Critical fragments (English)

Translations in English from Italian, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian

About concerts, and excerpts from essays and profiles

[…] composer with significant, creative depth, with a strong personality, someway connected to the Nono’s poetics […] It is the expression of the vital contemporaneity which, while consolidates substantial stylistic attitudes of the second ‘900, does not accept the mannerism nor what has been already said, but takes on new communication channels of music, showing a rich and varied linguistic direction of contemporary music.

Roberto Favaro, in the program notes of the Festival 

“L’Officina Musicale”, Cinisello Balsamo (Italy), March 18, 2003

Speaking about musical aesthetics of this important Italian artist, inevitably we must refer to his remarkable poetic language, as Osvaldo Coluccino first was a great poet and then became a new and important composer. We know, of the poet, his interest in the word when it comes from silence, as it is well known, of the composer, his interest in the silence when it arises from the sound. This intimate, vague and taciturn sound, calmly alchemized by the author in reflections of colors, pitches, tones, words and silence resting in the nothingness.

Ramón Montes de Oca, in Notas al programa 

of the “Festival Cervantino”, Guanajuato (Mexico), October 2004

[…] As a composer he escapes any classification, seeking and finding his own elegant style, which crosses the musical multiplicity that went beyond the music of the two decades after the Second World War. From this position […] a music with singular charm, a captivating music […]

Luigi Pestalozza, in the booklet of the Festival 

“Incontro con le Musiche”, Forlì (Italy), April 2005

[…] Poet and composer, it seems that he refers to the static time in Feldman and in the last Nono. He is a voice that speaks quietly, with a gently iterative subtlety.

Mario Messinis, Biennale Music, 

in “Il Gazzettino”, Venice (Italy), October 11, 2007

[…] His catalog includes original works in which the poetics is now fully defined, without compromise. In Coluccino’s music, a way to better understand the sudden conquest of the mature originality and of the extreme strictness could (and, I think, should) rely on the knowledge of Coluccino poet. […] With highly calibrated, essential musical notation, pondered and clearly notation defined in every detail (as if everything would depend on every pitch, every break, every choice of timbre) Coluccino defines sound objects immersed in the silence, in a static and mysterious space in which the movement of everyday life is suspended. […] Coluccino’s formal control is always very rigorous, and the conciseness comes from the need for essential concentration. It is also linked to the sound research within a dynamic that rarely exceed the “mezzopiano” (mp), a dynamic that serves to create magical suggestions and an effect of alchemical transmutation of the rarefied, dried up writing. From this, arcane tensions arise, suspended in a stillness that does not prevent to evoke unpredictable and unconventional formal pathways. Sometimes the poetic titles allude to them.

Paolo Petazzi, Alchemical transformations. The Italian composer 

Osvaldo Coluccino, in “Takte”, 2 / 2008, Bärenreiter, Kassel (Germany), 2008

The imperceptible transition to the boundaries of the inaudible [...] a kind of “praise to an ineffable presence”. The entity that escapes from the meshes of an explicit expression is the sound itself, evoked by nuanced and subtle colours which seem to drip from the outside, from an elsewhere that materializes on the liminal zone of the frame, of the “edge”. It is, as the composer himself writes, «it is about winning the laterality», giving voice, gently, to «a circumnavigating boundary line», to the «sweetness of a thread that deviates even as appears, extends to the edge and then winds». [...] The atmosphere is (e)static: in the flow of a however continuous sound – the echo of which vibrates over the breaks – poles of harmonic attraction emerge, unisons that seem to mark the edges of the sounding canvas, rare rhythmic ripples and microtonal shadows. The economy is the most surprising data on this page of chamber music [Voce d’orlo] in which each pitch (either touched on or marked pitch) has its importance and its specific location […]

Angela Ida De Benedictis, Sound paintings and imaginary embroideries 

between  shipwrecks and (new) structures, 

in Sound from Europe, 17° Festival di Milano Musica 2008,

La Scala Theater Editions, Milan (Italy), October 2008

                                     

[...] I met Osvaldo several years ago and gave birth to his first performance with the Koncreta Duo flute and piano active in those years; I invited him to write for me because, knowing him, I immediately identified him as a strong musical personality. To give you an idea of the composer, Osvaldo’s music is able to guarantee the flow of the sound in a rarefied and apparently static atmosphere, but in which every pause, every silence takes on an absolute significant. The pleasure of working with Osvaldo was verify that every rhythmic ripple, every microtonal choice, every pitch had its specific weight in its creativity, providing depth and specificity to his work. [...]

Rossella Spinosa, Osvaldo Coluccino for Italy&USA,

in “Amadeus Online”, Milan (Italy), May 16, 2011

[...] Coluccino is a composer and poet whose radical research turns the piano sound very transparent and rarified [...]

Alfonso Alberti, interviewed in Talents today, 

in “Classic Voice”, Milan (Italy), May 2011

Five names in contemporary music [...] have been chosen for this concert [...]. Giacomo Platini, Sylvano Bussotti, Osvaldo Coluccino, Mathias Pintscher, Gérard Pesson, each in relation to his generation, are today among the most interesting composers; they are musicians who have been able to find, especially abroad, a passionate audience and attentive institutions. [...] All of them, in some way, are united by a language full of willingness to communicate, of strong formal substance always intertwined with precious refinements. In our deep rift between pop and classical music, these musicians are located as standard-bearers of a research and a novelty never an end in itself, never self-referential: for the ancient and timeless ritual of a Presence that is revealed, of a unknown that appears, filtered by careful historical consciousness shaped by deep emotions. [...] today’s concert has a double merit: to propose important music, in order to awaken our consciences, and to accompany the execution of each piece with images taken by some masterpieces of contemporary art, according to these combinations: Coluccino-Burri; Platini-Kiefer; Pesson-Penone; Pintscher-Twombly; Bussotti-his score; for a free play of analogies and references, according to the ancient relationship between art and music [...]

Paolo Repetto, The Infinite present. Five composers in the present,

in the booklet of the Festival “Antidogma”, Turin (Italy), June 5, 2012

[...] the side of today’s music not only Italian which, reminding us “Oltre l’avanguardia. Un invito al molteplice” [Over the avant-garde, an invitation to the manifold] by Armando Gentilucci, moves forward in a fully free journey beyond each compositional order also in the new music, thus communicating that true music, that is the one out of the and therefore against the general but therefore musical conformism, preserves inside itself the opening beyond any closure, beyond the order created today in order to make us live without the possibility of change, as conceived and imposed as the end of history [...] a work with a particular charm, absolutely all his own, where the music is suspended over us like the transparent white clouds in the blue sky, which are moving without boundaries, which tell us that in nature there are no defined time and space. That is, we, real human beings who listen to Osvaldo Coluccino’s music, are not imprisoned in a definition. [...]

Luigi Pestalozza, in the program notes of the Festival 

“Gli Amici di Musica / Realtà”, Milan (Italy), February 18, 2014

Assigning a specific meaning to the objects and relationships that surround us is not an exercise in training of the mind, but a virtue possessed by those who, in those objects and relations, manage to discover their soul (in a situation in which the soul does not seem to appear). The meaning of art is often related to the ability to be able to see something that others do not see. If you are approached Osvaldo Coluccino (1963) and his music, you will realize how much sensitivity, carefulness and depth it conveys. [...]

The main association that I propose to you in order to enter into his music is to make a refresher on the work by the painter Piero della Francesca and the works for piano which follow the thin thread that binds Webern, Messiaen and Feldman: if you take all the work for strings by Coluccino (you can find it in a collection released by Neos, String Quartets) and the explorations of Stanze for piano solo (12 lucubrations on Col Legno with the performance by Alfonso Alberti), as if by magic you will find some of the themes developed by those artists. The largest reflection that Coluccino has instilled in music is the same introduced in the paintings by Della Francesca in Leggenda della Vera Croce, made into the Chapel of the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo: in front of the vision of the frescoes you can see a global structure with the theme in more paintings, with multiple colors and sense of perspective (Piero della Francesca was also a mathematician), but thanks to a long and appropriate observation, you are captured by the faces of the participants who are able to open a panorama of reflections: serious, solemn, motionless and impassive, with a pose that does not pretend to create a mystical effect, these actors of the painting return to the observer an unthinkable desire for dialogue and communication. As for the above-mentioned pianists, you enter in the ranks of the fantastic custodians of the time, temples of the sound crystallization of the time or of its cancellation, committed to eliminate the boundaries of its ends.

Coluccino’s work follows a rigorous line of reasoning, only due to him, that captures the objective characteristics of the intimate, describes an usual place of our life after a proper interrogation about its properties: the bearing structure of his music is continually tenuous and evanescent, but it does not lose in substance; in Attimo the string quartet covers a sentimental atonal range capable, in its nuances between chords and notes, to evoke states of soft light, a light that frames; with Aion we are enraptured by the mystery, by the light darkness and by the strings that simulate perfectly the effects of the blow; in Talea the tension is beautifully built on some unconventional techniques and on the power of the empathy (the perfomances by La Fenice Theater String Quartet are superb). The 12 compositions of variable length of Sranze subdivide 12 musical moments in which we can recognize the entities that belong to us, objectifying them with free sounds that are able, through their morphology, to fix a value or to make sense to our surroundings: in short a renewed order of the painting puzzle by Della Francesca, without temporal accommodation, and following only the one of the harmony of the images. Coluccino, stylistically speaking, however, transmits differences with respect to the art that I have indicated: there is no grudge or entanglement, least of all repetitions; the music takes shape in its expansions. [...] Gamete Stele is the confirmation that the same intimacy obtained in the whisper or in the almost endless calm of a piano or a viola, can be found in the “noise” of an ensemble of at least 9 elements.

Ettore Garzia, Sounds of the Italian contemporary: Osvaldo Coluccino,

in “Percorsi Musicali - Thoughts on contemporary music”, Italy, September 2016

[...] The third evening is still radical. Area Sismica does not let up. So the “case Coluccino” explodes. The 53 years old composer Osvaldo Coluccino is the protagonist of the Ex Novo Ensemble concert. In three pieces of his emblems cycle, written between 2009 and 2015, two of them are world premieres, he acts with long soft sounds at the edge of silence, barely modulated sounds, but with a kind of hesitation, just to mention the possible melodic fluctuation. Maybe he lives in a otherworld, perhaps he intends to make circulate in this world the extreme intelligence and an irreconcilable discretion. The works by Giacomo Manzoni, Renato Miani, Giacinto Scelsi, Bruno Maderna are the tasty side dish to Coluccino [...]

Mario Gamba, Contemporaneo Italiano, 

in “Il Manifesto”, Rome (Italy), November 29, 2016

[...] The Ensemble Exaudi weaves the theme of love, of separation and death with the madrigals by Monteverdi (“O primavera, gioventù dell’anno”, “Cor mio, mentre vi miro”) and those, more theatrical, by Gesualdo (“Se la mia morte brami” “Deh, come invan sospiro”), a repertoire for five voices directed by James Weeks, who sing with the color and the vocal flexibility that induces this refined writing. In the same way, the delicacy emerges in the recent pieces by the two Italian composers present this evening. The expressive tension passes through the spoliation and the restraint in Scomparsa by Osvaldo Coluccino [...]

Michèle Tosi, Inside and outside the Abbey of Royaumont,

in “ResMusica – Classical Music and Dance”, Paris (France), 14.9.2018

[...] The Royaumont Festival continues with a new meeting between nature and spirituality, baroque and contemporary, thanks to the vocal group Exaudi [...] Two contemporary pieces of fifty Italians, given in the first French performance, intermingle with madrigals from which they derive polyphonic quality (the quintet becomes a sextet and is directed) [...] Some equally beautiful radiant stasis bring a double resonance on Oscaldus Colucian’s Disappearance, which plays long and wide under arch vaults of the refectory.

Charles Arden, Eternal loves, magical spaces at the Festival de Royaumont,

in “Ôlyrix – The whole Opera is there”, Nogent-sur-Marne (France), 14.9.2018

[...] two madrigals by Monteverdi, “O primavera, gioventu dell’anno” and “Sfogava con le stelle” affirm the qualities of the Ensemble Exaudi, chiselling the words and their color with a purity [...] in an acute attention to the amount of silence in the vocal emission, which is found in Osvaldo Coluccino’s Scomparsa (2007), after two pages by Gesualdo, “Se ia mia morte brami” and “Deh, come invan sospiro”, an intimate theater crossed by the bitterness that here we feel differently, out of the formal historical, which is also true for the ending of “Rimanti in pace” by Monteverdi. Under the direction of James Weeks, the five singers of the Exaudi celebrate the meaning of expressive decantation.

Gilles Charlassier, World Premiere of Heave by Sivan Eldar. The Exaudi and 

Meitar ensembles perform Coluccino, Cengiz Eren, Elkana, Fedele, Hurel, 

Lanza, Leroux and Pagliei, in “Anaclase – everyday music”, Paris (France), 10.26.2018

The Festival di Musica Contemporanea Italiana returns to its original location. And that’s right, because it was born there and there you breathe that sparkling, alternative and informal environment that fits perfectly with the sounds that are programmed with a cultural foresight, between utopia and visionarity, which few Italian musical realities can boast. This is Seismic Area: an outpost of today’s music in the Forlì countryside. [...] It is also a confirmation the one offered from the piano by Fabrizio Ottaviucci who proposes Stanze 3-4-5-10-12 (2004-2011) by Osvaldo Coluccino. A mystical-philosophical encounter that is repeated between an author and a performer who share close sensibilities, love for silence, minimal movements, white spaces, blocked sounds. This too is a performance of considerable openness of mind, concentration, between suspensions that leave in space a sweetish sense of incompleteness.

Paolo Carradori, Seismic Area, a lesson in contemporary music,

in “Il Giornale della Musica”, Turin (Italy), 28.11.2018

[...] the pianist Ottaviucci now fabulous [...] this festival has given answers also on the side of the composers, not so much for the marvels by Luciano Berio, Salvatore Sciarrino [...] whose notoriety is consolidated, as for the “discovery”, which in the end is a “rediscovery” right in the quarries of the Seismic Area, of a portent named Osvaldo Coluccino. Where does an author of such great stature hide and why his name does not circulate from morning to night among music lovers and in newspapers and TV and in any other means of communication?

Five of his Stanze for piano, a cycle written between 2004 and 2011, were performed by Ottaviucci, who has a particular harmony with Coluccino (but he has it with Scelsi, with Cage, with Curran...). Composer of sounds that wish to move to the border of silence, of sounds that entertain with the idea of tenuous absolute but then discover that the absolute does not exist and then choose fragility as a way of acting, as a way of being well inside the construction of a platform of symbols between the author and the world. Passages on the “disincarnate” high notes, rich in echoes, itineraries of chord that caress unprecedented harmonic hypotheses, a sort of “requiem ballad” in the last Stanza all woven on a surprisingly singable melody."

Mario Gamba, Revelations and discoveries at the Seismic Area Festival,

in “Il Manifesto”, Rome (Italy), 4.12.2018

[…] He made his debut as a poet in 1992 in the Annuario di poesia 1991-92 (by Crocetti publisher), with short and concentrated verses; the traits of his literary activity, which are those of his personality, of his sensitivity and culture, of his impulses and attractions, obviously are also found in the musical one. As a composer, he manifests a strong autonomy from the main currents albeit close to that of the last Nono, a substantially static music often on the edge of the audible, suspended in a rarefied, questioning timbre, based on the ambivalence of the signifier, which leads to sound events on the border [...] “I feel the profound artistic expression, in whatever context it moves and with whatever language and technique it proceeds, always the same thing, conductor of the same postulate, as a pre-individual value. Art enters my music in a transversal, pseudo-subliminal way. The text I choose always has a hyper-musical nature, but, I would like to emphasize, of a music of sense, that is, that contributes to making resonate at multiple levels, music of a signifier that overcomes the illusion of constipated rational understanding or of reconstruction in a consoling order.” (Osvaldo Coluccino, Testimony, in Renzo Cresti, I linguaggi delle arti e della musica – L’e(ste)tica della Bellezza, Il Molo, Viareggio 2007).

The essence of art precedes each specific typology from the point of view of the arts, languages, forms and styles, it is a universal quid that Coluccino tries to work with transversal means and elements, in search of the profound meaning of things, the sense that lies before of all rationalization and embraces the human being with his inner infinity.

Renzo Cresti, Musica Presente – Tendenze 

e compositori di oggi, LIM, Lucca (Italy), 2019

[…] [Interviewer:] “After so much music listened to and played, what still knows how to amaze you, make her say ‘Oh’ in music and piano music?”

[Ottaviucci:] “I am increasingly attracted to rarefaction. This is not the case with the Falde timbriche program which draws on works from the mid-twentieth century. Today I feel that silence is increasingly the protagonist. I found an example of amazement in this sense in the music of Osvaldo Coluccino, a musician who knows how to embed sound in the meshes of silence, play skillfully with full and empty spaces and thus enhance the significance of each note and its intense absence. Against the rhetoric of our days that exceeds in every language: of words, of notes, of images.”

