Reshaping – The Fury of Memory

Reshaping is a journey into the deepest layers of my musical memory associated with the piano. The fundamental process underlying the entire piece is the transition from a painful and restless atmosphere to clarity, through involuntary memory and synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia is a profound aspect of my musical experience. Colours and sounds have always been inextricably linked for me. The minor third Gb-Eb which opens the piece, with its red and purple shades, is for me the darkest interval; the sounds Db (light green), Ab (light yellow) and F (ochre) are among the brightest and most colourful, while the sound E is white. So the transition from the initial dark figures to the final white and luminous ones is accomplished through sound textures with yellow-green reflections.

This process triggers involuntary musical memory and the will to recode and transfigure it. The repetition of certain motifs or intervals brings forth an unstoppable proliferation of fantastic hybrid sound creatures, derived from my personal musical memories. Each Reshaping figure always has a dual nature: it is a new form that inevitably carries with it the echo, the trace of the pre-existing material from which it derives. Memory, by transforming itself, generates new meaning.

This continuous flow of evanescent memories/colours paradoxically has a very precise architecture: the Fibonacci series and the golden ratio (phi) govern the structure of Reshaping at various levels: the tempi, the morphology of the figures, the length of the sections, up to the overall form.

Filippo Zapponi