Music without attributes, or serious¹, in its endless tension towards research and experimentation, keeps evolving and unveiling hidden details every time we listen to it. The feelings it evokes and the atmosphere it creates around us let us reflect on ourselves and the context we isolate from through a stereo system or a pair of headphones — admit it, even a concert hall the glorification of solitude. This kind of music, if we stick to the definition I just proposed, hardly obeys the rules of the music industry. Paolo Castaldi, interviewed by Luciano Berio during an episode of the Italian TV series C’è musica & musica, broadcasted by the RAI during the seventies, declared:

[…] la prima [la musica “leggera”] bisognerebbe che fosse discussa come fatto sociologico, piuttosto che come fatto musicale. A parere di molti, e un po’ anche mio, essa non è veramente musica perchè, per definizione, musica è quella che è fatta secondo i gusti di chi la compone, mentre invece la musica commerciale non è fatta secondo i gusti di chi la compone ma secondo i gusti di chi la deve consumare, cosa che è in conflitto con il concetto stesso di composizione.

[…] [“light” music] should be discussed as a sociological fact, rather than a musical fact. Many people, partly including myself, believe that this kind of music cannot be really defined as music because, by definition, music is something which is made according to the composer’s taste, while the mainstream music is made according to the consumer’s taste, and this contradicts the meaning of composition itself.

By the way, exceptions are not that rare.

I found, during my adolescence, what I was looking for in the old-school progressive rock, deliberately (sometimes exaggeratedly) virtuosic but extremely descriptive and rich music genre — someone would call it landscape music. During the following years I gradually left this world because of a physiological need of renovation, and, considering the disappointing prog-rock contemporary scene, I entered the land of jazz music, modern classical (no joke, people actually use this name), ambient and electronic music.

When a song strikes me from the harmonic, melodic, rhythmic and timbral point of view (let’s just say that I like it a lot) I try to transcribe it in the most complete way I can. When I’m done, after some rewarding minutes of self-satisfaction, I realise that I don’t wanna my work to stay hidden from the rest of the world in a computer folder, it should be available to any interested human being equipped with an internet connection! This is the purpose of this blog, where you can find my transcriptions (in PDF format) along with some supplementary information.

Last but not least: I chose Gumroad as the download platform and set a symbolic 1 Euro price for each transcription. This is because, frankly, after I’ve spent countless hours on a project, I’m not very happy with an indiscriminate diffusion of the material on the web. Gumroad allows to give an arbitrarily higher amount of money, if someone want to more effectively show his appreciation…

Obviously, any comment, critic or suggestion is very welcome. Did you spot a typo in the scores? Do you have some transcription proposal or commission? Contact me, and I’ll be happy to discuss about it.

LP

1. res severa est verum gaudium, wrote Seneca. Some people, later in 1781, wanted to remind it to the audience of the Gewandhaus, the most famous Leipzig concert hall, by writing the quote with large letters inside the original building. ↩