The label’s introductory text: “Salvatore Linguido is from Genova. The music on this CDR is for programmed piano. West Mantra; synthesis and technological echo of eternal musics – a research which we like to call “hyper-serial”, where the fundamental approach is not to build something with a scheme, but the more subversive one of a reconstruction of a lot of schemes, each one derived from a minimal modification of a structure; a music where attention for the singular sound is enormous, but even the composition of the sound is almost obsessive. We can see “fathers” like Conlon Nancarrow or Tom Johnson, but also like John Cage, Pierre Henry, Pierre Schaeffer – not only for an explicit influence, but also for a cultural and ethic affinity. “West Mantra” reflects itself in the rigor of the unpolluted.”

Maybe my characterization of Larry Kucharz’s techno-expansions could fit as well as a hint into Salvatore Linguido’s programmed pianism; Mondrian music… but then again, perhaps not. A clear association goes directly to Swedish-Italian composer Aldo Clementi, and… Josef Matthias Hauer (as I heard Herbert Henck interpret him in Stockholm in the spring of 2001).
However, this is only for guidelines, for directions of the compass… because Linguido’s music for programmed piano could as well have its mineral correspondences, way down in the crystal worlds of rock, of granite, of rock bottom – because there is something of a molecular structure in these compositions. The reinforced progressions of tones are relentless like the core of solid rock, simply stating their own fact, their own very persistent and explicit existence, right in the middle of their own gravitational drag. Yes, in these recordings you flash from micro cosmos to macro cosmos in the wink of an eye. Star signs can serve as models for these rigid self-reflections (as in the oeuvres of Stockhausen or Cage) as well as the clattering of moraines below glacier heads in Lapland (Björk and early Ralph Lundsten and especially the vocal art of bewitching Hebriana Alainentalo; a medium for… a spokeswoman for… shifting ice shelves and cracking glaciers).

Rocks and glaciers and minerals and flowing melting water in mountain streams can be very meditative, and so is this music, which can deconstruct and reconstruct many a floating image displayed on the inside of your skull, revealing it to you in hitherto unseen splendor.

In the label’s introduction Conlon Nancarrow comes up, but I don’t really see the relevance of this, unless you simply hint at a loose kinship, which of course is present. The intriguing thing about Nancarrow’s “Studies for Player Piano” (available in their entirety on Wergo Schallplatten) was the slow – or fast – transformation of a playable – humanely playable – pieces, into a realm of utter impossibility, where you’d have to have thirteen arms and be able to hit the keys 300 times a second. The connections I find to Nancarrow may be the fact that this music is mechanical, pre--programmed, and that it has a spidery construction of rigidity, plus the not unimportant fact that Nancarrow – and Linguido – uses the programmable piano (but of very different kinds, of course) to construct new pieces for that instrument, and not to – like was done before – recreate already composed pieces, like waltzes and so on, simply to get rid of the pianist. Linguido’s music seems fully realistic, completely playable, also for a normal pianist with two hand and ten fingers.

Has the composer in any way had Stockhausen in mind when composing? I’m thinking about Stockhausen’s very famous piece “Mantra” for two pianos, woodblocks, antique cymbals and ring modulators, of which I happen to have the score, and which I heard a few weeks ago in Kürten during the Stockhausen Courses 2001, played by two bright young Italian pianists - Fabrizio Rosso & Giuseppe Leanza - who had been studying “Mantra” in Ellen Corver’s master classes in Kürten. Probably Salvatore Linguido didn’t have a thought about that piece – it’s just the similarity in naming that raises my curiosity.

The pieces on Linguido’s CD start with “West Mantra” in four different versions, but with – to the second – the same duration; 6:14. “Incontro” is an isolated short piece in just one version. “Distanze”, with the duration 9:37, comes in two versions, and finally we hear four versions of “Studi” (numbers 1, 4, 5 & 8) with the duration 2:57.

If you think - like I did at first - that this kind of music writing is aided by computer insertions and random deviations, producing these variations, you are wrong. Linguido has chosen all the notes in the vertical and horizontal planes himself, so no machinery except the human machinery has been involved in these steel spring compositions!.

Salvatore Linguido’s piano pieces are bluebells of hard steel, erect on the slopes of suburban meadows.