Composition and Music Creation

The symbol on the right is the scacciapensieri mandala (© Luigi Antonio Irlandini, 1986), which I created in 1986 as a symbolic expression of the general mood and orientation of my music and philosophy of music.

For a list os lectures, paper presentations and lecture/recitals given about my research interests, please click here.

New Music, World Music

While remaining curious about and open to the entire heritage of past and present music cultures of the world, including western music from the Middle Ages to the present, and the traditional musics of India, Japan, and Africa, folk traditions from around the world, as well as the world music fusions of today, I believe that my music has its own necessity and its own path of developement, especially due to its "non-musical" interdisciplinary aspects. Since 1989,
I have been dedicated to the compositional research of a musical language that has close connections with the late twentieth-century European avant-garde, north and south Indian and Japanese cassical musics, ancient Greece music theory, and the Middle Ages and Renaissance polyphonies.

Improvisation, Composition

I have practiced improvisation for many years. Since I was a child, I would spend hours at the piano, immersed in a music flow that seemed to struck me as lightning. I still do it for my own pleasure. However, the freedom given by the idea of total improvisation appeared to me to be excessive and also illusory. Once I embraced the compositional idea of écriture, I have let improvisation be a much more controlled act, just like cosmos came out of chaos in some creation myths. As the craft improved throughout years of practicing composition with attention to time (rhythm) and space (pitch) organizational principles and methods, spontaneity appeared re-discovered, and improvisation, in the midst of writing, became a surprising possibility. I feel comfortable within the self-imposed boundaries of the composition craft, as they allow a true exercise of freedom...

There is also the recognition that some musical ideas want to exist through an instant birth while others take a long time of intellectual speculation and search for the right sound.
My job is to try not to stay in the way of this music that wants to be born,
by training myself to achieve the best craftmanship as a musician , for each musical piece, each time anew. Anyway, what 's been called a "musical piece " is nothing but a chunck--literally a piece--of a murch larger flow of sound that comes through--but not from--us, musicians, and there are countless ways for that to happen.

Research in Musical Language

From the point of view of structure and musical language my compositions are the result of research in rhythmic organization centered in the use of ratios and number. In the field of time organization, i.e., how music evolves in time, I have explored methods such as macroformal planning and the concepts of circularity and progressive spiral transformation. I have explored musical textures of several kinds, especially polyphony and monody combined with drone, and harmony based on a specific selection of intervals, and the concept of total chromatic symmetric or asymmetric harmonic fields, among other principles. Instrumentation has combined any world instrument, from the European violin to the Australian didjeridu, from digital keyboards to the shakuhachi, just because the world of today has, at least potentially, broken with geographical and even cultural limitations. My vocal music has explored polyphonic choral writing, chant, overtone- and throat-singing techniques.

An important part of my creative work comes from the interaction of music with studies in archetypal symbolism, mythology, and the role of music in "primitive societies". Because of that, my compositions are mostly concerned with creating a vital musical gesture, one that seeks true spiritual meaning through and beyond music. I find a deep resonance with the music, art and religious concepts of traditional India, and several of my compositions are imbued with concepts and ideas that originally come from them: Marriage of Heaven and Earth in its original version is for tâbla and English horn, accompanied by two guitars, Agnistoma and Sacrifice are entirely sung in Sanskrit and structured according to patterns of Rg Veda recitation, Pralâya is the spiral cosmic dissolution of the Puranas, Sol das Almas for guitar solo is composed on râga purvi, Numen and Sun Door…at World's End use texts from the Upanisads and Gâyatrî Mantra respectively, and so on.

Composition as Cosmology

Through studies in comparative religion and mythology as just mentioned, I have come to the idea of composition as cosmology and cosmogony: the act of creating music--and art in general--is a repetition of the creation of the world. This idea, as it was clearly exposed by religious studies scholar Mircea Eliade in his writings on creation myths, is one of the basic premises of how I see music and my work in composition. But the idea holds true to all musicians who experience music making as a spiritual discipline, even if they are not thinking about it.

Whatever the style, music is always the order of sounds. By order I mean the Greek concept of kosmos: the mutual relationships and ways of interaction of sounds that are unique to a specific style. The musician creates those sound relationships by putting them together in a musical piece, a composition, an improvisation, or a musical style. Creative methods vary. If we take a moment to define what are the musical characteristics defining the style of bebop jazz, or of South Indian raga, or of classical European symphony, we become aware of the musical principles that make each be recognized as exactly what they are: bebop, South Indian raga, and classical European symphony, and not something else. Each style of music is like an universe of sounds with its own natural laws. Music is a cosmology. And a cosmogony: one in which the creative cycle of music is made of several creations, ultimately completed when the music is played and becomes physical sound during its performance.

Looking at a piece of music or at an entire musical style as an ordered universe of sounds--a cosmos--brings the issue of music cognition: how this universe of sounds makes sense to us, how we know, understand, and experience it. How do the principles that originated it translate themselves through the music so that the listener can get a notion--and therefore make sense of them--through aural perception?

The concept of composition as cosmology is, however, more prescriptive of the organization of sounds in music than descriptive or interpretative, such as musical analysis is. Musical analysis ideally attempts to describe the universe of sounds in terms of how it was made, bringing light to the composer's creativity process and the cosmology of music as intended or prescribed by the composer. However, in other cases, analysis "takes a life of its own", and becomes a description that has nothing to do with the music's creative process and , is only valid as the description of its own analytical method. An example of this could be an analysis of a modal composition according to Set Theory. Therefore, it is useful to distinguish my idea of cosmology of music from that of music analysis. While it is a fortunate thing that analysis allows us to see one and same object from different interpretations, prospectives and angles, I am more interested in a study of music that sheds light onto the creative process that originated that object, rather than a study in which this process is dismissed by a a technique of analysis that is alien to it.

One more note about the concept of cosmology of music has to do with it as a double form of musical knowledge. There are two aspects to the cosmology of music: the scientific and the cultural.

The scientific aspect of the cosmology explains how the music is made. It is like a natural science of music, its Physics. It describes the structural, concrete, "physical" relationships--certainly mathematical--between sounds, such as principles of tonality (in tonal music), pitch organization, rhythmic organization, morphology, etc. Research in composition is usually done in this realm of musical order, which I call the scientific cosmology of music.

The cultural aspect explains how the music is a consequence of contents and meanings that initially do not pertain to the structure of music, but that can be conveyed by the structure of music. This includes any content that relates music to the knowledge of a spiritual truth (gnosis). Such contents actually take part in the shaping of a composition or a musical style. This could be called a symbolic aspect, which would send us to the unending discussion about whether or not symbols or gnosis are cultural constructs. Examples of the cultural cosmology of music are the role of astrology in James Woods' Stoichea, or of sonic theology in Giacinto Scelsi's string quartets.

Some of my compositions, such as Sacrifice, Luna, Agnistoma, Sun Door…At World's End, Pralaya, and others, are connected to the scacciapensiere mandala symbol on top of this page, which stands for the possibility of a meaningful spiritual content in music. The music structure in those works is in-formed by ideas and conceptions related to ancient cosmologies and archetypal symbolism. I have frequently explored the mandala and the spiral as time organization principles, sometimes also determining harmony. The elements of circularity, interdependence, complementarity, symmetry, and progressive transformation, thus constituting their cultural cosmology, make these compositions become these symbols (the mandala and the spiral) in musical manifestation.