Peter in Italy : compositional responses to place through an employment of musical topics

Abstract

This body of work is informed by the composer’s experiences of, and interest in, specific places, with his wife’s native Italy a recurrent source of inspiration. The research explores this creative stimulus from different angles through a portfolio of eleven original compositions, ranging from solo works to orchestral pieces. Many of these respond to the sonic or physical landscapes of specific places, or to the sensations that are awakened by the composer’s memories of being in a certain location, often during a particular time of day. Other works are more indirect in their approach, engaging with places in a cultural context through the lens of literature or traditional melodies.

These various types of engagement with place are united by the employment of topics: ‘musical signs [which] consist of a signifier (a certain disposition of musical dimensions) and a signified (a conventional stylistic unit, often but not always referential in quality)’ (Agawu, 1991, p.49). Rather than inventing new topics, the music harnesses the evocative capacity of a collection of pre-existing topics, from nocturnes and fanfares to different manifestations of the pastoral, in response to various place-informed stimuli. In the portfolio’s most pictorial works, imitations (drawn largely from transcriptions of field recordings) of bird- and insect-song, church bells, and vehicle noises constitute, moreover, examples of what musicologist Raymond Monelle termed ‘iconic topics’ through their ‘representation... of natural [and in this case, man-made] sounds’ (Monelle, 2006, p.28). That ‘topic’ derives from the Greek topos or ‘place’ is apposite given the nature of the research, and the submitted works may be heard as an exploration of this connection through their use of ‘musical places’ to suggest elements of physical, or remembered, ones.