Marc antonio Modaro

I’m wild about Marc’antonio Modaro’s piano etudes. There’s something bewitching about the harmonies that I can’t figure out. Give them a listen:

The ‘emancipation of the dissonance‘ required an avoidance of functional tonal structures. Twelve notes ‘in relation only to each other‘ tend to all sound ‘ok,’ freeing composers to explore other dimensions. But notes in relation to a triad sound, variously, welcome, unnecessary, or mistaken.

Plenty of composers mixed the two, but it takes a lot of care to go beyond simple ‘wrong note’ cuteness, or non-functional free counterpoint. Much 20th c. American music is as muddy as the Mississippi to my ear because of this.

Chromatic music can arise from within tonality and thereby maintain some functional logic. Late Romantic music arrived at extreme chromaticism through voice-leading. Jazz gets away with upper-structure dissonances (the same chords, just farther) by anchoring them in meat-and-potatoes circle-of-5ths root motion.

I’m still wrapping my ears around it, but I think Modaro presents another way entirely. Every note seems to fit in the harmony rather than stick out of it — it is in turns triadic and wildly chromatic — and it moves so smoothly between them that I never get a ‘wrong note’ feeling. Maybe its the strength of his patterns, or the persuasion of his playing. But there’s got to be something about his harmony too… I can’t figure it out. I’d love to study with him.

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• About Composer Marc’antonio Modaro