Fabio Vacchi - Poetics

Poetics

Since his early compositions, Fabio Vacchi has taken on the challenge of reaching beyond the closed and inside circle of connoisseurs, maintaining the objective of writing music for those who do not habitually listen to contemporary music (adapting to music the ideas of Hans Magnus Enzensberger). His creative process, rather than radically rejecting traditional codes, seeks to privilege a focus on the material, understood as an attention given to sound and to the human body that is that sound’s very destination. Vacchi, thus, believes that it is indispensable not to overlook the psycho-acoustic parameters that allow music to reach the listener and stimulate his or her senses. Such techniques include the repetition of certain elements as the work unfolds and the insertion of continuous but recognizable sonorous material, so as to keep the listener attentive and alert.

In Vacchi’s conception of music, the sonorous material that a composer chooses to utilize is less important than the way in which it is presented: the work’s form must communicate a sense of itself and must establish a system in which there is expectation and surprise, surprise having always been an expressive, communicative, and dramatic device used by many composers, even if unconsciously so.

In the Vacchi’s own words,

only music that is capable of setting in motion the listener’s senses and emotional perception can aspire to beauty; as such music is an asset that concerns us all, because then it allows us to live. The inhabitants of a world that is disenchanted, as ours is, still need fables. Granted these fables are no longer tales of fairies and witches, they still, however, need to arouse wonder. Thus, we must both take beauty back and follow the new roads created by the Avant-Garde without allowing, however, that the new expressive freedom therein be self-gratifying, that is, being transgression for transgression’s sake. It is important to aim instead towards a gradual transformation that is incessant and substantial.

This, believes Vacchi, is the road to take, a road he sees leading to an identity in which esthetics and ethics, and beauty and social commitment all come together, an identity in line with the important classical-Greek concept of kalòs, such that music becomes

a point of contact between the power of amazing us and the need for us to see ourselves in the Other, leaving behind the feverish egotism of a power that, like a cancerous growth, erects insuperable walls between people of different sexes, races, and social classes.