—, The timbral stratum of Fabrizio Ottaviucci at the ParmaJazz Frontiere Festival,

in “Ginger Magazine - Creative Amazement”, Italy, October 23 , 2020

Pianist Jan Michiels has selected works by Furrer, Sciarrino and Kurtág that connect with the world premiere Rispecchiato in Quarzo by Italian composer Osvaldo Coluccino. A grandiose work in which the electronics are a radiant extension of the sounds of the piano: sensual, poetic and massive – the 21st-century answer to Luigi Nono’s …Sofferte onde serene… These new piano works have found a champion as virtuosic as he is sensitive in the person of Jan Michiels.

Maarten Beirens, in the festival booklet,

“Transit Festival”, Leuven (Belgium), 2021

Slowly, after the last stanza by Osvaldo Coluccino, Jan Michiels’ hands slide from the keys to the edge of the keyboard. They form fists that rest on his knees. It is finished, silence and repentance have been stretched to the limit. The recital has ended, now there is nothing.

At his concert as part of Coluccino’s Rispecchiato in quarzo, Jan Michiels was able to show his strongest side: perfection in soft tones. The concert consisted of Coluccino’s world creation for piano and electronics and was preceded and followed by his stanzas, which in turn were interspersed with compositions by like-minded colleagues such as Kurtág, Furrer and Sciarrino.

The term velvety is still too coarse to describe Michiels’ touch. Sometimes his tones sound as if the keys are being kissed by angels. He fully respects what Coluccino understands by a stanza: a space in all its forms, real or imaginary. In Michiels’ case, this respect manifests itself in a masterly filling of the space between the notes. In his hands, the silences fill the space, and the notes seem to guard the silences. His feet gently play the pedals with tenths of millimetres. The soft tones are so minimal that they seem to be at the service of the peace that follows.

The programme was grouped around Coluccino’s world creation Rispecchiato in quarzo, a work for live piano and electronics, in which the piano enters into a dialogue with loops, drones, urban sounds, machine violence and powerful noise. Here too, Michiels showed himself the master of the few. In some parts, the piano was prepared and the strings were touched by the hands and nails of the live pianist. Here too Michiels stood out with subtle movements of balls bouncing over the strings or caresses with sticks and pads. The piece ended with Michiels backing away from the piano and examining it from a distance, admiring it or, if you like, paying it homage. Here, but also in other parts of the concert, Jan Michiels showed that he was one with his instrument.

Wynold Verweij, The slow hands of Jan Michiels,

Transit 2021 honours the piano as a spiritual medium,

in “Klassiek-Centraal.be”, Mechelen (Belgium), October 24, 2021

[…] The heart of Jan Michiels’ recital is Osvaldo Coluccino’s relatively long Rispecchiato in quarzo. The piece consists of an electroacoustic part pre-recorded by Coluccino and a part played live by the pianist, using both the piano keyboard and the interior. With these means Coluccino creates a particularly exciting and at times unsettling sound world that becomes more and more complex as the piece progresses. The rest of the recital is made up of Coluccino’s eight movements Stanze, which are interrupted by short pieces by György Kurtág, Beat Furrer and Salvatore Sciarrino. Those eight Stanze stand out in this recital for their extremely subdued world of sound. With great care and a great sense of timing, Michiels doses the delicate attacks, as if only fragments of music were playing, in the wind. It is the pieces by Kurtág and above all those by Furrer and Sciarrino with an almost industrial character especially in the two ‘Notturno Crudele’ by Sciarrino, to provide the dynamism to this recital. […]

Ben Taffijn, Transit Festival - Part 2 (Concert review),

in “Nieuwe Noten”, Amsterdam (Netherlands), October 24, 2021

In pianist Jan Michiels’ recital, Rispecchiato in quarzo by Italian composer Osvaldo Coluccino takes centre stage. Michiels has embellished this work for piano and electronics with Coluccino’s intimist cycle Stanze and some works by related composers such as György Kurtág, Beat Furrer and Salvatore Sciarrino. It is a richly furnished concert in which the confrontation of grandiozo with stillness results in a new listening experience. 

[…] Electronics often have a chilly connotation. But at Coluccino, deepening the magic is paramount. Electronics make it possible to transcend auditory boundaries, such as tone duration or the range of high and low registers. As a result, traditional perceptions are called into question. Coluccino is known for leaving nothing to chance. He writes out note by note and silence by silence with microscopic precision. This 18-minute piece is the result of four months of daily toil. 

“In quarzo” refers to the quartz stone (amethyst, rock crystal), a common mineral with a six-sided prism. The Greeks and Romans attributed magical powers to the stone. According to Coluccino, the combination of piano and electronics approaches the spiritual properties of the quartz. 

Luigi Nono – Historically, Rispecchiato in quarzo is rooted in ...Sofferte onde serene... for piano and tape (1975-77) by the Venetian composer Luigi Nono. […] Nono wrote his work in a period of intense reflection and self-criticism. With this, he set the tone for innovative ways of composing and for renewed perspectives on art and aesthetics. Luigi Nono is therefore the subject of a common fascination for Osvaldo Coluccino and Jan Michiels.

Identity – About himself and his compositional identity, Coluccino recently said: “I respect all kinds of musicians, but I must say that my genre cannot be called ‘free improvisation’, because I write note by note, silence by silence; it cannot be “electronic” because I don’t compose only this; it cannot be ‘minimalism’ because there is micro-mobility, subtle changeability, research about sound, and because the obsessive repetitiveness is absent. There is no doubt that I am a multifaceted artist, in the manner of certain personalities of the Renaissance, but regarding the genre, I repeat, it is sufficient to indicate ‘contemporary classical’ or ‘modern classical’.

Resonance – In its purest form, Coluccino’s triptych of tones-resonance-silence comes into its own in his twelve Stanze (2004-2011). Jan Michiels plays eight of them, grouped four-by-four around Rispecchiato. A stanza in Italian can mean many things: a space in all its forms, real or imaginary. They can be inner places in the soul or impossible places. Musically, these spaces come alive in a timeless suspension, in perfect mastery of the intervals between the notes and of the pitches. What we hear resembles broken piano music, the notes and sounds are scattered in space. In his Stanze, Coluccino uses the body of the piano to generate resonances.  He removes the windows, eliminates all frills, and confronts us with environments that are within ourselves. The light and dimensions continue to change. We determine the pace at which we walk through spaces that we soon perceive as our own. In a stanza, other meanings also take shape, such as the fact of staying, stopping and standing still.

Jan Michiels takes up the challenge of profiling these spatial interpretations with respect and love. He excels in a masterly interpretation of the areas between the tones. In his hands, the silences fill the space; the notes seem to guard the silences. His feet play the pedals with tenths of millimetres. The soft tones are so minimal that they seem to be at the service of the tranquillity that follows. The sound is magical and, for some listeners, perhaps even religious.

Fragmentation – Music manifests itself here more than ever as a language, albeit a different one. Music is a language in which we can express ourselves and which we understand, but which we cannot translate. […] Moreover, the use of rests, fermata’s, caesura’s and pauses of breath lead to fragmentation of the musical form, which makes linearity disappear. The silences challenge the perception of time. The result is the creation of a sound space that the listener fills in himself, creating an impression of timelessness. The composer takes a step back here, making space for the listener. The psychic result is an active participation of the listener who, in addition to ears, also switches on his eyes as sensitive antennae. Thoughts that had previously remained hidden are released. That which was initially internalised becomes externalised and is therefore tangibly released from the hidden.

Intensity – […] In this concert, the listener will sometimes be surprised by how the varying proportions of regularity and instability manifest themselves. In the beginning, the listener waits with some restlessness for something to hold on to and for direction. But he gradually notices that he is drawn into the here-and-now, for there is no perspective. The listening experience can therefore be better compared to a long and seemingly aimless hike in which time disappears from sight. The listener has no other anchor point than introspection, which ultimately results in a spectacular view. The initial discomfort of aural displacement has slipped through introspection into meditation and reflection. 

In Coluccino’s Dodicesima stanza, the final piece of the concert, the listener will have experienced that composition of silence ultimately creates space for dazzling vistas. Or, as a wall proverb in a 13th century monastery in Toledo says: "Pilgrim, there is no pathway, there is only travelling itself".

Wynold Verweij, A walking tour with panoramic views, 

in booklet of the concert at Festivl De Bijloke, Ghent (Belgium), 17.02.2022

“In general, I expect from artists a union between uncommon sensitivity and mastery. Therefore, in my case I am also dealing with formal research, i.e. with relationships between pitches of the notes of the various instruments, with rests, counterpoint, dynamics, dynamism, etc., just as it was done in the XIV, XV, XVI… centuries, and certainly also with the parameter that most fascinates me of our modernity, that is, “research on sound". But without poetry (of music), without (special) sensitivity, without a great (innate) personality, without an intense life experience that works for the purpose of knowledge and which alas also makes the soul suffering, certainly suffering not for free but for good reasons, altruistic reasons (Rimbaud said that «it is about making the soul monstrous»), this type of research, which to begin with is based on technical-aesthetic scaffolding, remains sterile.” (Osvaldo Coluccino)

By chance I got my hands on the CD Gemina, it contains eight compositions by Osvaldo Coluccino, an Italian composer until then completely unknown to me. […] Gemina attracted attention and apparently worked as a door opener. Eight “duets” in different combinations, written between 2002 and 2008, published in 2010, are collected in this humble CD: total duration just over 35 minutes. […] The first duo for violin and piano is stunning. [...] a very concentrated dialogue with a few gestures, a question and answer for hints. Mostly silent. Light, floating. With related overhead lines, above and below. One could count the sounds received while listening, obviously it would not make sense. A few moments before the end, three rather decisive, consecutive, brief gestures (three bars mf) accentuate the fragile union almost as distant as a climax. The classification as “gentlemanly tenderness” is on the tip of my tongue, Webern’s reminiscences might emerge in terms of succinctness and inner drive, something of Feldman is close, but Coluccino seems more to “sing” his way. Familiar things that cannot be named exactly appear again and again, while at the same time opening up new horizons in terms of invention. The material is free in the truest sense of the word, the emancipation of dissonance has long since taken place, traditional harmony can also return, anything goes and sometimes these eight miniatures present themselves quite “elegantly” to use a word that seems inappropriate in relation to the new in music. Only those who are able to create to an effective degree of concentration can work in this way.

The composer himself does not like to name masters or models, but the name of Luigi Nono recurs more often, not as an idol, rather as someone in whom he sees confirmation of himself, which does not exclude occasional closeness. No one comes out of nowhere. 

[...] His existence as a poet ended in 2003, declaring the choice to stop writing poetry an «act of poetry»: «I wrote what I had to write». He only occasionally resorts to these texts, for example in his vocal compositions. «I’m not a poet who also writes music for pleasure or a composer who also writes poetry», he told me in an email dated January 2023. He refuses the typical multitasking of today’s operations, and he doesn’t even hesitate to make big commitments: «Everything is music in the universe; but not as a pleasure to the ears.»

[...] Coluccino would correct or supplement my attempt to sketch Coluccino, having placed him initially and en passant next to Morton Feldman, with a crucial reflection: «In my music there is a radical research on sound, micro-dynamics and micro-sensitive», which moves his discoveries [...] He believes that this type of research reaches its peak in his most recent works, from 2017 onwards; in fact the Duets, with their almost classic appearance, date back quite some time.

My unsystematic walk through this work happily embarks on Emblema. These are seven pieces with changing instrumentation, seven pieces of music in statu nascendi, aimed at creating natural instrumental sounds, aimed at what is barely audible. The protagonists, for example in the first piece flute/bass flute, bass clarinet, violin, viola and cello, try to get the sound out in careful underlinings, in parallel movements that gently separate over time. A ppppp-ppp dynamic is applied. And again and again there are pauses, even caesuras like recitatives, the gestural-elegiac fields stand free as investigative settings, almost like clippings in the silence, like a graph on a blank sheet of paper.

In the six Interni for flute (2017/18) he radicalises this research sound movement again. With Roberto Fabbriciani he has a musician who knows how to realize these complex annotated inner visions. I see the drawing, I feel the space, I feel something one might call Aura. Silence is not adored, it is a conditio sine qua non. «Silence is a sound, an integral part of the work.» (Roberto Fabbriciani). Despite the concentration, the richness of color is great, and not only due to the change of instrumentation, since with Interni there is in any case only one performer, one instrument. The restriction, the reduction read as a lack of vocabulary would be a misinterpretation, it is rather a matter of acting in the similar, or in the inequality of the similar, which wants to be heard. You get up close and see more, immerse yourself in sound and hear an infinite amount. Sensations arise at micro-distances, the palette flourishes, under the microscope random things become complex organisms. There may also be a spiritual aspect, but there is hardly any risk of being confused with esoteric offerings, and the sovereignty of the work is not complicit in this direction (see also above: elegance), rather the “research on sound” appears as a cognitive interest that works against the strategies of hedonism. “Research” is perhaps only a verbal device for a sound that seems to question itself critically in the moments of its existence, to put it metaphorically. Music is decidedly centered on the signals coming from one’s own microcosm. Here a melancholic character is expressed, a «supersensitive personality» who is not moved only by the internal events of art, as Coluccino (roughly) describes himself.

[…] Stanze (2004/11) for piano, an investigation of a special kind, an attempt at different modes of expression, moods, writing in space, time management and forgetfulness of time. […] this suite of rooms is made as a sequence with new insights every time. If you want, you can find traces of a story. [...] With the Dodicesima stanza (Twelfth room), that is, with the last piece, a new tone enters the cycle, [...] I feel a melancholy that never existed before, a soulful return. Come back in? In what? A Proust effect comes to mind, Le temps retrouvé, that is the final desire to start all over again immediately after the end of the reading, because the author suddenly saw the world he had told, now in a completely different way. [...] Coluccino’s music is durable and resistant, a barely dreamed work would not pass this test of resistance, his music is not consumed in the first outrages, but is there as if it had already been heard before. In Stanze is the traditional way of playing the piano. «I chose the path of purity», Coluccino wrote in an email dated February 10, 2023, «in order not to compress this work into the technical stereotypes of our age». The aspect of sound research in the strict sense can be somewhat diminished here, the music is entirely dedicated to events, to the change of perspective, to the changing of the lighting in the different rooms, where the clocks tick in a slightly different way.

[…] In Rispecchiato in quarzo (2020) the pianist, at the world premiere in Leuven at the Transit Festival in October 2021, the congenial Jan Michiels, picks up the instrument, which is perfectly prepared, performs his rituals (even the performative aspect here plays its role), uses colorful aids to play directly on the strings, and also plays a (virtuosic) part on the keys. This sensitive border crossing is set in an electro-acoustic soundscape that allows for dialogues between the concrete and the virtual, but also clings to where they blend together. «The multiple faces, the resplendent and transparent multiverses of quartz, to which various ancient peoples attributed divinatory properties», writes the composer in the program of the concert, with a glance into the distance, «are here the magical seat to which the living being addresses to seek and seek himself in an ineffable way». […]

At this point, a little more could be said about Coluccino’s electroacoustic works, which form a separate body of work, in addition to the area for/with acoustic objects, for example Atto (2011), where objects are played, no instruments musical and without electronic manipulations. When asked by Simon Reynell what it is about, Coluccino replies with a declaration of principle that should apply to all of his music: «In music I try to capture abstract, invisible or parallel elements and then make them concrete».

Attimo for string quartet (2007) particularly captivated me. This brings me closer to the initial CD Gemina with the eight duets. The sound merges into balanced movements in lines, dots and interrogative surfaces. This “moment” is a static drama in the here and now, sharp and dramatic counterpoints appearing like lightning rods supplying electricity to the high-voltage whole, but this is not seditious, Coluccino is not one who needs a constant display of artistry. The musical legacy of modernity is still within earshot, but it has long since moved to another planet…

Reinhard Ermen, from the Portrait Continuation of poetry by other means

– The Italian composer Osvaldo Coluccino,

in MusikTexte, no. 177/178, Cologne, May 2023

CHAMBER, ORCHESTRAL AND VOCAL MUSIC

About Interni (2017-2018), Kairos, Vienna 2019

 [...] In a reality where composition examines methods and techniques even without a precise deductive theory, each composer is carving out his/her own space, his/her own specificity of composing: the one built by the composer Osvaldo Coluccino has the air of being one of the more aware, recognizable and “strong” in its identity and intensity: I have quoted the adjective “strong” because in the case of Coluccino there is a double entendre of meaning, which aims at a wonderful divergence between sense and object.

