Works
Among the early works is the Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti (1947–48), influenced by the music of Bartók, which has a special approach towards difficult sonorities. In 1948 he composed his first serial work, the Liriche greche. The Quartetto per archi in due tempi (of 1955) is an even more intensively serial piece.
The flautist Severino Gazzelloni inspired Maderna during the Darmstadt experience. In 1961 he composed Honeyreves for flute and piano: this piece was built on complex flute melodies and on unusual piano sound effects (clusters, playing on the strings, etc.). In the Studio di Fonologia Musicale, with the help of sound technician Marino Zuccheri, he wrote some electroacoustic works: Musica su due dimensioni (Music in two dimensions, 1952, rev. 1957 and 1963) for flute and magnetic tape, Notturno (1956) and Continuo (1958) both for magnetic tape.
In 1962-63 Maderna wrote his First Oboe Concerto (Concerto for Oboe and Chamber Ensemble). In 1967 he wrote his Second Oboe Concerto, and in 1973 his Third.
One of his works is Quadrivium for four percussionists and four orchestral groups (played for the first time at the Royan Festival in 1969). A recording of this work, coupled with the composer's Aura and Biogramma, was made by the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra under Giuseppe Sinopoli in 1979 and issued by Deutsche Grammophon. Among various other compositions are an electro-acoustic divertimento Le Rire (1964), a "work in progress" called Hyperion, and an opera Satyricon. Ausstrahlung for female voice, flute, oboe and pre-recorded tape, based on annonymous Persian poetry was commissioned by the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts and premiered there in 1971 with Maderna conducting the Hague Residence Orchestra and Cathy Berberian, Koos Verheul and Lothar Faber soloists.
Versatile as Maderna was, he also produced scores for five Italian movies released between 1946 and 1968, the most important of these being the revolutionary soundtrack for La Morte Ha Fatto L'Uovo (Death Has Laid An Egg), a 1968 psychedelic thriller by Giulio Questi.
Read more about this topic: Bruno Maderna
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“Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)