Canzona
Sergio Barroso
Programme notes
The title refers to the early Renaissance instrumental compositions bearing this generic term to define simply ‘an instrumental composition.’ The piece keeps specific contact with its sixteenth-century ancestors through an extremely dense and ornate polyphonic style, an open continuous structure, certain expressive moods and twists, and the smiling recreation of sound colours and compositional resources of that musical epoch such as echo and pian e forte effects. Except for the use of wholetone and harmonic series tuning systems, the piece is fully microtonal in order to achieve the resulting timbres and textures. The microtunings, ranging from quarter-tone to thirty-second of a tone, are combined in either complex single colour or multi-timbral blocks.
Canzona was realized with a Yamaha DX-7II/E
Premiere
- November 3, 1988, Sergio Barroso, keyboard • New Music for Digital Keyboard, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada)
About this sound recording
This version was recorded at Ireme studio in Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada) between June 1994 and February 1995 — sound recording
- Composer(s): Sergio Barroso
- Year of composition: 1988
- Duration: 12:23
- Instrumentation: keyboard-controlled synthesizers and stereo fixed medium
- ISRC: CAD509612110
