Walter Marchetti

The Concerto For The Left Hand In One Movement, for piano, is the last unpublished composition of Walter Marchetti to be performed in public before the death of the author on May 12, 2015. This performance by Reinier van Houdt was recorded on April 29, 2015, at Onder De Linden in Valthermond, Netherlands, and is presented with liner notes by Gabriele Bonomo, translated from the Italian by Philip Corner. Composed in 1994, the Concerto For The Left Hand belongs to an ongoing series of works written between 1994 and 1997 -- along with "Con vista sui suoni," "Eight or Nine Movements for String Quartet," and "La perdita del tempo" -- which develop from a preceding composition titled "Canonic Variations for Orchestra on Prolapsed Time From Development to Hiccup of Black Cherry Jam." In these works Marchetti made a systematic and assertive return to conventional music notation, while also not excluding performance and installation practices and the use of pre-recorded "concrète" sounds which, since the '60s, had been his privileged field of action (a modality shared principally within the exquisitely iconoclast and desecratory activities of the ZAJ group).

What was particularly interesting to Marchetti in this recourse to musical writing was the weakening of the meaning of the rigid normative apparatus of a musical score with the purpose of annihilating the factual potential of his system of prescriptions. The title alone is used to hide a paradox in which the notes to the performer intervene to subvert the following paradigm: "The pianist is obliged to hold a black umbrella opened over his head in his left hand during the whole performance of this concerto." From here the performer is confronted with two conceptually convergent possibilities in de-potentializing the apparatus of signs in the score: on the one hand, the restrictive imposition of the paradox by which the music cannot manifest itself while respecting the letter of the enunciation, which leads to the impossibility of the music's "existence" (i.e. the obligation of holding an open black umbrella in the same hand) or, on the other hand, the transgression of this encumbrance in favor of the implicit possibility of playing the score with the right hand, leaving the music subjected to its own manifestation no longer be able to coincide with its own realization -- "a magic made free from the lie of being truth."

Limited edition of 300. Digipak with full-color booklet containing photos and the liner notes.