous dialectic between these extremes. Throughout the MAA composition we find constantly repeated and ornate motif material, in which a subtle and gradual transformation of the same is produced by the intervention and interpolation with electronic sound; at the same time we also see rhythmic pulsations that represent one end of the scale of figurations produced by computer processing. These two elements - the melodic material and the rhythmic aspect - in their multiple forms, give rise to the dialectical substance on which the entire piece hinges. Many of Kaija Saariaho's compositions are designed to encourage us to savor and find ease in the timbral-harmonic detail often cloaked in bright and relaxed bands of sound. Indeed, the sensory stillness that permeates MAA's music inevitably influences our mood and senses, transforming and elevating them to higher levels of sensitivity and awareness.