Huge Tip! * Edition of 200 copies, comes with an insert * Giuseppe Chiari's Intervalli, composed between 1950 and 1956 and now recorded in complete form for the first time, is one of the most significant and least heard compositions of the European post-war avant-garde. A twelve-part work for solo piano, it sidesteps the dominant Serialism of its moment entirely - arriving instead at a form of radical restraint that prefigures Minimalism, systems-based music, and conceptualism by more than a decade.
Born in Florence in 1926, Chiari trained in both piano and composition and in mathematics and engineering - a rare synthesis that shaped a singular compositional logic. He would later join Fluxus in 1962 as its only official Italian member, situating himself within a Florentine circle that included Sylvano Bussotti, Pietro Grossi, and Giancarlo Cardini. Intervalli predates that affiliation, but already contains its seeds: sounds arranged through a logical system of repetition and variation, hierarchical pitch organisation rejected in favour of what Chiari termed a 'radical narrowing of musical parameters - liberated by the potential of their undefined combinations.'
The closest point of comparison is perhaps the early solo piano work of Morton Feldman - similarly preoccupied with the equal weight of tone and silence - though Chiari's framework is distinctly his own. Where Feldman moved by intuition, Chiari worked from mathematical principle. The result is music of quiet rigour: sparse punctuations of sound that open outward with each hearing, touching at moments on the impressionism of Satie or Debussy before retreating into something altogether more austere.
Performed with precision and sensitivity by pianist Reinier van Houdt and issued by Alga Marghen as a limited vinyl edition with liner notes by Gabriele Bonomo, this release marks the first time Intervalli has been heard whole. An essential addition to a body of work previously documented only in fragments, on Die Schachtel and Slowscan - and a necessary recalibration of what we think we know about the 1950s avant-garde.
