Gian Francesco Malipiero compositore ‘sistematico’. Procedimenti compositivi e strutture formali di alcune composizioni degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta: Dialogo I «con Manuel de Falla» per piccola orchestra, Quartetto n. 8 «per Elisabetta», Dialogo IV «pe

Abstract

Most contributions concerning the work of Gian Francesco Malipiero investigate the poetic and aesthetic reasons for his music-making, leaving out the analysis of the scores. Particularly neglected appear the instrumental compositions of his ‘third manner’, the creative phase from 1955 to the composer’s death. An updated analytical approach allows us to shed new light on the works of this period and on the «new chromatic language» used by Malipiero. The composer’s late style has generally been described by critics as unsystematic and «capricious», characterized by athematism, absence of development and musical form, and free counterpoint. The analyses of I Dialogo con Manuel de Falla (in memoria) for small orchestra (1956), IV Dialogo per cinque strumenti a perdifiato (1956), and Quartetto per Elisabetta (1964), reveal instead in Malipiero a systematic author, who invents, and consistently applies, very precise procedures for the creation and transformation of sound material. Very personal compositional techniques are devised ad hoc for each composition, thus generating highly original formal paths: ‘tone row-matrix’ used for the creation and transformation of motivic material; organization of the chromatic space by means of superimposition - and control - of pitch class sets; transformations of the musical material by means of interval expansion, invariance, recurring pitch class sets. We can thus, for the first time, understand from the inside the mechanisms that regulate Malipiero’s «chromatic language», as well as his handling of sound matter and formal structures, removing the composer, at least partially, from the isolation in which he, pandered to by critics, wanted to confine himself.