Interni, a new CD by Coluccino for Kairos, entirely dedicated to the subject of the flute, is a magnificent representation of that proposed adjective: with the indispensable performance of the great flutist Roberto Fabbriciani, Interni is divided into 6 parts, 6 investigative movements of the thought of Coluccino, a composer able to do something unique through music, that is to say, to work on a intimate and elaborated reflection of images, dynamic stations of objects with people formally inanimate. If there were already many channels ingeniously used by composers and flautists in which to present themselves with pianissimo dynamics, with long silences or with faint trails of breath or air channels, there was no one who had developed a specific configuration, the one that Coluccino elevates to the reality of “mild” and "dim", through the combination of meticulous extended techniques. [...] even if there's no explicit mention, when Osvaldo talks about Beato Angelico's paintings in the museum of S. Marco in Florence, we consider a connection to the "interiors" of that place, where the apparently immobile figures on the paintings seem to relate to us using a preferential channel, that of an imperceptible expansion of mute explanations; these sophistications designed by Coluccino and performed by Fabbriciani are able to act as a medium, to transforme musical listening, from the corporeal to the incorporeal, movement that passes from the ears to the brain. Therefore, it is a question of preparing ourselves for an immersive and difficult listening, but that launches another signal of true novelty in the composition for flute. C flute, high flute, bass and double bass, as well as flute with the help of an electro-acoustic support, follow unusual paths of virtuosity, because they feature elements of an aesthetic idiom (the booklet inside the CD collects examples of these meticulous scores) that had never been before placed in this way. Go and hear, for example, Interno 5 where the depletion of the timbre of the flute provides a space for a plethora of situations of sonic inertia, human breath that condenses with exhalations, aspirations, barely perceptible whistles, hisses conducted in an incredibly space airy.

The composition of Coluccino on the flute is different from what was done by the main Italian composers writing for extended techniques: Maderna made the flute poetic, Berio framed the extensions in the rules of coexistence of the harmonic processes, Nono studied the complexity of sound (even in space ), Sciarrino investigated the change of state (what happens in the spaces between sonority and silence), Ambrosini acted on motility, Fabbriciani produced a jump in the quality of the timbres thanks to gigantic instrumental discoveries. For Coluccino, not only the timbric investigation is important, but also how much can be achieved in terms of humanistic spirit, of connective tissues linked to artistic sensibility, given that his style doesn't provoke only awakening generic and subjective neural images, but he wants to direct us towards one of them in particular, that of a humble and elusive introspective dimension. The transfer to that, however, is very intense and it would be enough to listen to what happens through the enrichment from electro-acoustic processing: Interno 6 even shows a compound whisper, a proof of closeness to the paintings and to all the art that cannot be grasped in its beauty and totality if not after a careful vision of the details, in compliance with what Giacometti claimed in the need to develop a poetic addressed to the discovery of inaccessible horizons.

Ettore Garzia, Osvaldo Coluccino: Interni, 

in “Percorsi Musicali”, Italy, 30.9.2019

The flutist Roberto Fabbriciani faces the works of the composer Osvaldo Coluccino. The minimalism of the composition perfectly harmonizes with the Fabbriciani flute matched to it. This is important because Coluccino composes both for great orchestras (Destato nel respiro, 2018), vocal parts (Nel distacco, 2003) and for individual instruments balancing on the border of sound and silence, as in the case of the flute in Interni.

Flute in various versions, most often prepared, by the way Fabbriciani uses various techniques of playing on the album. There are long parts with whispers, quick phrases, breath work. Coluccino’s new contemporary music performed by the great virtuoso of the flute Fabricciani oscillates between creative freedom and composed, structured work. The recordings on Interni sound like solid improvisation, a full nocturne, mysterious escape deep into human thoughts. Restless, dark. Unspecified. This is the material of the album, six pieces requiring drawing focus, letting yourself be fascinated. Especially when the Italian flutist descends into the low areas of the subconscious, and the Italian composer plays with silence. For me it is simply a sen-sa-tio-nal album penetrating the space surrounding the artist with sound.

Piotr Strzemieczny, in “Fyh!”, Polond, October 26 2019

rating: 8 (great album)

The adjective substantive that entitles the program is in the plural: it declares the attention that the composer devotes to exploring gli “interni” ("interiors") but also the “interno” (interior) of the modern idiomatic writing of which Fabbriciani tames effects and silences with poetic naturalness, to recreate a sonic, spatial and listening dimension of original subtlety.

Angelo Foletto, An interior dimension,

in “Robinson-La Repubblica”, Italy, November 9,  2019

rating: 4 stars

In these six Interni (“interiors”) for flutes, the composer and poet leaves the usual paths and makes the instrument, its sounds, the ways of playing be heard, up to the limits of the audible, the silences therefore as integral part of the pieces, as a series of thoughts, which advance, evolve, explore – a path, a mission, a research. In this journey in which human breathing and the instrument are compared as alter ego, Osvaldo Coluccino refines the detail to the extreme, as in the Primo interno, which begins with four notes, identical (G, at the same octave), but emitted following different morphology: air through the flute; human breath; inspired air; air through the instrument but according to a fingering outside the norm. This is a disc that requires listening close to the ear, in the quiet of a helmet that produces silences and in the patience of one who knows how to listen to the subtle.

Bernard Vincken, Osvaldo Coluccino: Interni, Fabbriciani,

in “Clic Musique!”, France, November 2019

Before he began writing music as a mature composer, Osvaldo Coluccino (b. 1963) was a literary artist. Although he had studied composition and classical guitar, had performed in concert halls in his teens and had begun to compose in 1979, from the end of the 1980s to the early 2000s Coluccino was mainly engaged in writing: poetry, drama and prose. Poetry in particular demands an ear for words as sonorous objects as well as a grasp of language as potentially an instrument of condensed meaning – of saying much with little. And while Coluccino may consider his work with poetry and with composition to occupy two separate and largely unconnected spheres, it does seem that both of those qualities of poetry—sonority and economy of expression – carry over into his compositions.

This is especially true of Interni, a 2017-2018 series of five solo compositions for various flutes and one for flute and electronics. As he did with earlier works, like the Emblema series for small chamber ensembles and Atto, which was composed for objects rather than musical instruments, Coluccino with Interni makes music focused on the quiet details of sound production and color.

From the opening notes of Primo interno for C flute, Coluccino’s sensibility reveals itself. In as pure an example of klangfarbenmelodie as one could want, Coluccino calls for each of the first four notes—all of them a G—to be played with different extended techniques, yielding a melody consisting of a sequence of changing timbres over constant pitch. As with the first Interno, so with the rest: the entire series stands as a kind of encyclopedia of extended flute techniques. These include key clicks, whistles, palate snaps, tongue rams, air pizzicato, multiphonics, harmonics and more. Coluccino draws attention to the specific characteristics of his sonorities by separating them with palpable rests; these islands of sound then function as brief meditations on sound in its qualitative dimension.

Sesto Interno for contrabass flute, bass flute and electronics maintains the consistency of the preceding Interni by couching complex timbres at relatively low dynamics. The electronics serve as a kind of background curtain of undefined noise and a screen on which the flutes can project their sounds.

This music requires a technically advanced performer with an ear attuned to nuance; Coluccino is thus fortunate to have these fine works realized by the Italian flute virtuoso Roberto Fabbriciani.

Daniel Barbiero, Osvaldo Coluccino – Interni,

in Avant Music News, USA, November 11, 2019

Certainly “ecological” – of the mind, of wise living, of reflecting with sounds on the edge of silence – is the music of Osvaldo Coluccino in Interni (Kairos). Music written for all types of flutes and in the Sesto interno with the addition of electronics. Music entrusted to a famous performer named Roberto Fabbriciani.

Mario Gamba, Top Five 2019, 

in “Alias-Il Manifesto”, Rome (Italy), November 22, 2019

rating: top five of 2019

We know Roberto Fabbriciani as a passionate champion of contemporary music, without fear of experimentation. On this CD he performs the work Interni, written in 2017/18 by the Italian composer (and poet) Osvaldo Coluccino (*1963). It is not accessible music, the composer searches for different ways of expression on our instrument than the traditional ones. Coluccino gives a detailed explanation in the booklet, with examples of notes. [...] This research does not produce yummy listening music, but produce a fascinating CD with fascinating sounds. [...] It is always difficult to judge this type of music from the loudspeakers, precisely here the magic of the concert hall adds a lot. So I'd like to hear Fabbriciani perform this live – for now let’s listen to it thanks to this fascinating CD.

Bart Schmittmann, Osvaldo Coluccino: Interni. Roberto 

Fabricciani. Kairos, in “Fluit” 2020-1, Nederlands, January 2020

A place of retreat. A space as a refuge. Intimately united with music. An ascetic silence. The composer starts a musical soliloquy like a tree that gives him refuge.

The work Interni begins with inspiration and exhalation. The flute as a medium of the vital exercise. From the first movement the rhythm between sound and silence is perceived. Silence is corporeal, matter, sign and symbol. The notes of the flute, sometimes obsessive, collide with an imaginary veil that raises the vital breath and moves from north to south, looking for the light.

Each of the movements, first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth, expresses a state, a way of listening, of thinking, of being silent.

The sound, the harmonics, the rhythmic beats on the flute keys are the subtle song of delicacy, of words without saying arrived from some remote, unknown imperative, with nuances of urgency. The movements are connected to points of musical lines that unfold through countless thin layers. The melodic fragments, with conclusive episodes, suddenly disappear until they reappear in another dynamic. Small fragmented sentences generate the paradox of creative force and death. The tragedy heals the original wound and only the flute can act as an intermediary.

What tragedy? The one of a disconcerting, perceived, lived, breathed and suffocated world. Aphonia as a cause or metaphor for the loss of loved ones, for the loss of ourselves and of the hope ... the author writes this in the notes on the disc.

Osvaldo Coluccino shows us the journey made up to Florence, to the National Museum of San Marco, a sacred space where he was able to experience the transcendence of the works by Beato Angelico, the ethereal figures emptied of all corporeality. The rehearsals were performed near that space. After all, Interni, for flute is a work to experiment the unspeakable.

Carme Mirò, Interni, in “Sonograma”, Barcellona (Spain), March 29, 2020

[…] In the six Interni for flute (2017/18) he radicalises this research sound movement again. With Roberto Fabbriciani he has a musician who knows how to realize these complex annotated inner visions. I see the drawing, I feel the space, I feel something one might call Aura. Silence is not adored, it is a conditio sine qua non. «Silence is a sound, an integral part of the work.» (Roberto Fabbriciani). Despite the concentration, the richness of color is great, and not only due to the change of instrumentation, since with Interni there is in any case only one performer, one instrument. The restriction, the reduction read as a lack of vocabulary would be a misinterpretation, it is rather a matter of acting in the similar, or in the inequality of the similar, which wants to be heard. You get up close and see more, immerse yourself in sound and hear an infinite amount. Sensations arise at micro-distances, the palette flourishes, under the microscope random things become complex organisms. There may also be a spiritual aspect, but there is hardly any risk of being confused with esoteric offerings, and the sovereignty of the work is not complicit in this direction (see also above: elegance), rather the “research on sound” appears as a cognitive interest that works against the strategies of hedonism. “Research” is perhaps only a verbal device for a sound that seems to question itself critically in the moments of its existence, to put it metaphorically. Music is decidedly centered on the signals coming from one’s own microcosm. Here a melancholic character is expressed, a «supersensitive personality» who is not moved only by the internal events of art, as Coluccino (roughly) describes himself. […] 

Reinhard Ermen, from the Portrait Continuation of poetry by other means

– The Italian composer Osvaldo Coluccino,

in MusikTexte, no. 177/178, Cologne, May 2023

About Emblema (2009-2015), Kairos, Vienna 2018

In the vast domain of contemporary music, the originality of a proposal is only achieved through a particular “circumvention” of the compositional conditions: choosing to use certain materials according to rules that mistreat the elements that make up the music (modification or reset of harmony, of the melodic line, of the times, of the dynamics, etc.), projects the thought of the composer, beyond any discovery about the sounds. This thought, moreover, is also elaborated on interdisciplinary factors with the other arts: usually the composer is also a hidden poet, painter or writer, who in the music pours the connection.

Osvaldo Coluccino (1963) is an outstanding example of these principles: the “circumvention” proposed by Coluccino (who is also a poet) has a fantastic way out, because he works on an approach that develops the music-art binomial in a way that only a few have been able to formulate in a clear and fulfilled manner in contemporary music. His music has an obvious symbolist imprint that a mature listening returns in its entirety: it is a structure built with frames, where the instruments appear and vanish, the colors are tenuous and we are transported to an amazing sound world of the interior, a suggestion that responds immediacy to our soul, to look for explanations, like being in front of a painting in which the figures or objects are able to make sense, to make statements and to have a voice, despite the immobility is what is physically present in our eyes.

Coluccino’s music captures a neural image that, thanks to this kind of discovery, can simultaneously gives the shivers or be welcoming, a vitality that enters into the most intimate thoughts about what surrounds us, triggering deep and pertinent questions through its actors and, without artificial complexity or repetition, manages to be the only and sufficient material for musical expansion. I can assert that Coluccino is making one of the most worthy paths of continuity of the contemporary symbolism in Italy: I think of the great and inherent experiences of Luigi Nono or, later, those of Stefano Gervasoni, authors who linked it to the phonetic and semantic characters of the language, imposing a type of dramaturgy divided between perception of sounds and concepts to express. Coluccino is even more in the realm of pure sound and its visual power, his language is deliberately emotional, and, with a strong humanistic endowment, does not pursue a positivist propulsion, nor does he want to argue on conceptualities provided by events (as in the case of Cage, to be understood), and in spite of this, the score is scientifically accurate in the formulation of pitches, intervals, rhythmic micro-divisions, designation of timbral colors… And the most substantial test bench to affirm this his depth, is the chamber music [… ] Symbolism returns as a way of exploring the unknown. Everything ends up as it started. But in the middle there is a unique experience.

Ettore Garzia, Osvaldo Coluccino – Emblema,

preface at the CD Emblema, Kairos, Vienna (Austria), 2018

The Italian Osvaldo Coluccino was a long-time a poet before he finally moved on to the musical composition in 2003. He has maintained the fundamental intangibility of his language. A music focused on essential moments of sound reveals its “Emblema” cycle (2009-15) in various chamber music pieces, which throw fragile sound symbols into the room, which come from the silence and return to it. Only occasionally motivic particles solidify in this introverted suspended state of sound. It is enigmatic this sensual seductive austerity that the Ex Novo Ensemble knits here with very fine needle […].

Dirk Wieschollek, New Music by and with: Osvaldo Coluccino,

 Isabel Mundry, Caspar Johannes Walter,Iannis Xenakis, Ex Novo Ensemble,

in “NMZ, new music magazine”, Regensburg (Germany), July 2018

His music is difficult to describe and this, in the panorama of contemporary creation, is probably a compliment. Secluded, too secluded, we give voice to Osvaldo Coluccino. The work of the Italian Osvaldo Coluccino (1963) is almost secret. It shouldn’t be, but it is. One could say that his music is patiently waiting for its moment. While his name is establishing on the stages of new music, the recordings allow us to follow the steps of a creator endowed with enormous intellectual flair and a catalogue rich in suggestions and sounds in which to lose oneself. The group Ex Novo Ensemble is the protagonist of his new album. – [interview:] “Emblema, your first album for the prestigious Kairos label, is not his first cycle. I’m thinking of Stanze. Do you prefer to work with series of works rather than propose isolated compositions?” [the interview continues…]

Ismael G. Cabral, in «I always work weighing the past,

including the most distant», interview with Osvaldo Coluccino,

in “El Correo de Andalucia”, Seville (Spain), August 29, 2018

As a flutist myself, it’s refreshing to find new chamber works that utilize the extended techniques of the instrument in an interesting way. An introspective listen.

Mara Miller, September 2018 Staff Picks, 

Naxos of America, USA, September 2018

rating: among the 6 featured releases

[article not yet found]

Angelo Foletto, [title],

in “Robinson-La Repubblica”, Italy, September 18, 2018

We’re used to hearing about contemporary music’s plurality. In the 2000s, though, common ground has emerged in the probing of quietness. Whether this cross-party appeal to quietness is a response to the daily noise of our media environment or simply a strategy for freeing sounds from historical over-familiarity, it has given us some compelling music.

Osvaldo Coluccino, in describing the character of his chamber series Emblema, suggests an analogy with the early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca and his portrait of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. That kinship is not just in the well-defined forms, the compositional balance, the open spaces and the simplicity of colour; it is also in the ‘pervading dirty white’ the painting’s aged surface has acquired over time. In Emblema one listens not only to the post-tonal pitches but to the pressure of bow on string, the breath inside the flute—the flecked surface of the auditory canvas.

