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It could have been a night like all others. Instead something urged me to get up in my studio in the company of a cold beer… to settle an old account and forever mark on the staff a piece of music that had stayed only in my memory for many years. The origin of these notes dates back to an Easter Eve Saturday afternoon of many years ago… It was a time of absolute solitude. It was the typical time when the person you would like to be with you is living a different life and everything around you has no interest to you. It was the time when a strange physical apathy forced me to look like through a tunnel at the keyboard of my dear old upright Kawai, a companion of great battles. Everything else around me was like out of focus (though I was sober!).
I remember that I felt sorry for myself and thought of doing something dedicated to myself. But what was to be born, in reality contained a desperate desire to communicate, to transform my pain into a grace to be given. That was why, for the first time in my life, I abandoned all “learned” musical languages and instinctively rested my both hands’ fingers on the keyboard in search of sounds of a disarming simplicity. It was immediately B minor. Much later I realized that that was only the echo of my obsessive listening again and again of the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony in B minor, just to stay on the subject of “cutting one’s veins”.
Since that afternoon, every time I have to test a piano for the first time to worm out its sound, I start with these simple chords, well distributed there in the centre, born on an Easter Eve Saturday of many years ago. Only in this way I can read an instrument’s heart.
Last night I definitively fixed on paper this little piece, trying to keep its improvisational instinct, forcing myself not to get dominated by the development mechanisms of the good musical craftsmanship.
The only protagonist is its moving simplicity.