Francesco Filidei — Ballata No. 7

Over the years, I have repeatedly felt the need to change my musical language, namely from one consisting entirely of mere noises to one made of pure sounds. But a few elements have remained unchanged and point to a clear, internally consistent path.

Looking through my list of works, the first thing one notices is the frequent use of titles that refer to musical forms of the past – toccatas, sonatas, ballades and preludes. In these cases it was always less a matter of filling an empty formal shell with unusual material than of contextualising a musical object, offering the listener a possible frame of reference. Once this path had been taken, it was a matter of repeatedly breaking up and questioning it.

It is in the writing of music that I have found the best possibility to keep the memory of my own story – and of many other past stories – alive, for music is like a running thread that can colour time, that time in which the memory operates. The necessity of limiting this time in order to observe it better led to a focus on the closed arched form, as well as an economic use of a minimum of material, both of which guide the attention to the linear development of the musical language.

My Ballate do not simply evoke a Romantic form; beyond that, they are also parts of my path on the way to a comprehensive construction process.

Ballata No. 7 continues this search and, at the same time, draws several lines to previous things: to Ballata No. 2, as both works – in contrast to all the other Ballate – feature no soloist; to Ballata No. 6 because of the kinship with language; and it resembles Ballate No. 4 and No. 5 through the close connections to works written at the same time. In Ballata No. 7, the material draws its form from the notes for the opera Inondation, based on a text by Evgueni Zamiatine, which will be premiered in September 2019 at the Opéra Comique in Paris. This resulted in a music that retains a dynamic character and is closer to the ballades of Liszt than to my own previous works. Ballata No. 7  is dedicated to Shinichi Baba, a Tai Chi master who recently passed away.
—Francesco Filidei, 2018