The flute and violin of Emblema 3 are so tentative as to be barely there, long silences separating their slim shards of pitch and colour. In Emblema 1, registral width (high violin with low bass clarinet) combines with heterophony to generate a compelling micro-drama. The lack of activity makes even the slightest movement stand out vividly; due to such restraint, when towards the end of Emblema 1 we hear the shrill crack of a clarinet multiphonic, it is even more intense than usual. At times the late music of Coluccino’s fellow countryman Luigi Nono comes to mind in this ascetism and near-mysticism. Ex Novo Ensemble give performances of intense concentration and striking nuance. I’m not sure I knew so many gradations of quietness existed.

Liam Cagney, The new quiet, in “Gramophone”, London (UK), November 2018

Italian composer Osvaldo Coluccino created a series of Emblema pieces for a commission by the Gran Teatro Fenice in Venice. Slowly unfurling, sustained pitches, deft employment of overtones and harmonics, and varied textures populate the works. On Coluccino’s Kairos portrait CD, the Ex Novo Ensemble performs them with attentive delicacy. One can hear echos of great composers such as Feldman, Scelsi, and Nono in these elliptical emblems, but it is the ghost of Webern that looms largest.

Christian Carey, Best of 2018: Composer Portrait CDs,

in “Sequenza21”, USA, December 2018

rating: best of 2018, composer portrait CDs

Osvaldo Coluccino is one of those authors, in reality a rare species, who knows how to interpret modernity perfectly by composing both electronic and/or electroacoustic works and works for traditional chamber ensembles and by turning to the most appropriate record companies for the release of his works. Emblema is released by the Austrian Kairos, where his name is combined with champions of contemporary music such as Scelsi, Lachenmann, Nono, Feldman, Donatoni and Sciarrino. […] I said sober intimacy for a music that seems velvety and elegant, with clarinets, flutes, strings and piano engaged in brushing colorings, underlines, dots and counterpoints. Coluccino is like a high fashion designer who, using the available timbres, creates textures of precious refinement.

I wouldn't want the reader accustomed to the rough noise of everyday life to snub up these pages of authentic sound poetry which, on the contrary, represent an authentic panacea to relax the mind and to free its thoughts (pay attention to what I wrote: freeing them and not freeing from them). […]

Mario Biserni, Emblema, in Sands-zine, Italy, 4 December 2018

rating: refined and elegant

Music that tries to find an elsewhere, a region of the intimate that concerns us (the old dear unconscious?), an imperceptible that is experienced as strongly sensitive, a sound field where the tenuity, the absence, the silences are always present elements, can this music be called ascetic? The composer who produces it suggests yes, the possibility remains to deny it. The music of the cycle "Emblema" by Osvaldo Coluccino is very coherent with other music of other cycles of the same composer. He aims – one would like to say “play” but the “severity" of the author induces to restrain himself – on the succession of sounds organized by very thin threads, hinted pronunciations of the phrases by the instruments, sound reigns of the unspeakable. Yet it is openly emotional. Yet it makes this assemblage of “absences” a way of a musical acting, which is a way of acting in the world. For other worlds, perhaps, but in the world and not in renunciation, in an ascetic foreignness (in fact...) to the world. The criterion is to unite long sounds or light ripples, touches on strings and on wind instruments, to unite them in a homogeneous picture, a drawing of dreamy lands perhaps nocturnal without too many lacerations and jolts except for light whims by unquiet but discreet spirits. They are six tracks entitled “Emblema” collected in the album released by Kairos with the same title of the cycle. Which includes seven tracks but “Emblema 2”, written for a large ensemble, has been omitted. For what reason? Easy to understand: Coluccino wanted something to be heard as a single sound flux between an “emblem” and the other and this flow had to be obtained with reduced chamber ensemble to never alter the idea of acting on the tenuity, on the concentration, on the emotion of discovering, with attention, with the desire for precious unusual “inaudibility”, what is in other territories of sound, caskets to be opened with wise hesitation, feelings of a still secret earthly life. “Emblema 5” that introduces the piano in the dialogue between clarinet, violin and cello is the piece where the “divagation” is a little granted within a continuous thinking and sensing the sound-not sound and silence. “Emblema 3” for flute and violin contradicts the smallness of the staff with a few rips in the speech (talking about sound violence would be exaggerated). Throughout the album the soloists of the Ex Novo Ensemble show an instrumental ability and an intelligence at the limit of the superhuman.

Mario Gamba, Coluccino, emblematic absence,

in “Alias-Il Manifesto”, Rome (Italy), 23.2.2019

Zumindest in Italien ist es nicht mehr nötig, zur Charakterisierung von Osvaldo Coluccinos Musik einen Luigi Nono als Vorläufer oder „Übervater“ zu zitieren: Längst haben seine Fans das Gemeinsame, aber auch das Neue, Weiterführende entdeckt (u. a. bei den Labels Col legno oder Neos dokumentiert) und begriffen, dass es mehr als einen Weg der zeitgenössischen Komposition geben kann. Soll man ihn meditativ oder gar mystisch nennen? Impressionistisch? Empfindsam? Oder vielleicht noch besser: labyrinthisch! Denn obwohl wir uns an Fäden entlangtasten, scheint das, was uns nach der nächsten Ecke erwartet, völlig ungewiss, ja, schon die Erwartung an sich scheint durch die Konstruktion des Labyrinths in Frage gestellt.

Coluccinos Bezugnahme im Booklet auf den Maler Piero della Francesca weist auf eine unmittelbare Beteiligung des Betrachters am Geschehen hin, andererseits aber auch auf eine unnahbare Kühle (wie wir sie herrlich beim Fresko Madonna del Parto oder der Auferstehung erleben dürfen).

Coluccinos Labyrinth ist das eigentliche Emblema für unsere Reise mit seinen Klanggeweben, deren Verknüpfungen und Muster nur aus großer Höhe sichtbar werden und so auf die Ebenen des Mikro- und des Makrokosmos verweisen. Einzig den Kampf mit dem Minotaurus verweigert Coluccino – den eigentlichen Herrscher des Labyrinthes zu stellen, bleibt Sache des Hörers.

Den Faden der Ariadne spinnen uns Flöte, Klarinette, Violine, Viola, Cello, Klavier: Das auf neue Musik spezialisierte und seit 1979 bestehende venezianische Ensemble Ex Novo glänzt in den Stücken Emblema 1, 3 ,4 ,5 ,6 ,7 in verschiedenen Besetzungen.

Peter Kaiser, Neue Musik / Osvaldo Coluccino: Emblema,

in “LitGes – Literatur und su weiter”, St. Pölten (Austria), 22.3.2019

Here is the antidote dreamed of for the discophile who wants to escape the hyperactive and super-virtuosistic part of the current musical creation. Osvaldo Coluccino offers us a highly beneficial moment of tranquility with Emblema (2009-2015). The second part of this cycle has been omitted – its staff far exceeds that of the six musicians of the Ex Novo ensemble.

Certainly parsimonious but inhabited, stripped of any affectation or false philosophical depth, Coluccino’s music addresses itself with great tact in an almost subliminal way to our emotional faculties. The high percentage of breath that colours the first note by the flute in the Emblema I quintet does not reflect a noisy aesthetic. Similarly, multiphonic sounds (by the bass clarinet and the bass flute) are part of a poetics of precarious sound, which naturally recalls the play on the ponticello for the string trio. If such a stripping can evoke the introspective music of the last Nono – who may be a peaceful Nono –, the dispassionate objectivity of the discourse echoes the plastic dimension of Feldman's works.

The minimal effect is obtained with Emblema III, a duo for flute and violin. The absence of shown complexity, here does not mean indigence, and we feel that this musical economy is a meticulous strategy. It integrates its numerous constraints (extremely limited dynamics, almost absence of flow as well as perceptible pulsation) from which it draws its persuasive power.

Emblema IV is a string trio. It is impossible not to notice, in a painting that is nevertheless more animated than the other pieces, the long voids (up to eleven seconds of silence) that interrupt any discursive impulse. As if immersed in a contemplative state, the performers show great serenity, clarity and precision. What they transmit to us is neither patch-work nor neutral music. A compelling disc for listeners sensitive to meditation.

Pierre Rigaudière, Osvaldo Coluccino, Emblema,

in "Diapason", Montrouge (France), April 2019

rating: 5 dipasons (superb. Try it!)

It is not surprising that the Italian composer Osvaldo Coluccino […] is a poet. His music is steeped in poetry. For example in the six Emblema that were collected in a new CD that appeared on Kairos and that are played in a special way by the members of the Venice-based Ex Novo Ensemble. […] The similarity with the poestry is in the precision with which Coluccino works. Just like in a good poem, where every word is weighed and the constructions are chiselled until the poet thinks that everything is fine, in the same way the composer undoubtedly went to work with these passages. Here too, not a single note sounds out of place and you can hear that everything is well thought out.

The first Emblema is for flute, bass clarinet, violin, viola and cello […] The sounds here are like a breeze, always silent. He uses the fragile and almost painfully accurate sounds, just enough to make an abstract sound painting. Because, yes, Coluccino is a poet, but the comparison with abstract painting is unquestionable. At the same time, those abstract sounds also sound very natural […] Emblema 3 is for flute and violin and therefore sounds even meager than Emblema 1. Here we hear rustling sounds that are often adjacent to silence. In Emblema 4, for string trio, there is slightly more variation in the sound, in particular due to the use of pizzicato which alternates the rubbing movements of the bows. This part therefore has a the character of research. Emblema 5 for clarinet, violin, cello and piano is particularly special because of the last instrument of the four mentioned. After all, the piano is the only one of these four instruments that presents the inevitable limits when we talk about microtonality, another essential feature of this music. But the combination works wonderfully well here and makes this part one of the highlights of this cycle. Due to the combination of bass flute, bass clarinet and cello, Emblema 6 has an extraordinarily dark tone, creating a rare musical tension. And finally, in Emblema 7, the sounds of flute, clarinet, violin and cello proceed together more in a flowing soundscape. You float.

Music in which practically nothing happens. There is no question of rhythm and, despite the fact that sometimes some sounds are inciting, there is no melody either. In the case of Coluccino, however, it is not a problem at all. With these six "Emblema" he created a wonderful, intimate world of sounds that is beautifully performed by members of the Ex Novo Ensemble.

Ben Taffijn, Osvaldo Coluccino - Emblema (CD Review),

in “Nieuwe Noten”, Amsterdam (Netherlands), May 4, 2019

The touch and delicacy of the Ex Novo Ensemble, founded in 1979 in Venice, transports the listener into this chronological sequence of six compositions with delicate colors in an inner world in which subtle emotional transformations and crystalline evocations intertwine. Osvaldo Coluccino, classical guitarist and poet, has been writing music since the age of sixteen. For this monograph, in which the instruments appear and disappear with unusual sweetness, he forges the originality of his writing in a specific circumvention of the conditions of the composition, modeling a sound in nuances and regulating time with a caste distribution of pauses and silences. To preserve this whole atmosphere in suspended fluctuations, the composer preferred to remove Emblema 2, with more numerous instrumentation, favoring the intimate unit, a sort of filigree in movement, which emerges when listening to this delightful little disc.

Bernard Vincken, Osvaldo Coluccino: Emblema, Ensemble Ex Novo,

in "Clic Musique!", France, October 2019

Osvaldo Coluccino’s research (1963) continues with absolute consistency [...] The nobly allusive but completely open vagueness of the title Emblema is consistent with the poetics of the composer and the importance that the elliptical omission, the anti-rhetorical renunciation of “say everything” has in these pieces, leaving space for participatory listening and silences, for suspension. Each of the chosen instrumentations is the object of investigation on sound to evoke poetic worlds with suspended suggestions, arcane magic. With drained writing, Coluccino defines sound objects immersed in silence, in a rarefied space. Each piece presents different paths, different ways of living a suspended time, the voids and silences, a tension to the absolute. The Ex Novo Ensemble [...] worked in intense collaboration with the composer, with admirable results.

Paolo Petazzi, Coluccino, Emblema, 

in “Classic Voice”, Milan (Italy), November 2019

rating: 4 stars

Emblema is one of the most illustrative examples of the well-connected relationship between composer and performer. [...] The Italian composer and poet Osvaldo Coluccino, is the author of these intimate impressions of short phrases and sounds connected by silence. [...] The pieces have a symbolist imprint: they are based on a structure built with frames in which the instruments appear and fade away, the colors are dark and transport the listener into a surprising sound world of the interiority, a suggestion that immediately responds to our soul. This is what Ettore Garzia says in the notes on the disc.

That said, when we read Coluccino's writing and listen to the perfomermance of the Venetian instrumental ensemble, the Ex Novo Ensemble, what struck us even more is the sensitivity of the author and the involvement of the instrumentalists who are part of the same chain of communication. The possibilities of expression of the sounds of the flute, the introductory notes of the bass clarinet, the sonic coincidences of the strings and the occasional appearances of the piano show control over a story that, through an infinitely complex mechanism, ends up forgetting its fragility and uncertainty. [...]

Carme Miró, Emblema, 

in “Sonograma” Barcelona (Spain), January, 29, 2020

About Stanze (2004-2011), Col legno, Vienna 2012

[…] A room differentiates an interior from an exterior. It separates the space of futile and indifferent sociality from a place which feels like one’s own, and which alone can testify how we are when we are not there for anybody else. Of this separation, Coluccino’s stanze incorporate the basic element, silence; permitting the subsiding of the underlying noise that surrounds us and allowing for a search for sound events that are fragile or more than fragile. This internal, private, dimension does not exclude traveling. […] In this journey, Coluccino does not hide the cadence, and it is not uncommon for his music to take on the regular gait of a step, a very slow step, slower than the normal frequency of putting one foot in front of the other – comparable, maybe, to very controlled breathing, which, at times, gives way to the hypnotic. An inhomogeneous breathing, also inside one and the same “stanza”: whatever happens in this place modifies the step and the breath. […]

Alfonso Alberti, Places to be asked, introduction to the CD

Osvaldo Coluccino Stanze, Col legno, Vienna (Austria), 2012

                                    

His words are sound and his music speaks his language: Osvaldo Coluccino. – Reduction to the essentials is the maxim of the Italian Osvaldo Coluccino, who arrived late at composition after his home country was already known for his literature.

With the twelve “Stanze” by Osvaldo Coluccino, Alfonso Alberti presents us with a piano work that lives through us, which sounds like shattered piano music, as if they were tones and sounds scattered in space. Osvaldo Coluccino uses the harmonic case of the piano in his “Stanze” to create spaces and reverberations within us. Having eliminated the window to the outside, removed the pomp, he places us in front of environments that lie within us. As we walk inside, we realize that the proportions are changing: we wander to the rhythm of those spaces, which we soon realize are ours.

—, A poet as composer,

in “Harmonia Mundi Magazin”, II/ 2012, Eppelheim (Germany) 2012.

[…] A film by Theo Angelopoulos comes involuntarily about: The Suspended Step of the Stork... It is as if the listener observes a person in meditation, without being able to guess his thoughts. His eyes movement, the brow furrowing, the engrossed hand gestures... As if the listener try to take part in this invisible background, only through the thinker’s few movements, or – more abstract – through his thought movements that have become visible. We can however also be satisfied only by studying the variations of light on the white chalk walls, the shadows of cracks and humps visible in the brickwork, or the flutter of a moth on the window. With Coluccino we are dealing with a sound scholar, who does not tell, but through his sounds creates spaces in which we can throw glances through windows and skylights. The gift of this music [Stanze] is to be able to bring its thoughts into the stream, without that they are likely to end up in preordained lanes. No doubt this takes time. Just the time to find in the silence the beginning of the story. […]

Peter Kaiser, Rooms full of silence,

in “LitGes – Literature and other” ”, St. Polten (Austria), March 2012

So, the mirror is broken, more with a singing than with a rattle, and from now on we see and especially listen to the fragments falling to the ground in slow motion. The music stops – and yet it goes on. The fragile piano notes seem fatigued halfway, but then they rear up again. As sounding splinters just hinted, as a premonition of a fracture of the time that has already occurred long ago. Welcome to the Osvaldo Coluccino’s sound world. Stanze or “the secrets breaths of the objects” collects 12 tracks for piano, in a certain way having as their theme the space within which they resonate. On the one hand, this recalls the late John Cage or Luigi Nono, on the other hand could be the soundtrack of a film by Antonioni. Antonioni’s Eclisse, for example. Monica Vitti walking along the Avenue of Cycling until the avenue of Technology, where the water tower stands; the constructions with fluttering covers are on the background. The camera loses contact with the protagonist, intercepts the life of the borough becaming a still life, the streetlights sparkle in the nothingness, suddenly the city, as the entire planet are wiped out. Because man – this resonates throughout the “eclipse” – regularly also produces the inhuman, the absence of himself. So the film also ends with an absence. And so the piano pieces of the Stanze also play. As if they constantly want to deprive the listener, deny him of any sensation of heat. They are agile and yet melancholic until the fracture.

