Description

Walter Zimmerman
“Voces Abandonadas (Antonio Porchia) para Piano primera serie (2005) segunda serie (2006)”

This 40-minute piano piece is an attempt to translate the 514 aphorisms from Antonio Porchia‘s book of the same name into sound emblemes, most of which last only one bar, often only a fraction of a bar or only one fermata, and which merge seamlessly into one another. During the composition process, the sentences were refl ected in the same order as they appear in the original. The form of the composition emerged as a secondary process, generated by the semantic references between the sentences. A process that came about through the creation of musical links for the synonymous and metonymic concatenations. The recurring formative word fields are: “everything”, “nothing”, “time”, “waiting”, “love”, “eyes”, “moment”, “evil”, “pain”, “good”, “minute”, “years”, “eternity”, “stars”, “small”, “big”, “less”, “more”, “remove”, “circle”, “one”, “mine”, “tomorrow”, “today”, “hold”, “fall”, “dream”, “life” “chains” “flowers”.
The composition process took a year and proceeded like a diary, without constructive guidelines, reacting directly to the respective sentences. The successive sentences were often of a contradictory nature, so that the music always had to articulate itself over cliffs of meaning. It becomes perceptible that the initially disparate sound sentences increasingly begin to speak their own language as the 40-minute piece progresses. The abstracted, condensed sounds become the building blocks of a musical logic, which in turn reveals the logic of the sequence in Porchia‘s book, just as a landscape can only be recognized in its structures from a spatial distance. “Voces Abandonadas” is the first piece in a series of compositions that translate all of Antonio Porchia‘s sentences (approx. 1200) into music. Here are some of the sentences:
(W.Z.)

“If man had wings, he would sink lower.”
“So many things would not slip away from us if others did not come with the slipping away.”
“The years I lived too little and the years I lived too much add up to… my age.”
“I do not see through my eyes, but through the eyes of others who have seen.”
“My pasts are still awakening today, but my todays are no longer awakening.”
“Man is made in such a way that it is not possible for him to be good, even when he is good.”
“Older time erases what younger time writes.”
“The remnants of overfilled desires overfi lled our desires.”
“He who can be who he is, how little he is to him who cannot be who he is!”
“The soul of things is not that which we put into things.”
“The eternal is the result of transitory lives.”
“It is not embarrassing to show ourselves fallen; it is embarrassing to show what makes us fall.”
“He who forgets more can begin more.”
“You straighten outwardly what you deepen inwardly.”
“Man, when he says ‘man is like this’, does not say ‘I am like this’.”
“We want the best from tomorrow, always, and it is from yesterday, always.”
“You have conquered my heart, but you still have to conquer yours to win.”
“He who draws his eyes close to the stars moves infinitely far away from his eyes.”
“The whole universe behaved flawlessly towards me, except man, my image.”
“Apparently, outside of us there are only poorly made imitations of what exists within us.”
“When the superficial tires me, it tires me so much that I need an abyss to rest.”
“A thing, before it is complete, is only noise, and when it is complete, it is silence.”
“We have a world for everyone. But we don‘t have a world for everyone.”
“Would there be this eternal searching if what is found existed?”
“We perceive emptiness by filling it.”
“Going straight ahead shortens distances. And also life.”
“In full light, we are not even a shadow.”
“Everything fits into a full soul, and nothing fits into an empty soul. Who can see that?”
“And if there is nothing like thought, then either thought is only thought, or thought is everything.”
“The condemnation of a mistake is another mistake.”
“Yes, I‘ve already heard everything. All I need now is to remain silent.”