With These Hands (2023)

This all started when Ale asked me if I had any piano/percussion music, as he had formed a duo with the wonderful pianist Margherita Coraggio. I said “not yet, but are you willing to sing, too?” The answer was a courageous “yes,” and With These Hands came into being as a result. I wrote the text, beginning with the Italian translation of “With these hands, there is work to do,” sung simultaneously with English. What followed that was a word game that I think of as a tribute to one of my favorite Italian writers, Italo Calvino. I tried to translate the English into Italian, placing them against each other in the two sung voices, until a rhyme imperative or syntax issue made it impossible, at which point they split into their own divergent meanings, before finding each other again. Against this, I composed permutations of “keyboard music”; part of our goal was to make this performable by any combination of piano and vibraphone (two of one or one of each), so that creative limitation imposed on the text in a sense was translated into music. You could think of it as a vibraphone meant to resonate like a piano, or a piano so restricted in range that one has to play it like a vibraphone…

I cannot overstate how thrilling it is to see this come to life! Thank you to Alessandro DiGiulio and Margherita Coraggio, and to their amazing collaborators in sound and vision: Tommaso Cancellieri (audio) and Francesco De Santis (video).