Curt Cuisine, Osvaldo Coluccino, “Stanze”,

in “Skug – magazine for Music”, Vienna (Austria), April 1, 2012

“Stanza” means not only a poetic form, but – in its various meanings – also “space”. The twelve-part cycle by Osvaldo Coluccino (1963), composed between 2004 and 2011, employs this reference field. The twelve pieces numbered in a neutral manner, consisting of isolated gestures, scattered tones and long reverberant sounds, aim to a “suspension of time”. They have a duration ranging between half a minute and a quarter of an hour, however converging together in this "first recording", except for the first piece. An aerial and crystaline music kept in balance with great sensitivity by Alfonso Alberti, so continuously canceling the impression which in the booklet is referred as “fractured piano music". Those who listen with adequate concentration perceive how fractures merge together again in continuous lines, leaving flow the succession of apparently fragmented figures in a dazzing continuum.

Daniel Ender, Osvaldo Coluccino, "Stanze",

in “ÖMZ” (Austrian music magazine), Vienna (Austria), May 2012

At a short distance from each other, two CDs dedicated to Osvaldo Coluccino (1963) are released by prestigious German labels: a great opportunity to get to know a composer who, while cultivating musical composition since the seventies, has signed his first works in the years 1999-2001, and until 2003 he dedicated himself to an intense literary activity. […] The title Stanze should be understood in the sense of place, the piano sound is fragile and immersed in the silence: here the author can speak of «delicate, hieratic, timeless suspension.» […]

Paolo Petazzi, Coluccino, “String Quartets” and “Stanze”,

in “Classic Voice”, Milan (Italy), n. 161, October 2012

rating: 5 stars

Sounds that float in the air like particles in a progressive rarefaction that almost leads to the vestibule of the anechoic chamber. Osvaldo Coluccino’s piano language is part of the now great twentieth-century tradition which has investigated the extreme limits of the annulment of the agogic and dynamic parameters [...] Considerable the passage to a peaceful interpretation increasingly evident in moving toward the upper rooms (“stanze”), as if the need to move progressively towards an ever more substantial transparency arises.

Michele Coralli, Coluccino, “Stanze”, 

in “Amadeus”, Milan (Italy), January 2013

rating: 5 stars

Listening to the disc [Stanze] in succession to the other [String Quartets], is instantly recognizable the beautiful and elegant calligraphy from the same hand. [...] The disc appears as a path in various places of the ego, and narrates with force (not physical but spiritual force) of an interiority bewildered by doubts and curiosity, but also by a constant search for the absolute. Both discs, along with the others of which we already have written or just mentioned, go to complete the map around an extremely sensitive author [...]

Mario Biserni, String Quartets // Stanze, 

in “Sands-zine”, Italy, April 10, 2013

rating: poetry… without words

About String Quartets (2002-2008), Neos, Munich 2012

[...] At the end of 2010 fell into my hands, I do not remember how, a CD titled Gemina, which contained eight compositions by the Italian composer. The disc in question was placed in sixth place in my list of the best albums of the year. [...] In the early months of this year, his three CDs were released simultaneously by magnificent labels: String Quartets (Neos), Stanze (Col Legno) and Atto (Another Timbre). [...] The disc [String Quartets] opens with Attimo, an austere and magnificent string quartet, very feldmanian and full of contrasts, especially in its second part. [...] Three magnificent discs, very different each other, which show the enormous talent of the Italian poet and composer, who, I suspect, will give us a lot of joy in the years to come.

Javier Santafè, Osvaldo Coluccino (Y II),

in “Forgotten memories”, Barbastro (Spain), March 25, 2012

If you are immersed in reading the booklet of String Quartets by the Italian composer Osvaldo Coluccino, it is confirmed what the biography reveals: Coluccino began composing at the age of 16 but, mostly, he worked for many years and published as a poet. In music as in poetry Coluccino is a supporter of the reduction, of the condensation and of the focus. He writes about Eco immobile (Motionless echo): «The paradox of the title is a goad to our perception. This is an echo that denies its defining features, that it moves, namely it prolongs, duplicates, disperses...». Elsewhere he writes: «“certain” cages of quantification.» But this cage (the psychoanalyst who lives in ourselves might conclude) is the less calculation than the prevailing calculation here, ie the inflexible determination of the form which shapes words and music treated equally as if they were a rock from which the fragile “work” should spring. A monolithic hermeticism, amazing sounds – fragments and harmony in the corridor of an abandoned villa, lost in the cold. “Air from other planets”, in the best sense, almost a mystical experience of listening. Instead, listening with the wrong attitude, the listener gets stuck outside the gates of this sound, he is not allowed to enter there, moreover, he does not start. Unknown difficult worlds vibrate here... However (and this should be investigated), on this music the Luigi Nono’s silent spirit hovers.

Curt Cuisine, Osvaldo Coluccino, “String Quartets”,

in “Skug – magazine for Music”, Vienna (Austria), July 27, 2012

[…] What does emerge in any case from all this is the fact that Coluccino is a very earnest composer, and this is certainly reflected in these works. From a sonic point of view they all explore similar avenues, whatever forces are employed. Coluccino’s music is gossamer, almost ephemeral, flickering in and out of existence like meaning in a Deleuzean text. It is also very slow-moving, apt to slide into stasis or short periods of silence. There is little contrast or differentiation even in the two parts of Aion. In each work Coluccino’s music seems to float like a creeping mist on a hilltop, disorienting yet not frightening. Admirers of Luigi Nono should enjoy themselves, if that is the right word, but others will need to work at their listening to extract the intellectual secrets locked up in Coluccino’s music. […]

Byzantion, Osvaldo Coluccino, “String Quartets”, in “Art Music Reviews”

and “MusicWeb International”, UK, September 2012

[…] the rigorous consistency of the Coluccino’s poetics is imposed in each piece […]. The evoked poetic worlds are placed under the sign of a vision full of questions and suspended awesomeness, of arcane magic, of waitings, vision far from predictable paths. With drained writing, as if it pursues the essence of the sound, Coluccino defines sound objects in the silence, in a rarefied space, static and mysterious space in which the movement of everyday life is suspended. In the CD performed by the string quartet […] each piece has different paths, different ways to live a suspended time, to live the emptiness and silences, a tension to the absolute. Listening to the impeccable performances, the texts by the composer accompany us. […]

Paolo Petazzi, Coluccino, “String Quartets” and “Stanze”,

in “Classic Voice”, Milan (Italy), n. 161, October 2012

rating: 5 stars

Important silences, instrumental drawings absorbed in a plot in which rarefied timbres and suspended sense of the time have a bold but instantly narrative coloration.

Angelo Foletto, Osvaldo Coluccino, “String Quartets”,

in “La Repubblica”, Italy, November 4, 2012

The string quartet works are characterized by a precise observance of subtle detail, observed, as it were, without regard to the element of time or duration. Thus, in Attimo, the work’s various sections explore combinations of suspended intervals, chord progressions and small phrases, held up for examination before evaporating. Aion goes further in its exploration of unquantified time; slowly mutating progressions of dissonant intervals distributed between the instruments form an unchanging landscape in the first section, while the second part presents little isolated events against a background of silence. Eco immobile (“Motionless Echo”) shares the static quality of Aion, with motionless chords from the strings forming resonant halo around sculptural gestures from the piano. The duet Talea consists of ethereal threads of sound, with unorthodox bowing techniques used to create wavering, insubstantial sonorities which ultimately coalesce into a single unbroken line. Quartetto d’Archi del Teatro La Fenice, Achille Gallo (piano).

—, Osvaldo Coluccino, String quartets, 

in “Records International”, Tucson (USA), 2012

One method of explaining our sense perception is through a series of minute, stand-alone instances received by our senses as quickly as they can handle them and cobbled together by our brain into a seamlessy perceived world. Osvaldo Coluccino’s Attimo aims to capture this philosophy musically in string quartets. […] His fascination with time and our perception of it exists in each piece on the program. The works [in String Quartets] are delicate and create uneven sheens of sound; and they are entirely motive based, unfolding events rather than thematic tours.

Kraig Lamper, The Newest Music, in “American Record Guide”, 

Cincinnati, Ohio (USA), January-February 2013

[...] Coluccino [in String Quartets] uses the sounds to brush the same way as an abstract painter, with the difference that the painter distributes on a canvas, instead in these quartets the author distributes over time, and thereby to color variations and to changes in intensity, in addition to the weavings and to the overlaps of these colors, he also adds the duration of their persistence. It’s like a painting dynamic, that of Coluccino [...] String Quartets is both a minimalist and maximalist disc. Minimalist in short fractions of time, because the full sound is never done and silence have an essential role, in Cage’s manner etc. Maximalist because in their fulfillment, in contrast with respect to small fragments, it is possible to identify variability in these quartets, for colors, solutions and facilities, this is impressive!, and there is never a tendency towards an adaptation on the thalamus of the repetitiveness. [...]

Mario Biserni, String Quartets // Stanze, 

in “Sands-zine”, Italy, April 10, 2013

rating: poetry… without words

The Italian Osvaldo Coluccino was previously also a poet, now he composes music only. He has found himself. He writes delicate music, unique and above all quiet music and that’s why so insistently it stems from the Nothing. Fragments or hints to a former abundance are made in a concise manner. In "Attimo" (Moment), a music for string quartet composed in 2007, references to the modern classical (Webern, and the last Nono) are unmistakable, but this conscious, partial and rather narcissistic poverty which recognizes in the crucial moment of the emphasis, is peculiar and unyielding, sensitive and somehow also very concrete.

Reinhard Ermen, Oktober, in the book Monate II by Nora Schattaurer 

and Reinhard Ermen, Kettler editions, Bönen (Germany), 2015

Italian composer and poet, Osvaldo Coluccino ([born 1963), has written two named works for string quartet. Aoin for String Quartet was composed in 2002 and is in two movements. […] Attimo for String Quartet was composed in 2007 and is in one movement. […] Is this the most avant-garde composer that I have discussed? I don’t know, but I would put him up there with the previously discussed Elliot Carter’s First Quartet (October, 2016) and Morton Feldman’s String Quartet II (May, 2016). His minimal approach is nothing like the intensity of Carter, and, although I can hear brief snippets of Feldman’s style, they are really quite different. These works have a sense of abstraction all of their own. Only by listening to them, will they reveal their secrets. There are two other pieces on the review CD. These are Eco Immobile – for piano quartet and Talea – for violin and cello. These are both fine, introspective and abstract works in the Modern style of the quartets. The former is actually quite busy at times. Listenability: Very modern, but not noisy …

John Hood, Osvaldo Coluccino – Aoin and Attimo for String Quartet,

in “String Quartets – A Most Intimate Medium (A Listener’s 

Guide to the Genre from 1800)”, Perth (Australia), June 7, 2017

Possibly the most feldmanian string quartets one could find. Style-wise they occupy very similar chambers: rarefied timbres persistently floating away, driving your unprepared sensations, always in anticipatory-mode, mad. Their relation to time is quite different however: the enduring nature of String Quartet No. 2 [by Feldman] eventually lets rationality take over, one starts wondering about the emerging entity they have in front. No really satisfactory answer can possibly arise and you are forced to let yourself be hypnotized by the great puzzle of the music. Attimo, Aion and Talea [by Coluccino] are not lasting enough to instill awe, not intense enough, compared to other famous modern quartets, to raise any visceral arousal, yet subtle enough and alluring enough to make one start wondering about the mystery of their existence. But while String Quartet No. 2, due to its slow but steady repetitiveness, is felt wholly present at every moment of its existence, Osvaldo Coluccino’s quartets slightly deviate in their paths and distinct themes can be perceived as discrete units of meaning, thus making the quartets more comparable to a work of poetry: full of allusions, suggestions and allegories. If Morton Feldman recall Finnegan’s Wake, then Osvaldo Coluccino disturbed Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo.

Ryoanji, in “Rate Your Music”, Seattle (USA), 5.4.2021

Rating: 5 stars

About Gemina (2002-2008), Due Punte, Italy 2010

[...] Gemina, a rigorous disc that well reflects the character of its author. The music is gaunt and dense at the same time, full of silences but also of microtonal inventions and variations, and hides a strong attention and a strong tension for experimentation under its apparently “quiet” appearance. It appears above all evident how his compositional art never indulges in demonstrations of beautiful writing to privilege always and in any case the search for personal solutions with a strong expressionist characterization. [...]

Mario Biserni, Gemina // Atto, 

in “Sands-zine”, Italy, November 22, 2012

rating: both to buy

[…] Those familiar with Coluccino’s “string quartets” – see review – will be well prepared for this collection of chamber pieces. These short pieces for eight different kinds of duos are not destined for the ears of those requiring their music to have tunes in it, nor indeed for those unwilling or unable to apply considerable concentration to their listening. The works, all dating from the last decade, are each cut from similar cloth: they are concise, ethereal, viscous and virtuosic. Their meditative, generally fragmentary nature renders them also more or less inscrutable. […] these pieces are not totally inaccessible, certainly not to anyone with a penchant for Webern, who may recognise in Coluccino a distant but kindred cousin. […]

Byzantion, Osvaldo Coluccino, “Gemina”, in “Art Music Reviews”

and “MusicWeb International”, UK, December 2012

About Voce d’orlo (2002-2008), RAI Trade, Rome 2009

[…] musician and writer far from simplistic concessions, which, however, would not be able to offer the necessary means to "communicate" a vision full of questions and suspended suggestions, of arcane magic, devoid of straight paths, which has a propensity for concealment, for lateral, indirect, deviant trajectories, for the «ductility of a circumnavigating  perimetral line», for the «sweetness of a thread that already diverts while springs out» (as the composer wrote about Voce d’orlo). Indeed the Coluccino’s elegance and subtlety are perfectly able to reach the listener who is capable of an accomplice availability to listen. [...] Not surprisingly, Voce d’orlo is also the title given to the entire CD. We should not try to explain precisely the suggestion of this title, which is destined to remain open; but we have already mentioned what type of direction it alludes. It also suggests the idea of ​​a liminal experience, of a tension to the limit. […]

Paolo Petazzi, Introduction to the CD Osvaldo Coluccino Voce d’orlo,

RAI Trade, Rome-Milan (Italy), 2009

[...] [Voce d’orlo] a unique, strong choice, of great poetry [...]

Francesca Odilia Bellino, in "All About Jazz – Italy”, June 21, 2012

An artist that places no limits to his creativity, Coluccino has always pursued an ideal of research that is expressed in a thousand streams [...]. Precisely in this extreme variety of themes and forms is probably the deeper meaning of the Coluccino’s work, which is consistent within the multiplicity. So here is a work as Voce d’orlo (Voice of edge), absolutely obsolete because of the frame of composition, namely the chamber ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano), that uses tradition to enucleate a musical vision which is – one will understand – in preparation for the most radical electroacoustic research made by the author. The compositions in the album Voce d’orlo, a few heartbeats, zen brushstrokes of acoustic sounds, can not be classified in a sort of evanescent animism, but rather delineate between the mists a situation of constant tension, as if the horizon comes alive slowly... A very deep work, able to build on the forms of the too much schematic contemporary music. […]

Antonello Cresti, Osvaldo Coluccino, 

in Solchi sperimentali, Crac edizioni, Italy, 2015

ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC

About Absum (1999), Inexhaustible Editions, Ljubljana 2021

A man and composer of uncommon sensibility in an Italian scene depressingly founded on the terminal cancers of political alliances and rampant falsehood, Osvaldo Coluccino gets straight to the point when he talks about Absum, published some 22 years after its conception. “The premise is (…) the hope that the work, in its purity, speaks for itself and of something that concerns what goes beyond, making use of the artist (the human being) as a sounding board, but limiting his presence as much as possible – that is, his exhibitionism and virtuosity, his existential supremacy over the instances of art.” For context, please read the complete interview [on Inexhaustible Editions]. 

The Latin word “absum” is indeed the root of “absent.” Those accustomed to reasoning in terms of “maestro”, “conductor”, “harmonic laws” and what not might perceive a record like this as + anathema. Only the universe’s main component – the sound – is present in variously altered/processed forms. The one who turned it all on is, in this case, practically invisible, though we can distinctly feel his spirit behind the whole. 

We ought to be grateful for these six movements, at once representing a valuable teaching and, in the opinion of this reviewer, a sizable sample of Coluccino’s finest artistry. 

The following are personal sensations jotted down track by track, over a cycle of listening sessions. By definition, they are extremely limited as far as the capacity of attributing the correct connotations to such an intangible inwardness is concerned.

1) Trembling electronic frequencies, almost shy in their manifestation, yet rich in subsonics substantiating their effect on our perception.

