Interpreter or composer? Davide Ficco’s Solo Guitar Works on #neuguitars #blog
DA VINCI PUBLISHING Davide Ficco: Solo Guitar Works (davinci-edition.com)
I believe there is a moment for every musician when he/she decides to become what he/she simply is. I think one of these possible moments can coincide in the fact of becoming a composer. A moment of awareness, through which to see one’s feelings validated, but also to identify the origin of these feelings within creative organizational structures. Becoming aware does not only mean becoming aware of facts, ideas and perceptions of which we were previously unaware: it rather means radically changing our entire relationship with the world. Awareness is a creative process. The creation of both a new “I” and a new “object”, on which one can intervene as well as on realities capable of being potentially transformed. This transformation, however, requires knowledge and a certain sense of maturity: I don’t think it can happen through the use of spontaneity, voluntarism and/or the effect of a simple rupture event.
For several years now, I have been following the career of Davide Ficco, an intense career as an interpreter, at the service of his instrument, the guitar, and of many composers, both past and contemporary, whose works he has revived. A career as a traveler within musical maps, which reminds me of a story by Jorge Luis Borges, a story published in 1935, entitled “On Rigor in Science”, present in the then version of the collection “A Universal history of infamy “. This short story tells of an emperor of a great empire who created a map so detailed that it was as large as the empire itself. The current map was enlarged and destroyed when the empire conquered or lost territory. When the empire crumbled, all that remained was the map.
“…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”
Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
This analogy, almost pantheistic in nature, reminds me of the work of a composer. The work of a cartographer whose interior geography, critical and free, tends to multiply metaphors and conceptual categories. Avoiding seeing the world from a single point of view, he turns around it knowing that he will never represent it completely and never definitively, that representation must not exclude discovery. An inner world described as a possible multiplicity of non-mutually exclusive languages, orders and forms cannot be dominated; it can only be heard, told, in some ways admired, in others pitied or avoided.
And if every map, every score, every text has a composer Cartographer who draws it, then it has at least one interpreter traveler who relives it, who re-reads it. Davide Ficco wisely preferred that his text be reread by another interpreter. Maybe he wanted to get rid of every alibi. Perhaps he wanted his territory, his map to be reviewed with different eyes, to arrive at a new deciphering and representation. The representation of the excellent Edoardo Pieri, who skillfully interpreted his compositions, all for classical guitar:
01 Psaltes
04 Sette Frammenti su Poesie di Federico Garcia Lorca
11 Berceuse
12 Trois Nocturnes de Poche
15 Der Atem der Nacht
16 Chromedxide Heart
Davide Ficco Solo Guitar Works is an album with a complex nature and a long gestation: his compositions cover a period of time that starts from 1988 and reaches the present day, while its recording took four years, from 2015 to 2019. A extensive work, a varied and complex musical cartography, perfectly conforming to the articulated personality that animates Davide Ficco. An album that perfectly represents him. I think both he and Edoardo Pieri can be fully satisfied. DDD recording with a flawless sound quality.
NeuGuitars 