KINDERSZENEN | live recording

Marco Momi | KINDERSZENEN ( Ricordi 2024 )
for piano, electronics and orchestra

Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano
Michele Gamba, conductor
Mariangela Vacatello, piano
Serge Lemouton - Ircam, sound designer
Jérémie Henrot - Ircam, sound engineer

Patron’s Françoise et Jean-Philippe Billarant, Milano Musica and La Biennale di Venezia commission.
Recorded at Auditorium di Milano on May 17th, 2024

“[...] is showing the child a goal: not his own past, but his future, the future of his memory as an adult.”
(Cristina Campo, The Unforgivable)

Kinderszenen is a title stolen from Robert Schumann. This blatant theft is not limited to the title alone. Composing “reminiscences of an older person for older people” (this is how Schumann describes his collection of piano pieces) is a very particular attitude to writing that perhaps, on closer inspection, goes far beyond Schumann’s masterpiece itself.
It is possible that it is an invitation. It is probable that it is an exercise of feeling, to be practised again and again in empathic writing.
To look at the world through children’s eyes – to remember having been children ourselves, to re-appropriate and revive that unique way of experiencing time – is a gesture of adult re-education towards the sensible that demands answers from my writing.
After all, the everyday life of many of us expresses with increasing clarity some symptoms of the world’s childhood: the social discovery of new consciousness (whether sexual, environmental or relational) captures us in a new evolutionary condition. And how much fun there is in playing with AI (as residually postmodern as it is elementary in satisfying the playful appetite for ironic revisions of the past!).
The great narratives that believed they could superimpose a model of order on the world are no longer exemplary; they are now part of the cult objects to be either reviled or celebrated, amidst the figurines of footballers and the fetishes of technological archaeology that we probably once believed in.
The stories of grandparents to their grandchildren remain powerful. Their augural voice – of which Cristina Campo speaks in the passage quoted above – will be their precious memory.
Wars that begin with the ease of board games and migrations from the earliest age of peoples force themselves onto the agenda of childish politics, and many children see the sea for the first time at the same time as they encounter death.
It is with subtle truth – which their clear and unaware gaze can afford to grasp without any presumption of complexity – that an amplified piano moves through this piece. With a naïve step open to wonder, its gestures – even the most fragile and elementary – enter into the textures of the anti-heroic orchestra arrayed behind it that accompanies it on its adventure of discovery.
All around, the electronic worlds of a possible childhood journey. A testimony told in the form of a fairy tale. A memory of today, of what will remain of the extreme synchronies, of the suffered landscapes, of the bewilderment and disorientation that through the tone of memory looks us in the eye and ties us to the present.

Marco Momi