2) My overall favorite part. The music breathes, touches deep inside, unravels between distant murmurs containing harmonic embryos and more vivid manifestations. Noisy apparitions immediately vanish in the dark, or transmit signals that cannot be decoded via normal analytical processes. Awesome ghostly resonances place the listener in a transcendent meeting of pasts never really identifiable. There are faint lights in the apparent decline of shapes. The instinctive attraction to them must be trusted.

3) Coluccino is here at his highest level of “galactically insightful”, so to speak. The slowing down of the vital pulsations broadens the inner visual field, at the same time subtracting a little anxiety from the set of reverberating auras. We’re aware of having now reached the centre of a psycho mnemonic cage, built by no one.

4) The concreteness, however seemingly ethereal, of the composer’s insufflations through unspecified objects and instruments adds a dramatic dimension of sudden awakening. In between, quasi-carillonesque cues and unexpected eruptions from nowhere, at times of metallic descent, create a sequence of psychoacoustic frames that conceal rather than reveal. Still, the truth is, to some extent, intuitable. The most profound “why?” should ideally remain unanswered, until the next stage of evolution.

5) Coluccino superimposes two violins, both played by him, with a magnetic tape of electroacoustic ectoplasms. The result is a kind of abstractionism that, nevertheless, possesses several figurative attributes. We detect the struggle of the ephemeral earthly vessel to stay afloat amidst a thousand doubts of diverse origin. The mind, potentially corruptible by stupidly esoteric formulas, finds itself facing what is wonderfully pure, which in turn would be described by the ignorant as “dangerous”. Or, at least, misleading. But this, like it or not, is the right path to follow.

6) We are not granted the commonplace of “well-deserved rest” at the end of the journey. The concluding movement is a reminder of what is harsh, uncomfortable, unclassifiable for one’s own convenience. More abrupt cuts, silences as long as a freeze-dried eternity, openings on interpretations of a vibratory future that won’t take into consideration the selfishly intellectual needs of mere human beings. For they continue to believe in fairy tales narrating an anthropocentric trip towards the demise of intelligence.

Massimo Ricci, Osvaldo Coluccino – Absum, 

in “Touching Extremes”, Rome (Italy), May 31, 2021

Osvaldo Coluccino is a poet and composer who deserves special attention. If we look for justifications on the usefulness of representations in the field of art, we cannot help but go in search of significant clues on the good balance of our consciences: Coluccino’s poetics digs right into that context of analysis, typical of the twentieth century, which he thought deeply about the value of existence. Enraptured by the words and paintings of people like Jacques Lacan or Francis Bacon, Coluccino built his own path when the world began to abandon the inner search and questioning of the soul [...]

Coluccino's maturity has always been expressed by following two tracks, one classic and instrumental, the other electro-acoustic and climatic; as for the first, the composer has imposed a music with a character only ascribable to him, that is a detailed representation of the “dim”, a quality that on these pages I have been able to describe through his CDs for Kairos above all; as for the second, Coluccino has instead invented a channel of research and manipulation of sounds which is essentially a mental effort on perception. In both cases, a well-defined thought stands out, what Coluccino has defined “minimum sound emission”, that is, divergences in the distances of sounds, details and sound colors that try to go beyond listening, to provide subtle mental and imaginative material useful for to grasp tensions and concepts that are not visible at all, because they are obtained from the vibrations of sounds or verses. [...] “absum”, a Latin word to which the composer certainly does not give a univocal meaning, that of communicative practice: it is not only physical or intellectual absence that we are dealing with, but it is also necessary to place consequent meanings, such as opposition, difference , inferiority. There is an evident Lacanian root in this, especially when one thinks of the “presence-absence” of his A Father, but there is also an extension towards a mute conception of elements that have their own space for action: as in Oltreorme “concept”, Coluccino is hunting for that inner world released beyond notes or sounds, in the same way a painter tries to do through his painting.

absum contains recordings from 1999 in a cycle of 6 musical episodes, in a particularly fruitful period of creativity of the author on the side of electronics and manipulation, something that all music lovers have already had the opportunity to appreciate splendidly in the results of a cd for Die Schachtel entitled Dimensions (compositions written between 1997 and 2007, where Osvaldo probably reached his peak). absum has inside the sensations of that period, when the planning was addressed with an infinite grace and depth of vision to themes and systems already known in the Italian electronic history (Nono, Maderna, Berio, etc.), [...] however the operations of Coluccino have their own style, something that the imagination of listening returns as a composite patchwork, with distillation of sounds, highlighting of perspectives and dynamics, with semi-silent odyssey [...] The technical providences of absum are perfectly described in the notes internal by Coluccino, which also brings us to the knowledge of a thesis by students of the Conservatory based on the 6 tracks [...]

The fact is that absum demonstrates not only that Coluccino is a very skilled manipulator of sounds with a love for wisdom and refutations of the soul, but also that a reflection on today’s electronics is necessary, constantly looking for expansions that are often aggressive or coarse: perhaps instead of finding representative “threats” of the times it would not be better to go in search of patient “resources”?

Ettore Garzia, Osvaldo Coluccino’s absum, 

in “Percorsi Musicali”, Italy, August 20, 2021

Archival materials dating back to 1999, therefore twenty years old, are now seeing the light of day thanks to the Slovenian brand Inexhaustible Editions. [...] Electronic treatments and sounds, objects to be made to resonate by blowing (in Absum IV), two violins (in Absum V), this is the paraphernalia used in the six compositions. The author explains in an aside that “absum” is a Latin term with various meanings, including being absent, free, being strangers, being different, being inferior, being distant (in case of place)... The concepts of freedom, strangeness and diversity seem to me the most pertinent to the definition of these somewhat alien, sometimes obscure music, a soundtrack perfectly adaptable to the scenario of a deserted and unexplored planet as well as to that of an abandoned industrial complex. Futuristic sounds capable of evoking states of anguish. Those who already know Coluccino’s universe of sound will find it here in its most disturbingly visionary aspects.

Mario Biserni, Absum, in “Sands-zine”, Italy, 21 October 2021

rating: oldies but goldies

This is a very smart package from Inexhaustible Editions, with six tracks accompanied by liner notes from Osvaldo Coluccino.  […] The pieces are born of manipulated ‘electronics, violin, [and] objects’ which are heavily processed to produce electronic tones and details - nothing someone versed in electroacoustics won’t have heard before, but still very engaging.

The album begins with ‘absum I’, a short track of creeping, bass heavy drones that move around the stereo field, shifting and breathing. ‘Absum II’ is more active but maintains a dark sense of dread, with detailed fragments of sound dancing over a bed of airy drones. The third piece - yes, its titled ‘absum III’ - pushes these drones further, into a distinct ghostliness, complete with disembodied voices. ‘Absum IV’ presents more movement and more energy, with a material quality that reminds me of some Parmegiani; whilst the eerie drones remain, they are backgrounded, and punctuated by kinetic jolts of sound and moments of silence. The fifth piece doesn’t evoke the same sense of tectonic upheaval that ‘absum IV’ does, but it’s still a more dynamic work compared to the opening of the album. Subtitled ‘(for two violins and magnetic tape)’, the violins are indeed prominent and recognisable elements, with Coluccino processing them into long spectral drones and modulating sounds. The final track, ‘absum VI’, is at points the most condensed, or cluttered, piece on the album, with rattling objects colliding before transforming into stop/start arrangements of warped processing and electronics. It’s an effective close to absum, summarising much of what has come before.

This is a good, solid album […]. Sections of the release, with its dark and ghostly drones, would please dark ambient fans; at other points, ‘absum VI’ for example, Coluccino presents more hardboiled work, but due to the engaging nature of the sounds the album can be easily enjoyed without knowledge of musical theory etc - this knowledge probably unlocks further dimensions of Absum but these ears aren’t that tutored. The whole album has a pleasing atmosphere that, whilst not overly dark or aggressive, is certainly not ‘light’ to my mind, and I think a lot of people into noise will find much to savour here.

Martin P, Osvaldo Coluccino - Absum [Inexhaustible Editions - 2021], 

in “Musique Machine”, Petersfield (UK), December 4, 2021

rating: 4 stars

Absum is the March 1, 2021 release from Italian composer and poet, Osvaldo Coluccino. The album was recorded in 1999 with Coluccino utilizing electronics, violin, and “objects.”

This is composed electronic and electroacoustic music of low volumes and copious use of reverb and panning. Although, tracks four and five, “Absum IV (for blown objects and processing)” and “Absum V (for two violins and magnetic tape)” use acoustic source material as described in their titles, the treatment of the acoustic material is such that it is not always recognizable as acoustic in origin; it is most often processed and blended homogenously with electronic sounds.

This is subtle and detailed atmospheric music; some might even categorize it as ambient. Because of the low volumes, particular timbres, and use of panning as a significant compositional element, it is best enjoyed through headphones.

The album grows in complexity from “Absum I” to “Absum VI”. The first three tracks are barely audible, low-frequency fog-like textures emerging from, and evaporating into, silences; sounding like field recordings from a dystopian, digital future. Tracks four and five continue this ambience but at higher frequencies and more noticeable activity, or development, thanks in large part to the introduction of the acoustic material. The final track continues the Absum qualities of “not being there, being absent, being distant, being far away, being alien” but with a more tangible quality in the more complex timbres and the greater variety in activity/development.

This album is unusually organic and austere for composed electronic and electroacoustic music, where often there can be a focus on the technology, a twisting of the knobs, if you will, absent of a fully formed aesthetic. Here there is a concise sound world with an intense focus, requiring a similar attention from the listener. This isn’t driving music, or casual background music, this is listening music that requires effort to extract its abstract beauty.

Ron Coulter, Osvaldo Coluccino – Absum, 

in “The Free Jazz Collective”, USA, March 5, 2022

rating: 3 and half stars 

About Parallelo (2007-2009), Unfathomless, Bruxelles 2015

If we had not read the brief information written on the disc jacket, really we would not able to say in which country – which cavities, which tunnels, which depth – Osvaldo Coluccino went to gather this evidence of truth: echoes, dense puffs, squeaks, gusts... Not an abandoned industrial area or a disused hangar, but an Italian monastery of the seventeenth century, apparently in ruins. They are promises of good ghosts to make sing […] and they are debris to be mix, which are transformed by Coluccino into two fantastic landscapes: two musical parallels of twenty-two minutes and two seconds each, not to be missed.

Guillame Belhomme, Osvaldo Coluccino, Parallelo, Unfathomless 2015,

in “Le Son du Grisli”, Chantilly (France), January 2015

Italian composer Osvaldo Coluccino’s past releases have appeared on NEOS, Another Timbre, Col Legno, and Die Schachtel, suggesting that he can operate in the same vein as a composer like Wolfgang Rihm or cut closer to an electronic outsider like Catherine Christer Hennix. On his Unfathomless debut he leans strongly in the electronic direction, though he plays with composed harmonic textures too. Parallelo consists of two 22-minute compositions. […] It’s hard to tell exactly how Osvaldo achieved the final product, but the music consists of uncanny tones, disembodied noises, and field recordings blended so as to confuse the senses. There are tectonic wall-shaking drones, mechanical vibrations, sourceless resonances, and snippets of more recognizable fare too: car traffic, running water, busy thoroughfares. It’s all surprisingly spectral and melodic.

Everything is represented within a larger environment, however, and at times it can be difficult to assess whether the sounds were played into and simultaneously recorded within the space of the monastery (Alvin Lucier style) or if they were generated from it. Some of the tiny harmonic fluctuations and twisted effects must have required a computer or at least a few electronic gadgets to achieve, but the skill with which Coluccino merges them into the environment makes them far more unusual than they might otherwise be, sequestered inside a studio or concert hall. It’s a layered and sometimes ominous recording that finds unusual correspondences between structures and environments both man-made and natural.

Lucas Schleicher, Osvaldo Coluccino – Parallelo CD (Unfathomless),

in “Dusted Magazine”, Chicago (USA), February 12, 2016

By analyzing Osvaldo Coluccino’s artistic path and recorded output, two important things must be noted. The first is the variety of the acoustic spectrum, ranging from the rigour of modern classicism to the relative aleatoriness of soundscapes based on actions performed with unidentified objects in equally mysterious environments. The second is his unique talent in fusing instances of musique concrete in ambits where the juxtaposition and processing of diverse studio-generated sonorities give birth to bottomless psychological milieus. Parallelo should ideally be placed in such a context, despite the music’s reluctance to accept a true classification.

The record consists of two tracks of identical length and title, but diverging in terms of succession of events and actual distribution of the sonic substances. “Parallelo” is describable as a continuum comprising the multitudes of blurred facets pertaining to an individual awareness emerging during the daily existence, whereas “Parallelo 2” manifests its meanings via a sequence of flashes with interspersed short silences, presenting the same type of sonority from a fascinating “now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t” perspective, a slightly different equalization delineating the reverberation of human activity a little more vividly.

The initial half throws in an obscure semi-oneiric dimension, utilizing frequencies that suggest a whispered hugeness in correspondence with relatively recognizable echoes, some of them of urban derivation. It’s the sort of soundscape filling a room with cavernous aural mementos even at a modest volume: faraway vehicles, luminescent trajectories and unwelcome reminiscences call your attention through a thick haze. A disfigured realism, if you will, with several moments of unadulterated humming from an unspeakable underground.

The alternate version kneads the receptive systems with cyclical frames of action, then quietness. In a way, it’s as if Coluccino wished to let the audience guess the occurrences which will define each subsequent snapshot. “Ordinary” turns into majestic vibration; “massive” is reduced to nothing in a few instants. This constant change does not imply contradictions, as we configure our being according to the (un)familiarity of what is heard. If anything, a separation may emerge between the passiveness of a mere listener and the willing participant submitting a piece of his/her soul to become a part of those unreachable manifestations.

All we learned from the composer is that the inspiration for this imposing opus came from an abandoned monastery destined to be demolished. I fantasize him hypothesizing a symbolism for the ruins of mankind, for Coluccino is well conscious that a decaying building can still offer a rich resonance while most people are completely deprived of internal chambers. And strings, for that matter.

Massimo Ricci, Osvaldo Coluccino – Parallelo,

in “Touching Extremes”, Rome (Italy), February 29, 2016

Osvaldo Coluccino rolls in holes and through the throng of the Italian music scene as a singular, elegant, plastic and malleable glass marble in a dead and petrified forest, made up of now immovable and unchangeable fossils.

In these two discs, released at a short distance of each other, the investigation into the world of sounds that we already appreciated in his two released CDs on Another Timbre (“Atto” of 2012 and “Oltreorme” of 2013) continues with some variation. […] The point of contact between the four works is the use, as the sound source, of objects commonly destined to purposes of a different nature (and also when he uses traditional musical instruments such as the piano in “Differenza”, the percussions in “Nell’attimo” and the violin in “Dimensioni”, or when he uses the human voice, even in “Dimensioni”, he makes this in a non-traditional way, therefore attributable to the general plan of the two works). The variation, however, concerns especially electronic processing, and in the recording studio, to which the recordings of these two discs are submitted, whereas in the two CDs on Another Timbre sounds were purely acoustic.

If the recording and the structuring of the pieces included in “Dimensioni”, although different from each other as origin and nature, correspond to the classic model of electroacoustic composition, “Parallelo” is instead an example symbol of recording in an environment (precisely in the ruins of a monastery of the 17th century […]

What is most striking in the Coluccino’s music is the care given to detail, in a game of precision and joints where there is not a speck that is out of place; or, if you prefer, it is an abstract painting where there is not a single brushstroke drawn randomly.

[...] It is as if [his music] floats in a perpetual suspension stage. I do not know if Coluccino follows some religious discipline in particular, it is certain that from his music exudes a strong sense of spirituality.

Another important aspect is the contradiction, which I consider positive and creative, between the action that is intended to stop the moment – and this makes me think both to the phrase uttered by the protagonist of one among the most beautiful books by Heinrich Böll («I am a clown and I make collection of moments») and the purest improvisation – and the result of that action that takes timeless characteristics or which are part of a dreamlike dimension. The unique moments that only the recording techniques are able to grasp in their elusive essence, with Coluccino assume their own characteristic that transcends from those usually indicative elements of the characteristics which are suitable to define a musical composition -– sound sources, place and date of the recordings... – to move to their own as tangible as unthinkable space.

I must say that “Parallelo”, given the more than 20-minute duration each of the two pieces it contains, has more breath and so it is able to impose itself to the listener more vigorously than the even fine compositions included in “Dimensioni” (whose maximum extension is just over 14 minutes each). I must also say that “Paralleo” was released in the context of a successful series that has already hosted numerous well-known international artists.

This seems an important element because it can bring grist to the mill of a composer who at this time, this is the only certain and incontestable thing, has received much less than what he would have to receive by virtue of his merits.

Etero Genio, Dimensioni // Parallelo, 

in “Sands-zine”, Italy, April 17, 2016

rating: nearly two hours of shadowy sounds

Osvaldo Coluccino is a contemporary Italian composer and poet. It seems that he already has a considerable reputation in Italy and in German-speaking countries.

