This submission comprises a portfolio of original compositions and a written commentary.

Composing music is a multifaceted activity: imagining, improvising, notating, listening, arranging, transforming are only some of the actions a composer might undertake when creating a new piece. While the mind and the hands of a composer-performer wander across these different conceptual spaces, musical instruments not only provide a canvas for technical and expressive possibilities, but also act as psychological planes: their pitch matrix and their poetic soundscapes trace a web of creative potentialities that arise from the complex dialogue between their technology and the human mind.

How the interaction between mind and instrument functions and how it can be exploited imaginatively is the preliminary research question of the current work. Supported by up-to-date musical and cognitive studies, this practice-based project specifically explores the guitar (limited to its “classical”, acoustic connotation) as a compositional tool, and aims at suggesting a way to advance its compositional affordances. 

The main result of the work presented here is a portfolio of newly composed music by myself. This intends to foster a new way of understanding the fretboard and its intrinsic possibilities, as well as to propose a musical language that emerges from an in-depth analysis/experience of the guitar: my approach has informed both music written for the guitar itself, and music written for other ensembles not including the guitar. The portfolio of newly written works is attached separately and it includes the following original pieces:

1) Frammenti (after Miguel Llobet) for solo guitar

2) Suite per la Cappella degli Scrovegni for solo 10-string guitar

3) Movimento di Quartetto for string quartet

4) Nell’alto collinoso cavalcare for contemporary ensemble 

5) Lungo il Po for 10-string guitar and orchestra

The compositional process that brought such works to completion has developed by conducting research across a wide range of disciplines, which include – besides composition itself – musical performance and technology, as well as their cognitive implications. Alongside the composition portfolio, the outcomes of this research have also produced a set of related audio and video recordings. 

The written report that follows is intended as a description of the methodology that guided the compositional venture undertaken and presents conclusions about the role of the guitar’s idiom into today’s compositional landscape through the means of musical analysis. Composition is presented here as both the beginning and the end result of a creative experience that originates from the guitar. It is the point of view that I select to explore the idea that a musical instrument is not only an object used to create sounds, but rather a “tool for musical thinking”.