A short discussion of my musical style.
I do not consider myself as an innovative composer and I have never been interested in creating the new for the simple sake of being different. I am a firm believer that a dissonance is a dissonance, be it in a XVI century madrigal by Gesulado or in a symphony by Penderecki. The endless piling of dissonance over dissonance destroys the very reason for dissonance in the first place. In the arts red is a very strong colour, but a canvas with is completely red is not as impressive as one in which red plays a minor, but fundamental part.
This is not to say that my music is totally rooted in the past. Think of Stravinskij and his neoclassical style, some of which he claimed to originate from Pergolesi. Now that we are well into the XXI century we know so many things about the models that he used that were unknown by Stravinskij. We know that most of the “Pergolesi” was written by others, such as Domenico Gallo, we have inferred how this music should have sounded based on historical research that took place after Stravinskij's passing.
At times we wonder how Fritz Kreisler or Manuel Ponce managed to fool musical critics by attributing their music to composers from the past, until we realise that we, in 2025, know these composers as no one ever knew them in the early XX century.
Through social media we have access to a world of music that was impossible even to imagine 30 years ago. I have listened to the music by composers that forty years ago were only names in Grove's dictionary, sometimes dismissed as minor and derivative.
All these contribute to the newness of my traditional style, also because I never cancel my personality. In my Piano Sonata in e minor I create a work in the style of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, but there is no way that I could pass it as the work of any of those. The sonata is full of gestures that are not to be found in the music of those composers.
I am not only rooted in tonality, but also in modality and in the latter I tend to use harmony in a different way than in my tonal music. Here harmony tends not to be functional, but colouristic, with dissonance used in a similar way that modulation is used in my tonal music.
I remember giving up composition because at the time, the early '90s, it seemed to me there was no place for my style of music in a world that seemed only to have place for Schönberg, Boulez, Webern, Stockhausen and Berio. It was only in the early 2000's that I began noticing contemporary music that is actually pleasant to hear. That was the moment I said to myself, "but all along I was writing music like that!"
I believe one of the things that has made me turn my back on “the Modern” were my many experiments when I was young. We had a post horn at home, as well as some old guitars, but I also was very inventive, building flutes from plastic pipes and cork, using hosepipes as horns and elastic bands as Jews' harps. I cannot say I was inspired by the results of these experiments and have not yet found reason to revise my opinion.
13, August, 2025