According to an article, the Italian language should always be the one used for music; this also applies to his poetry, and the words that emerge from the silence are also words of a music composer who arrive at the same time. 

[…] The aspect of this rite of passage is the archetype of the motif of the “Sacred mountain” which has gone through several variations. […] It is not a symbolic microcosm like a three-dimensional mandala, but rather a world like a Kasuga mandala, the light poured into eternal space prevents the sacred landscape from getting dirty.

Coluccino’s album is based on recordings made within the ruins. 

While silence reigns, a roar creeps up from within, beckoning the listener. It is truly the work of a ghost, floating in a fluid other than history or the passage of time. When pure sound represents the environment in general, it only shows formal aspects without any concreteness. But that’s exactly what a ghost is. The ruins are like crevasses on the surface of the mountain, like glaciers melted forever. There the ghosts do not haunt us, they simply continue to dream, sway and speak peacefully. It was a voice, a sound, and a sound not unlike birds chirping.

YO, music tropic 2: Osvaldo Coluccino – Parallelo,

in Anti optimized haunted processor, Nagoya (Japan), 25 February 2020

About Dimensioni (1997-2007), Die Schachtel, Milan 2015

[...] Osvaldo Coluccino is an atypical case in our contemporary music scene. Composer of the most secluded, poet and convinced animal-rights activist Coluccino has a range of a few compositions, but all of high quality, in particular those relating to a rarefied chamber music (which has had the honor to be appreciated even by an historian and great critic as Paolo Petazzi) and to his daring electroacoustic realizations […]. If "Neuma Q" was a unitary and a mammoth work for processed sounds, premiered in 2006 at the Festival of Nuova Consonanza [...], "Dimensioni" collects nine heterogeneous electronic compositions, designed and produced in a decade, from 1997 to 2007. This anthology, precisely because it is not focused on a single work, succeeds better than the previous in shedding light on the great talent of the piedmontese composer, putting greater emphasis on his creativity and poetic. [...] [The piece] "Dimensioni" (1998-1999) is the true masterpiece and perhaps the absolute apex of the Coluccino’s whole musical production: an afflatus with symphonic flavor gradually joins with a colloquial spoken (by Jacques Lacan, from his conference in October 1972 at the University of Louvain) and with a little-girl voice, expertly artfully manipulated. It is impossible not to refer to the great electroacoustic Italian school, who was headed to the RAI Studio of Phonology in Milan in the late fifties, with Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna (and with the help of the fundamental sound engineer Marino Zuccheri) which there conceived their greatest masterpieces in electronics and destined to revolutionize the world of contemporary music. [...] Cerebral but communicative, Osvaldo Coluccino manages to be a personal and original author, where everything was already been written and said, years ago, by famous composers. Certainly this is not a small quality. [...]

Leonardo Di Maio, Osvaldo Coluccino, Dimensioni, 

in “Ondarock”, Italy, 19.03.2015

rating: 7,5

[...] Nine tracks, just over an hour of electronic sounds that surround the listening “telling” a story in which the acoustic space is shaped all the time: depending on whether the attention of the listener follows its own mnemonic-musical logic – and so it overlaps a horizontality and a drama to the lush forest of electronic sounds – or if it is free from superstructures and  from a need of analytical order and unfolds with the ear the emotional and musical wire behind it. Coluccino does not put traps and he does not cheat (he does not promise digital havens) but even he does not facilitate. He claims to be taken seriously, and that’s it. So the electronic paintings are clarified by themselves, as the result of a design concept in which sensations and not acoustic sounds do not diverge, and are self-explanatory..

Angelo Foletto, An hour of electronic sounds,

in “Suonare News”, Milan (Italy), May 2015

Unreal electro-acoustic magick from Italian composer Osvaldo Coluccino for Milan’s ever-trustworthy Die Schachtel label. Highly recommended for those who cherish peering into the abyss and holding its gaze […] Osvaldo Coluccino presents a collection of his early (1997-2007) electroacoustic pieces. From the dark drones of Dimensioni (interspersed with the treated voice of Jacques Lacan) to the treated percussions of Nell’attimo, to the acousmatic brilliance of Dal margine, this CD is a journey into the brilliant head and the complex soul of one of the most interesting Italian contemporary composers, whose music is always on the edge, stretched between a flight towards a distant and bright horizon and a dive into the darkest obscurity. […]

—, Osvaldo Coluccino, Dimensioni, 

in “Boomkat”, Manchester (UK), May 2015

A burdensome existence; an uncomfortable quiescence; the unfathomable complexity of correspondences that cannot be delineated by words. All of this, and much more, can be depicted through sequences of sonic appearances by someone living at the deepest levels of sentience. Osvaldo Coluccino’s work at the margin of one’s psychological response to a given acoustic environment has been carried on over a decade. Dimensioni is the brilliant outcome, a collection of nine tracks exploring aural spaces and inner adjustments with soberness and acumen. This disc needs your full mental and physical self; it is not something that can be left in the background while performing mundane acts. Sticking labels, or lamenting the absence of striking effects, would inevitably unveil inadequate analysis. […] the bulk of this record is made of “scenes”; some of them longer than others, a few of them only brief glimpses across the various stages of interior connection. The sources, largely unidentified, propose different paths towards a profound discernment; quite unusual, in the age of slapdash esoteric cheapness. In that sense, nothing in any track has really more importance than the rest of its components. As an example, “Differenza” exploits and alters the characteristics of a piano; yet, the piece’s success does not lie in the particularity of the instrument’s treatment. It’s the reconditeness of the implication; the attempt to focus on a systematically mutating wholeness, in turn conveying untold emotions – fears, perhaps – desperately attempting to manifest themselves. […] Frequently possessing a “blurred-at-the-edges” quality, Coluccino’s creations eschew the kind of acousmatic hodgepodge that smiles and winks at green audiences. They are defined by technical rigor […] an egoless gem that should be diffused in any possible way.

Massimo Ricci, Osvaldo Coluccino – “Dimensioni”,

in Touching Extremes, Rome (Italy), July 5, 2015

This artist started from this label and gradually expanded his activities, such as e.g. the release of intense works on Another Timbre. Here it is all abstract electroacoustic music, consisting of 9 long and short tracks, and the contents are unusually high for being in the label’s new artists series. Furthermore, there is a passage that can be said to be a key point, and it does not tire: in that work, entitled Dimensioni (track 2), a female voice is used faintly, showing a glimpse of an artist who is heavyweight.

—, Osvaldo Coluccino, Dimensioni, 

in “Omega Point”, Tokyo (Japan), 2015

[…] Dimensioni is another facet of the sound favored by Coluccino, that is an immersion into the realms of electroacoustic experimentation, presenting pieces that seem to serve as a possible bridge between the acknowledged masterpieces in this field of expression emerged in the Fifties, and a new musical vision which, rather than to make imagine academic worlds, draws points of contact with the dark ambient aesthetics or with other forms of electronic isolationism. You are thinking: considerations by an intollerant listener to official schools, but judging from the Coluccino’s path, I think that much of his ability of crossing between dimensions is not at all random...

Antonello Cresti, Osvaldo Coluccino, 

in Solchi sperimentali – Italia, Crac edizioni, Italy, 2015

About Neuma q (2006), Die Schachtel, Milan 2010

New in Die Schachtel’s Composers series, Neuma Q is a collection of four works by poet and composer Osvaldo Coluccino, a well-known name in experimental electroacoustic music on the international festival circuit. Although the music here is very much grounded in the more challenging and cerebral areas of electronic music, Coluccino’s appropriation of relatively familiar elements such as the drone, or processed spatial recordings mean the music here is never too far away from a well established frame of reference. The first track opens up in an erratic, fairly noisy fashion, channelling powerful low-end drones along with scrappier, twitching interference-like sounds. The second piece is a shorter and steadier affair, surfing across a sheet of washed-out, opaque static over four immersive minutes of minimalist concrete sound. The third entry stands out, taking on a more atomised character, exploring noisy sound matter, smashed into particles. This composition is arguably the most academic sounding entry here, taking on an almost Hecker-like level of diligent noise exploration. Finally, the fourth and longest composition on the disc explores the kind of enigmatic sonorities you’d hear from a Francisco Lopez recording - you know it’s based on some sort of processing of field recorded sound, but the level of abstraction means you’ll never be able to work out quite what it is you’re listening to. Whatever it is, it manifests itself as a brooding, steely slab of narrative-free, dark-ambient tonality, modulating and evolving in only the most subtle and unhurried fashion.

–,Osvaldo Coluccino, Neuma q, 

in “Boomkat”, Manchester (UK), April 2010

Osvaldo Coluccino is the last happy surprise of the catalog Die Schachtel [...] [Neuma q] is a beautiful feeling, that beyond the electroacoustic imprint, reveals the immersive quality of its sound material, inside a pure electronics that can postpone at certain German cosmic droning frequencies. The first Klaus Schulze of Irrlicht comes to mind, but it is obvious that by derivation and setting the sound spectrum by Coluccino is undoubtedly more rigorous and not so easily classifiable. Charming anyway.

Gino Dal Soler, Osvaldo Coluccino, Neuma q, 

in “Blow up”, Italy, May 2010

[…] Osvaldo Coluccino’s Neuma Q is an utter immersion into the purest electronic sound, exploring a broad spectrum of electroacoustic phenomena […] magically-constructed and sequenced in a way that preserves its intimate feel. The composer serves as a seismograph of both the inner and the outer world and the composition as a record of a momentary musical horizon that combines four pieces that defy any standard modern music evaluation criteria and explore new spaces of sound. […]

–, Osvaldo Coluccino, Neuma q, 

in “Down Town”, New York (USA), Giune 2010

[...] electroacoustic work in four movements, in a rather purist style and inspired by academic electroacoustics, without becoming formalist. Beautiful work of textures, beautiful use of infrabasses, but especially the composition creates (the illusion of) a narrative frame that keeps my attention.

François Couture, Osvaldo Coluccino, Neuma q,

in “Monsieur Délire”, Marbleton (Canada), July 2010

[…] The Italian composer and electro-acoustician speaks of non-space, a removal of the influence and/or suggestion of a physical space or environment on sound. This results, for Coluccino, in a revealing of the unheard and unnoticed, those sounds we fail to discern due to physiological limits and inattentiveness brought to the fore. […] the sounds conjured in Coluccino’s non-spaces being more powerful than the words used to describe them […] The first of Neuma Q’s four untitled tracks is the album’s best. A 16-minute extraterrestrial walkabout, the composition evokes the incidental acoustic inhabitants of outer space. Scrambled satellite signals, celestial swirls, the mechanics of interstellar craft float freely around ambient tones in an almost episodic form. Sounds pass through the foreground of the track almost as if on display, sent past on a conveyor belt, or released from behind a curtain in a choreographed series, like models in a fashion show. Overlap occurs, but there’s little crowding, and even less repetition. The (non-) space that the sounds inhabit is itself on display, a suggested vacuum that’s as much an active character in the music as the setting it negates. […]The disc’s second track is a four-minute milky way as viewed from Earth, its gossamer gleam easily invisible at times to those who don’t purposefully search it out. There’s a hidden power, however, in this understated approach. Often, one may find Neuma Q intermingling with the sounds of the listener’s own surroundings in unexpected collaboration. Even with headphones on, there’s a bleed between Coluccino’s creation and the droning traffic, hum of appliances, occasional chatter and distant airplanes overhead. Intentional or not, this intermixing of environments is perhaps Neuma Q’s most effective negation of space, a subtle dissolving of the walls between the output of the disc and that occurring outside of the window or in another room. It’s an experience that isn’t constant, but can be bewitching when it occurs.

Adam Strhom, Osvaldo Coluccino, Neuma q,

in “Dusted Review”, New York (USA), July 23, 2010

Composée en 2006, Neuma q semble explorer l’univers spatial et les voix perdues de satellites en détresse dans un large spectre de phénomènes électroacoustiques et de drones infinis. Osvaldo Coluccino est un compositeur et poète italien né en 1963.

–, Osvaldo Coluccino, Neuma q, 

in “Metamkine”, Rives (France), July 23, 2010

[…] The other three pieces are more linear in approach – building from start to finish, around central themes of sound. It It doesn’t bounce up and down the scale, seem to work from inside the sound itself. The best is saved until the end, the fourth and longest piece of this quartet with sounds dying out beyond their sustain, a carefully constructed building of the piece and a fine range of acoustic sounds (flutes perhaps?). Quite a great CD altogether […]

Frans de Waard, in “Vital Weekly”, 

Nijmegen (Nederland), September 2010

[…] These electronic soundscapes suggest a spacey strain of ambient drift and gentle drone, using a minimum of layering, which allows the rapidly evolving squiggles, hums, high frequencies squelches and swoops. […]

Peter Margasak, in Global flutters and Blasts,

in “DownBeat”, Elmhurst IL (USA), December 2010

The poet and electro-acoustic composer opens the album by lulling you into familiar territory with drone elements, squitters and tone shifts for the opening track. Far from being meditative, the formalized and structured track produces plenty of movement and swerves on this largely dark album. The opener works as an example of the elements that feature in the other tracks and which get explored by those untitled tracks. The use of space is a big thing here. The drone element is explored further with the brief second track giving a sense of breadth and depth, pushing the walls out, creating more space for the context within which the album is heard. So it’s interesting when [the composer], for the third track, uses small sounds in this big space. Cricks and squeaks flick from here to there. The 18 minute grand finale reverts to the drone element subtly shifting in tone and density across its length. Apparently it’s a processed field recording. […] what is interesting are the ideas and the thought process that lays behind the end results. Sadly that’s all to often the case.

Hasni Malik, Osvaldo Coluccino – Neuma q,

in “Progress Report”, Storrington (UK), Giune 23, 2011

[...] Eccoci in prossimità d’arrivo con la “geometrica” Zeit Composers Series che dopo un inizio in sordina, da intendere come poco appariscente, ha recentemente messo in fila sei bei tomi di rigorosa compiutezza: Null di Luigi Archetti, Neuma Q di Osvaldo Coluccino, Rimandi e scoperte di Angelo Petronella, On Debussy’s Piano And… della coppia Thollem McDonas / Stefano Scodanibbio, Death By Water di Fabio Selvafiorita e Valerio Tricoli e Joy Flashings di Philip Corner e Manuel Zurria. [...] Anche con Angelo Petronella e Osvaldo Coluccino si casca nel sicuro. [...] Anche Osvaldo Coluccino viene da lontano [...] e ha all’attivo composizioni suonate da varie orchestre ed ensemble e proposte in numerosi e importanti consessi. Il suo nome sembra avere un buon seguito anche al di fuori dei confini nazionali, almeno così mi fa pensare la citazione del suo nome da parte Simon Reynell di Another Timbre in una recente intervista. La sua è una musica elettroacustica fluida e cosmica che ha la profondità degli abissi marini e la spaziosità del cielo, mentre di entrambi, mare e cielo, possiede la trasparenza. La perfetta colonna sonora per un viaggio verso mondi lontani.

Etero Genio, Die Schachtel: della maggiore età, 

in “Sands-zine”, Italy, October 2011

Over the years, Die Schachtel has issued many fine electronic and concrète releases by italian musicians, and here are three more […] Osvaldo Coluccino is the youngest and his disc opens on a kind of pressurized electronic morph that hits several spectrums in quick succession. […] Much of the bulk of the disc, however, is an intricate study of the varieties of electronic wind, especially the final track, “4”, a long tunnel of hum. Tiny poppling bubbles, and squeaky, rusty bike-chain, growths percolate, yet it his the powerful opening that situates you in the dramas that are to unfolds.

Andrew Choate, Osvaldo Coluccino – Neuma q,

in “Signal to Noise”, n. 60, Houston (USA), December 2011

MUSIC FOR ACOUSTIC OBJECTS

About Oltreorme (2012), Another Timbre, Sheffield 2013

Osvaldo Coluccino’s debut album on Another Timbre, Atto, was one of 2012’s more pleasant surprises. Despite Coluccino’s history of composing for conventional instruments — his release immediately preceding Atto was String Quartets (NEOS, 2012) — for the composition featured on Atto he opted to only employ (unspecified) acoustic objects which he struck, rubbed or blew into. […] Despite his use of non-instrumental sounds here [in Oltreorme], Coluccino demonstrates a composer’s ear for the ingredients that combine to make dramatic listening – contrasts of volume, texture and duration, periods of stability or repetition are offset by occasional surprise elements thrown in (but no great shocks). Altogether, Oltreorme is as successful as Atto and the two together form a well-matched pair. There can be no higher recommendation than that.

