No. d'opera SUISA

No. d'opera SUISA

DISCOGRAPHY

REVIEW

Italian percussionist Sergio Armaroli’s Twelve Pieces for Marimba is something of an enigma. At face value, the collection appears to be a more-or-less sequential series of etudes, but in reality Armaroli’s “etudes” are revisited transcriptions of the 12 tracks from his 2007 improvised solo marimba album, Early Alchemy. Things do become more technically and musically adventurous from one piece to the next, but the journey is clearly one intended for the audience rather than the student. 

Some pieces are quite short, most lasting under three minutes, with a few lasting no more than a page or two, while others are decidedly, almost disproportionately, longer and more involved. The composer’s awareness of their brevity is evident in his instruction to play up to four pieces on any given program, or else the entire collection. 

Armaroli’s instructions actually pose a number of problems and ask many more questions than they answer. Several times, he insists that improvisational freedoms must be taken, and that performers should deviate from his notation (which, he says, “can freeze the actual musical thought through improvisation”). He further declares that “Everything is possible. The composer’s supposed interpretation, which is a spontaneous creation, must not be binding.” 

Some may view this as being his way of urging performers to recreate the improvisational magic with which he birthed this material a decade and a half ago, while others may take it to be a flimsy justification for the absence of the many conventions (such as chord changes and stylistic instructions) that are typically included in improvisational music. Indeed, numerous hurdles are caused, rather than solved, by choices in notation (a particularly egregious example is a full page with notes that are placed three and four ledger lines below the treble clef, while the bass clef staff is empty).

The impression I am left with is that the composer sees himself as following in Keiko Abe’s footsteps, in that he believes strongly enough in the value of his original improvised creation that he took the time to write it down so that others could experience its performance. There are plenty of interesting moments in this collection, and although the music lapses into repetitive stretches of indulgent idiomatic vamping too often for my personal taste (certainly more often than in Abe’s playing), I can also appreciate that many people will find that quality appealing. 

If these pieces were used as developmental etudes, I would be warmer to their repetitiveness as a means of reinforcing technical or musical concepts. However, I believe that these pieces will be most successful as vehicles for improvisation, rather than education. I could easily see an improvising marimbist using these pieces as “lead sheets” to create an interesting and appealing set for a public performance. 

If you are already a fan of this performer/composer, I recommend that you purchase Twelve Pieces for the artist’s compositional insight as much as for the pieces themselves. However, it is likely that the only way to properly approach any of these pieces is to first purchase and absorb the composer’s 2007 album.