Piazza Sant’Agata:
Overture for chamber group to accompany Tony Clark’s Unsculpted exhibition.
Kevin Flanagan

https://kevinflanagan1.bandcamp.com/track/piazza-santagata

I first met Tony and encountered his work about a decade-and-a-half ago in Sicily. I was immediately struck by his use of a powerful limited palette, usually of four colours. That, and the stillness of the neoclassically referenced images, often disembodied, took me straight into a world of Italian Baroque stage sets, calling up images of Commedia dell’arte, with Pulcinella holding forth.

The problem in a collaboration where one encounters a different medium is to find a way in. The minimal elements and directness of Tony’s work called for an equivalent response, and because of the Italianate references of both the work and the location of Tony’s studio, I began by looking at Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo for an inspiration, .wanting to re-create the motorific, open textures of the first Toccata, and echoing Renaissance antiphonal choral textures by using three spatially-displaced instrumental groups which call and respond to each other across the performance space.

I have been interested in composing pieces for landscape-based projects in which I use the coordinates of a location to create both melodic and structural elements, in this case, the coordinates of Tony’s base in Sicily. A series of numbers can be used to create a melodic line, a chord or a rhythmic cell, among other things. For this piece, I discovered some software that allowed me to analyse the colour codes of Tony’s palette , the numbers yielding a series of notes. For instance, his shade of blue came out as the notes D, E, A, B and C#, which was used as a melodic phrase . The directness of his work called for simplicity on my part: sparse, open textures and minimal harmonies usually consisting of shifting two-note harmonic cells, either fifths or seconds. That, and I tried an often static rhythmic and harmonic backing to create a stillness to match that of the paintings. In the end, I used the codes of the four colours, plus the coordinates of Tony’s base in Sicily, Militello; for instance, those of the Piazza Sant’Agata suggested a line for the bass clarinet. 

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released November 13, 2024