Voci dalle terre alte ("Voices from the Higher Lands"), for electronics.
"A Forest Tale", "I Richiami della Grande Cascata" ("The Calls of the Great Waterfall") and "Sognando le Terre Alte" ("Dreaming of the Higher Lands") are part of a cycle of four pieces named "Voci dalle Terre Alte" ("Voices from the Higher Lands") dedicated (as far as the personal sphere is concerned) to the memories of many moments of my childhood, spent in the high mountains in the Alps.
First Piece: A Forest Tale, for electronics and piano ad libitum. (Composed in Milan, May 1995).

Recording data: Electronic part: Computer Music Studio of the State Conservatory of Milan, 1995. / Electronic and piano version: live recording, February 6th, 1996, Milan, Italy. Pianist: Giovanni Grosskopf.

(Jump to AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION)

REVIEW
"The piece A Forest Tale takes life from the influence that Norwegian tales and the paintings of Theodor Kittelsen and Erik Werenskjøld - two great tales illustrators - have exerted on Grosskopf. These tales narrate of worlds made of dreams and magic, full of children lost in the middle of the forest, at night, when all the night creatures, spirits and trolls awake. The piece shows also an amazement towards reality, that always exceeds our measures. Grosskopf's amazement develops into questioning, waiting, waking, into a wish to know deeper, a wish of adventure, a travel into knowledge. Never is Nature reduced, observed only from a single point of view: it is often a cruel Nature, marked by awe and sorrow. However, in the end, contemplation of beauty, at first only indistinctly seen, prevails. "Yesterday I was not here, today I am", says Grosskopf's music. "It isn't me who makes reality, but I'm fond of it", it seems to go on."

- Enrico Raggi, musicologist, Vatican Radio, January 6th, 1999.

AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION
This piece exists in two versions, the first with only the tape part, the other one with also a live piano part. Both are accepted by the Author and both of them have been recorded. In the aesthetic conceiving of "A Forest Tale" I have been strongly influenced by the world of the ancient Nordic folk tales, that I began to know a long time ago, and from the extraordinary paintings by the great Norwegian artists Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914) and Erik Werenskjøld (born 1855), who illustrated that world in a peculiar fashion, giving it an unusual atmosphere of dreaming and magic, at the same time childish, naïf and profound. The situation often suggested by many Norwegian tales is that of a boy who, getting lost in the middle of a forest at sunset, is compelled to spend the night in the wood, but cannot rest, being continuosly fascinated and charmed by the night creatures of the forest, by the several spirits, trolls and goblins who appear suddenly nearby, floating in the air in front of him or marching in troops among the trees, and then disappear again in the dark. When, the following morning, the boy returns to his village, he will certainly feel somehow different, and will have something to tell people: a "Forest Tale"!
In this "tale" an important part is played by human voice, which is sometimes deliberately distorted, because, in the context described, "it does not belong to human creatures". Voice appears in different ways: real soprano sampled voice, synthetic "soprano" voice, female voices with a "not learned" way of singing, sampled from a Swedish and a Mongolian folk songs and eventually male choir voices sampled from medieval compositions.
Some other interesting samplings have been made on a hurdy-gurdy and on the sound of three music boxes with different tunes in different rhythms and keys, activated at the same time.
In the composition it has been payed attention to the feeling of consequentiality in music and to a clear, well defined evolution of the composition during its developement. It must be pointed out that the well-known process named "continuum" (that is the continuous repetition of similar patterns, thus creating a static musical situation that may evolve slowly) has often been used only with the superimposition of well-perceivable soloist parts, that act as a guide for the listener, while the real "continuum" lays in background.
The form of this composition is derived from its harmonical and tone colour structure in the following way: after having planned a certain number of complex chords, each one with a different intervallic composition, I have observed the way tone colour changed when each chord was played with each one of the about 45 sampled or synthetized available sounds. The tone colour results of this test depended either on the interval structure of the chords (intervals were regarded to only as particular tone colours) or on the harmonic spectral composition of the sampled or synthetic sounds I was using. This test has shown that sounds that were apparently different were related, while others that were apparently similar reacted in a very different way to the same chord: playing the same chord, each time with one of the two apparently similar sounds, had a very different effect, due to some different partials in the harmonic spectrum of the sounds. By combining and cross-testing different chords with different sounds, I have obtained a range of finely graded tone colour relationships, that served as a ground structure to give a form to the composition, creating moments of increasing or decreasing tone colour tension, thus using the proper chords and sounds to obtain this in a consequential way.
The composition ends with a duet between real soprano sampled voice and artificial synthesized voice.
With regard to this point, one must also remark that in this composition I have arranged things as to make sampled and synthesized sounds very close to each others, so that they are indistinguishable.