A few moments with Caterina di Cecca

On Wednesday 31 October at the Warehouse in London we will be playing Jonathan Harvey’s masterful Song Offerings, the world premiere of Benjamin Graves’s Four Facades, and new pieces from two of our 2018 Call for Scores winners, Caterina di Cecca and Judit Varga. Caterina, who is based in Rome, spoke to us about saxophone potential, the poetry of Rilke and Pavese, and her research on personal branding for musicians.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson: Hi Caterina! The piece you have written for us has an unusual title, Die Brücken hinter uns – ‘the bridges behind us’. Could you start by telling us something about the background to the piece? Where does the title come from, for example? And what are the inspirations behind the work?

Caterina di Cecca: ‘Die Brücken hinter uns’ is a phrase in R. M. Rilke’s book entitled Notizen zur Melodie der Dinge – ‘Notes on the Melody of Things’.

I share Rilke’s view that we all live on different islands, but that the islands are not far enough apart for us to stay solitary. The only way to interact is to make dangerous leaps from one island to another, each time risking falling back to where we were before. This is not strange in fact because the only way to really connect with others is to consider the background that links us together.

Our fulfillments take place deep in the radiant backgrounds. There, in the background, is motion, and will. There play out the histories; we are only the dark headlines. There is our reconciliation and our leave-taking, our consolation and sorrow. There, we are, while here in the foreground we only come and go. (Rilke, Notizen zur Melodie der Dinge, XVIII)

All conflict, all error, comes from the fact that people look for what they have in common in themselves, not in the things behind them, in the light, in the landscape, in the beginning, and in death. They lose themselves and gain nothing in return. They mingle with each other because they cannot truly unite themselves. (Rilke, Notizen zur Melodie der Dinge, XXXVII)

I found the type of relationship described above between solo/tutti, foreground/background very suitable for transposition into music, and this piece will be the first in a series whose formal structure derives from these assumptions.

In my work strong and incisive gestures emerge from an indistinct and magmatic situation and are given to the saxophone. The various potentials of this multifaceted instrument (percussive, melodic, articulative and timbral) are exploited, and it plays a pre-eminent role. In the beginning, in fact, its interventions motivate changes in the rest of the ensemble. Later, however, the soloist adapts and conforms more and more to what appeared at first as simply its background, recognizing its value and becoming part of it in an organic way.

TR-J: Looking at the score lots of the saxophone part is written using just keyslaps and other noise effects. How important is noise in your music, and what approach do you use to compose with it? Are you led by your ear, for example, or the capabilities of the instrument, or do you have some other system?

CdC: In my opinion noise is just a continuation and expansion of sound itself. For this reason, I do not consider it as a stand-alone element, but rather as a further possibility in the palette available to me when I am composing.

Talking to performers, combined with listening to and analysis of recent scores, has allowed me to reflect on noises in the same way as on sounds and therefore to be guided by my ear and my imagination. In addition, I always take into account the mechanics of the instrument and its physical, acoustic, and technical limits.

In the specific case of Die Brücken hinter uns, I gave many noise effects to the saxophone for two reasons: The first is to obtain specific and characteristic timbre and articulations that cannot be realized in any other way. The second is to emphasize its idiomatic possibilities to ensure that its interventions differ markedly from those of the other instruments of the ensemble, which have a homogeneous quality, since they are intended to be perceived as a unity.

TR-J: In 2012 and 2013 you studied with Alessandro Solbiati, who taught another of our favourite composers, Clara Iannotta. Solbiati’s music is almost completely unknown in the UK; What drew you to him as a teacher, and what did you learn from him?

CdC: Alessandro Solbiati was suggested to me by a colleague after I had already completed my academic studies.

Our meeting was a significant moment in defining my personal identity as a composer, since it allowed me to get in touch with and learn the techniques of Francesco Donatoni, who was his professor.

I really appreciate the Socratic quality of his teaching method: he succeeds in getting the real potential out of his students without imposing his own conception of music. In fact, all his students who have had international success compose in their own language, rather than a univocal school of thought.

TR-J: I understand you have also written a thesis on ‘Personal Branding for Musicians’. What three bits of branding advice would you give to a young composer?

CdC:

1. Seek and find your own personal identity and derive your own aesthetics/poetics from it, in such a way to become a recognizable brand (Personal Branding).

This is easier said than done in today’s world, since we are all buried beneath the suggestions and ideas of others. We must try not to be influenced by trends and fashions or affiliated with academies and schools, but to choose paths off the beaten tracks and develop a critical and creative way of thinking that comes approaches our deeper being and our conception of music.

Once we have identified and created our brand, it is important to remain faithful to who we really are, always ready to grow through the stimuli around us. This is the only strategy that works: it makes no sense to play a non-existent character who does not represent us.

2. Identify your target audience, choose on the internet the social networks and platforms on which you want to be active and make your online profiles meaningful and unique, offering something that is always valid and ascribable to what you want to say/give (Net Branding).

If you follow these guidelines, the public will feel involved and become active and responsive, helping you spontaneously to share your content.

3. Promote your works and ongoing projects through your own channels in such a way as to keep your followers constantly interested in the route you are following.

Once online attention has been gained, it must be maintained with timely updates that allow the public to feel involved in our artistic and human journey.

TR-J: You have a strong international profile, with lots of commissions and awards from around the world. What is next on your agenda?

CdC: I have a series of commissions, some of which I care very much about. The next one coming up is thanks to an artistic residency I will be undertaking for the 2018/2019 season at the Tenuta dello Scompiglio, a wonderful country estate located in Lucca.

My project, a response to the international open call Della morte e del morire – ‘Of death and dying’, will be made in collaboration with Blow Up Percussion, a percussion quartet based in Rome. It will be performed outdoors, taking advantage of the characteristics and peculiarities of the landscape and the setting.

It is a stage/musical work called Mono no Aware – L’intensità agrodolce delle cose (‘The ahhness of things – The bitter-sweet intensity of things’) and will feature an active and close interaction between theatre, performance, and music. It will be divided into four parts, each lasting about 10/12 minutes. Between one movement and the next one the public will be asked to move from one to another setting within the estate (secret garden, stairway, chapel and back to the secret garden), thus following the dramaturgical path physically as well as metaphorically. In each location the four performers will have a different set of percussion instruments that have been placed there already. Each performer will be not only a musician, but also the protagonist of a journey that always implicitly contains its end, that is, death.

TR-J: One final question: if you could choose anything, what would be your dream line-up of instruments and/or voices to write for? And where would you like the premiere of this fantasy piece to take place?

CdC: I have been lucky enough to write music for very varied occasions: movies, documentaries, artistic installations, performative acts, musical theatre. Even the locations have been very disparate, sometimes indoors and sometimes outdoors. So in this sense I have already realized a good part of my desires for compositional expression.

My dream would be to have available a large instrumentation that would allow me to write a piece for female voice, mixed chorus and orchestra on the text of a poem from the collection La terra e la morte – ‘Earth and Death’ by the Italian poet and writer Cesare Pavese, which is very close to me. If I could also choose the place and date of the performance I would opt for the Langhe – Pavese’s birthplace – in 2020, the 70th anniversary of his passing away.