The Solitude of Last Words

A linguistic approach integrated with a mathematical type of procedure has become increasingly important over the last decades, ultimately arriving at being projected onto other areas of thought, communication and creativity. In music, for example, there has been an appearance of studies based on the idea of “generative grammar”, derived from the theory by the same name developed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s and applied in this case to the relationships between sounds. It is precisely around these two dimensions — language and science, or better, words and numbers — that revolve two lyric operas that I have worked on in recent years: Big Bang Circus (written in 2001 and performed in a world premiere at the Biennale Musica in Venice in 2002) and Il killer di parole (“The Word Killer”), which I began to compose in 2008 and was performed for the first time at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice in 2010. In both of these works what at one time was viewed as two opposite approaches — one scientific, the other humanistic — were instead set face-to-face in order to discover the affinities that would make them appear to be synergistic.