Works » By Title » C » Canzona (16:00 / 1988)

The title refers to the early Renaissance instrumental compositions bearing this generic term to define simply ‘an instrumental composition’. Scored for DX7II(E!) and TX802 digital synthesizers, the piece keeps specific contact with its 16th 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 colors and compositional resources of that musical epoch such as echo and ‘piano e forte’ effects. Except for the use of a wholetone and a harmonic series tuning, the piece is fully microtonal in order to achieve the resulting timbres and textures. The microtunings, ranging from quarter-tone to thirty two-tone, were usually combined in either complex single color or multitimbral blocks. “Canzona” was composed at IREME studio in Vancouver in late 1988 and was premiered shortly after in a recital of new music for digital keyboard I performed at the Vancouver Art Gallery. SB