Flavio Emilio Scogna

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (light ring and edges wear)

An early and striking document of one of Italian music's most rigorously trained compositional voices. Flavio Emilio Scogna, born in Savona in 1956, arrived at composition through a formation of unusual depth: the Conservatory of Genoa, then advanced studies in composition and conducting at Bologna with Franco Donatoni and Aldo Clementi, and subsequently a long, formative collaboration with Luciano Berio that would shape both his compositional intelligence and his career as a conductor. That the RCA label - not typically a home for Italian avant-garde music - committed to releasing his early chamber work is itself a measure of the seriousness with which his generation was taken in the Italian musical establishment.

Segnali per sei dimensioni - signals for six dimensions - sets the terms of its enquiry in its title. The work is chamber music in the precise sense: music whose social and acoustic relationships are as structurally active as its pitch and rhythm, the six players constituting a field of simultaneous perspectives rather than a unified ensemble voice. The influence of Donatoni is present in the writhing density of the counterpoint; the influence of Clementi in the moments where that density thins toward something almost static. But what emerges is Scogna's own: a taste for clear polyphony and canonic argument that Berio, appraising his work in this period, identified as the mark of a composer with genuine craft and a genuine future.

A document of the Italian new music scene in one of its most productive decades. RCA, 1983.