John Eyles, Osvaldo Coluccino: Oltreorme (2013),

in “All About Jazz”, London (UK), April 19, 2013

And then you get recordings like this one which seem so effortlessly beautiful… Solo, all “acoustic objects”, played in a loosely percussive manner, softly. Softer still if you follow Coluccino’s suggestion and turn the volume low. […] Sounds enter into the room, disappear; depending on your listening acuity, you may forget the disc is on for a minute or two. When they surface, I bet they sound as natural as whatever else is going on wherever you are. Nothing forced, nothing overly stressed, a fine willingness to withhold; reticent but not shy. […] One of those recordings where it’s tough to say much, worthless to describe but extremely enjoyable to experience. […]

Brian Olewnick, Osvaldo Coluccino – Oltreorme (Another Timbre),

in “Just Outside”, New Jersey (USA), April 19, 2013

[...] sounds tend to be imperceptible, they pass like fleeting shadows that are often difficult to perceive. The universe of Oltreorme is unstable, ghostly and beyond reality. [...] A very tenuous music [...] Everything is a matter of listening, attention and perception. A truly original experience based on unique textures. [...] more than difficult, Oltreorme is disconcerting. Especially because of this distinction that fades between the abstract musical universe and the concrete surrounding universe. In addition to giving a musical life to non-musical objects, Coluccino erases – in a musical way – the distinction between sound projection and its concrete environment [...]

Julien Héraud, Osvaldo Coluccino – Oltreorme (Another Timbre, 2013),

in “Improv-sphere”, Nantes (France), 20 Avril 2013

[…] Coluccino seems interested to create a method for the loss of self-perception within a quiescent milieu of soft noises and brushed silences, as if willing to reaffirm the rigor of isolation as the basis for the development of our innermost capabilities in opposition to ego. […] Coluccino shows the weight of his conception – already surfacing in the previous Atto on this same label – through a clear, if wordless explanation that defies critical categorization. We ourselves are the sounds that we hear in a complex give-and-take mechanism of acceptance and/or denial; the reaction to this simple fact will determine our social (or less) attitude. […] genuine deep listening is not possible if solitude is diluted.

Massimo Ricci, Osvaldo Coluccino – Oltreorme,

in “Touching extremes”, Rome (Italy), April 28, 2013

[…] Atto’s music is in fact very fluid, the pieces generally have a parabular shape and are quite compact in density and volume. The pieces of Oltreorme, on the other hand, appear much more rarefied and engineered on soft volumes [...] What is lost in fluidity, however, is acquired in dynamism, with the consequent ability to surprise the listener, since both the silences and the hardly perceptible volumes are well they adapt to the twists and turns. [...] The footprints (“orme”) seem to represent the here and the present while the beyond (“oltre”) can be a beyond space and the instant. Sounds muffled by distance and / or by time, therefore, sounds to be experienced as tears of memory.

Etero Genio, Oltreorme, in “Sands-zine”, Italy, 25 maggio 2013

rating: Atto’s spiteful twin

If someone ask this question to me about who I think is one of today’s most exciting and versatile contemporary composers, the Italian Osvaldo Coluccino would have the title as soon as possible. At the same time genius with boundless imagination and meticulous craftsman. […] Oltreorme, composed in 2012, moves along Atto guidelines […] The next step is that Oltreorme demands that what was previously touched or rubbed, now it’s just caressed; only now its breath that blew in it is included. It is soft and subtle music. It is also more delicate and quiet. […] he gives us a Zen riddle, which is not the solution to the issue but the fact of thinking that those are all the other external factors that we hear when we listen to a piece by a composer. […] it is ultra-soft music, exciting, a challenging work. Absolute mastery.

Dusted Hoffman, Osvaldo Coluccino – Oltreorme,

in “Improv.hu”, Szeged (Hungary), 2013 május 29

[…] Silence is clearly a large part of Oltreorme […] but it’s punctuated most elegantly by sounds from acoustic objects, with no conventional musical instruments or processing involved. The title is an invented portmanteau of two Italian words which translates as ‘beyond footprints’ or ‘beyond traces’, reflecting Coluccino’s aim of capturing what he describes in an interview on Another Timbre’s website as “the breath of objects”: delicate, shortlived, mostly gestural sounds, arranged in clusters between the silences, with objects overlapping to highlight their sonic similarities and contrasts. […]

Abi Bliss, Osvaldo Coluccino – Oltreorme, 

in “The Wire”, London (UK), Giune 2013

[...] Osvaldo Coluccino does not play objects like anyone else. Rather, he does not play. No, he examines, shakes, sees what happens after that, seeks, finds or does not find, digs or abandons... I would also like to say also that we must not look for what is the object, since this must be allowed to imagination that trots and galloping, to the disc that invites imagination... But Atto is not Oltreorme, whose title is a neologism that launches us on the track of a “over-footprint”. Even more than the album that precedes it, here the objects require silence. Even more than in the album that precedes it, Coluccino here reinvents concrete music by making it elusive. Even in the concrete, it is important to distinguish oneself. And Osvaldo Coluccino knew how to do it.

Pierre Cécile, Osvaldo Coluccino – Oltreorme,

in “Le Son du Grisli”, Chantilly (France), juin 2013

Osvaldo Coluccino is one of the most interesting “experimenters on the margins of silence” in the Italian scene and also in the Another Timbre catalog. If Reynell has focused on him there is to believe him and be intrigued! He has an idea and an aesthetic of silence, to which he clearly gave its meaning. He travels on the limit, for a long time he has devoted himself to more and more material compositions with acoustic objects that become music, moving the boundary line of his research a little further, a little beyond. Oltreorme. It is not by chance the title. After the declaration of intent contained in Atto. Oltreorme is almost impossible to grasp. We should see it realize, develop, materialize. Instead, Coluccino leaves it to our imagination, to the abyss created between the distance of the informal and concrete sounds that reach the ear and the objects and hands that created them. [...].

Francesca Odilia Bellino, Osvaldo Coluccino: beyondmusic, oltreorme, beyond..,

in “All About Jazz – Italy”, 8 July 2013

rating: 4 stars

About Atto (2011), Another Timbre, Scheffiel 2012

[…] Apart from how well it is done, what makes Atto so interesting is that its creator Osvaldo Coluccino is better known as the composer of more traditional instrumental and electroacoustic works, with past releases appearing on heavyweight contemporary music labels such as Col Legno and Neos. […] you can hear the acute painterly ear he has applied to the arrangements on Atto. The sounds used are mostly quite small; little squeaks, crashes and scrapes, some crunchily brittle, others colourfully tonal, and all recorded in a large resonant space but then distributed and sequenced with great care and a consistently sharp consideration of structure. Coluccino doesn’t just stack sounds up; nor does he ever let the music slide into any kind of drone. Instead he gives every sound the space to stand up for itself alongside its companions and allows them to build an often quite dramatic narrative that forms finely balanced compositions. […]

Richard Pinnell, Osvaldo Coluccino – Atto, 

in “The Wire”, London (UK), April 2012

And so to the last of the four recent releases from Another Timbre (If you only counted four reviews here, I wrote about the Osvaldo Coluccino disc for the Wire). I say this every time I know, but this might again be my favourite batch of discs from AT yet, four beautiful discs each with a sense of real purpose. The label is firing on all cylinders right now. […]

Richard Pinnell, review to the CD Thread by Caddy, Krebs, Mayas,

in “The Watchful Ear”, UK, April 1, 2012

[…] Its most immediate characteristic is a sense of space and tranquility. Coluccino has not overcrowded the soundscape nor allowed any sound to linger for too long; there are no prolonged drones or barrages of sound. On occasion, two sounds are heard in parallel, but throughout, each component of the piece can be heard clearly and savored. Coluccino was successful in producing sounds the source of which cannot be identified, thus keeping Atto fresh and cliché-free. The majority of them are covered by the term “small sounds”, which includes scrapings, rattlings, tappings and breathy tones. Most were clearly recorded in a resonant space; they resound in ways that others achieve electronically rather than physically, giving the music presence and immediacy. [...] It is music that will stand the test of time and be richly rewarding for years to come.

John Eyles, Osvaldo Coluccino: Atto (2012), 

in “All about jazz”, London (UK), April 23, 2012

[...] it’s just a trip to do. A breath pushes me, a screech indicates a direction, a hissing catches my attention. Everything seems to happen in the air, yes they are air currrent that I hear. But I ask too many questions, and I close my eyes. The objects of the Italian now turn around me, here I am surrounded, I keep my eyes closed. Thunder thunders, wheels spin, some materials tinkle, ring squeak... Is polystyrene rubbed on my floor? And the imagination takes over. A hole appears, Coluccino and his objects are engulfed and I am the movement. By the force of things, by the force of objects. There are disc that, in addition to carrying you away, make you imagine things. This is the case of Atto.

Héctor Cabrero, Osvaldo Coluccino – Atto,

in “Le Son du Grisli”, Chantilly (France), April 2012

[...] Objects are rubbed, struck, blown, tense, kneaded, we do not really know how these textures are produced, nor with what. But we know that it is not about instruments, which also allows Coluccino to avoid reductionist clichés to explore new musical and sound territories. If the sound spaces drawn by these objects are undeniably original and creative, the fact remains that their contemplation requires an availability of whole spirit (and a good hi-fi...), because Coluccino’s music is subtle, minimal, often very calm and airy, but also difficult, sometimes austere or airtight. [...] The exploration of materials as sound and musical possibilities is extremely profound, so deep that it can become vertiginous and frightening. Atto really demands total attention and availability, so complete that it seemed to me too much austere or hermetic. However, the richness of the textures and the creativity of this manipulator of objects will certainly be able to charme [...] in my opinion, and I still think that the sound journey proposed by Coluccino can be quite powerful once we get caught up in the game.

Julian Heraud, Osvaldo Coluccino – Atto (Another Timbre 2012),

in "Improv Sphere", Nantes (France), Monday 23 April 2012

Antoine Beuger recently lamented the fact that so many interpretations of John Cage’s music lack a basic sense of beauty and phrasing, an observation that came to mind as I listened to these four new releases from Another Timbre. Whether for large ensemble, trio, duo or solo player, and whatever the syntax employed in the music’s construction, each is imbued with a sense of beauty that is often overwhelming. This [Atto] is some of the most elusive and enigmatic music I’ve heard in some time […] but its composer’s ear for subtlety, ensures a timbrally pleasing and structurally diverse listening experience.

Marc Medwin, On Another Timbre, 

in “Paris Transatlantic”, Paris (France), Spring 2012

[...] the introverted exploration of a rough palette that, upon repeated attempts, reveals surprising truths disguised amidst the relative normality of unprompted gestures. [...] the nonexistence of standard musical components – no harmony, no melody, no rhythm, at least in the conventional acceptation of these definitions – constitutes an incentive for fine-tuning our listening abilities through what appears as a collection of echoes from an historically neglected long-ago. Not composition, not improvisation: just snapshots of states of mind, translated into substantial clatter and gentler cracks in a charged silence.

Massimo Ricci, Osvaldo Coluccino – Atto, 

in “Touching extremes”, Rome (Italy), April 9, 2012

Coluccino only uses objects, not instruments, to create his music. He is concerned about the sensation of creating sound, about the expressive act of it, about its impact beyond the known. On some tracks, the density is high and many things happen all at once. On most other tracks silence offers the foundation for the objects to hear themselves.

Stef, Osvaldo Coluccino – Atto (Another Timbre 2102),

in “Free Jazz”, Belgium, April 30, 2012

Osvaldo Coluccino joue des objets acoustiques en plastique, bois ou métal qu’il frotte, souffle, écrase, froisse, frappe pour en obtenir une palette sonore inouïe. Entre Cartridge Music de John Cage, l’écoute d’un paysage sonore ou une musique concrète inédite, un travail à rapprocher également de ceux de Lee Patterson ou Olivier Toulemonde. Réellement surprenant!

–, Osvaldo Coluccino, Atto, 

in “Metamkine”, Rives (France), 2012

A new work by an Italian composer, of whom previously I had selected the album Gemina among the 30 best discs of 2010, was played only with acoustic objects, not using musical instruments or electronic processing. […] There is a constant change of the ever-changing acoustic flow and of the perspective composition of the space, which bursts, smashes, shatters, scatters and flies into the sky. The camera keeps on moving without stopping for a moment, and the light it injects changes from moment to moment, and something huge that is happening in front of the eye can not be caught under the panoramic view and overflows from the view. Nevertheless, the whole film is pervaded by a solid sense of construction. Overwhelming torrents, that are spouted, collised, intersected, broken by sudden release of collective velocity, mobility to the limit while maintaining the texture, the graininess of the sound material and the feel of the space, resonate. Sometimes it reminds me of the ensemble of Iannis Xenakis.

Keiichi Fukushima, in “Removing the ear frame”, 

Japan, April – June 2012

[...] Some artists and some releases are so unique, so impalpable that we are just there, charmed, to listen to the sounds nodding with our head, but, for a while, we prefer not to speak out. Coluccino’s works are like that. [...] The path of the composer Coluccino so far has been characterized by the use of traditional acoustic instruments and by the creation of semi-electronic works. And now, at the time of the composition of Atto, what he does? He completely excludes the two components: musical instruments and electronics. But then, what is left? What remains is the small or large sounds produced by objects not traditionally associated with the concept of musical creation, and without electronic manipulation. Of course, today this is not new, we might say, since dozens of CDs documenting the music with similar design are released, but in this case, the artistic achievement – from the performance to the editing and mixing, through the recording – is undoubtedly masterful. [...] Through rustles, rubbings you can not deduct, even remotely, what objects exactly they are. One can only guess in some circumstances their material: metal pipes, chains, blocks of wood, cardboard boxes, but that is not the question. Rather, the question is how the composer was able to create, through the multitude of small noises, a complete composition in five movements. [...] You can listen to every sound at the most appropriate moment, even the slightest little noise finds an exact location. It is a precise and accurate work. [...] with the willful exclusion of musical instruments, vocals, harmonies, rhythms and melodies, he has created an authentic musical work with a special aesthetic. […]

Dusted Hoffman, Osvaldo Coluccino – Atto, 

in “Improv.hu”, Szeged (Hungary), July 3, 2012

[…] [Atto] a disc that seems to start where Gemina ended. It is in fact an electroacoustic work, created by the author in its entirety (compositional and performative), without any type of instrument or electronic manipulation, but only through the use of resonances arising from a variety of acoustic objects. Atto, where the first half of the title wants to be a tribute to the guest brand (AT), is a disc that is profoundly “different” and yet very “similar” to Gemina. In particular, the music presents the same characteristics of delicacy and fragility, but also with a Machiavellian expressive force.

Etero Genio, Gemina // Atto, 

in “Sands-zine”, Italy, November 22, 2012

rating: both to buy

[…] For one thing, this is not music by any sensible definition. Sound art, objet trouvé work, musique concrète: these are all labels that might apply to varying degrees – but not music. For another thing, only those fascinated by extreme compositional experimentalism – John Cage at his strangest, say – are going to find rewards in Osvaldo Coluccino’s Atto. Like a true post-modernist, Coluccino will not be bothered by this. His previous recordings (of his “string quartets”, for example – see review) make absolutely no attempt to follow any populist route towards fame and fortune. […] Atto is an artwork: though there is no orthodox sense of structure or progression, that does not mean the noises are randomly thrown together. In fact, Coluccino has assembled his found sounds rigorously, to keep textures translucent and preserve a sense of spatiality. In a touch worthy of John Cage – an Another Timbre catalogue regular, by the way – background traffic is very faintly audible in some quiet passages. Audio quality is nonetheless excellent, as is to be expected: Coluccino recorded and then mixed the sounds himself. […]

                       Byzantion, Osvaldo Coluccino, “Atto”, in “Art Music Reviews”

and “MusicWeb Intarnational”, UK, December 2012

Atto [...] the first work in which Coluccino completely abandons the use of traditional instruments. In Neuma Q (Die Schachtel, 2010) he kept something between acoustic instruments and electronics. Is here this choice extreme? No. It is rather a purification process. A need for concentration. A kind of tension. Atto appears as the deliberate choice of a composer to lay down the instruments and use the body, the arm and the mind together to make music. Or rather, even bodies, objects, those chosen to play and on which to compose. The inorganic shapeless and dirty sound to make music. [...] a continuous, very dense, thin, liming discourse, on the border between silence and rarefaction. Nevertheless every single act has its internal development. Rustles, rubs, cracks, scattered and collected sounds, objects tears, alternate with elegant glissando, clusters of non-notes, suspended intervals. Atto is full, does not go in subtraction, experiments and probes the possibilities of making concrete and material music. A real composition where the object, that is the means to make music, has become that (material or non-material) thing to which action and thought are directed. The act is the movement, the gesture, the time, the sign to explain the process and the feeling.

Francesca Odilia Bellino, Osvaldo Coluccino: beyondmusic, oltreorme, beyond..,

in “All About Jazz – Italy”, 8 July 2013