Alvaro Company(born in Florence in 1931) has studied at the Florentine "Cherubini" Conservatory of Music, graduating in Choral Music in 1955 and in Composition in 1956. After being a pupil of Andres Segovia from 1950 until 1954, he undertook a brilliant concert career in Italy and abroad. A neurological lesion of his right arm forced him to interrupt concert activities, with the exception of a 1973 concert held at the Scala theater of Milan, upon the invitation of the great conductor Bruno Maderna. After a long period of research and reeducation by means of different techniques, he reappeared before the public at the Chigiana Academy of Siena in 1987.

In 1960 he opened the class of guitar at the Florentine Conservatory, where he still teaches, and in 1965 in Modena, at the Academy of music, until 1970; in 1967 he taught at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory of Rome, invited by its director the conductor Renato Fasano. From 1968 onwards, Company holds post graduate courses at several European academies and universities. He has edited many works for the guitar and lute and has worked out a new gestural and breathing technique for instrumentalists which he calls "musical biodynamics". He is a member of the national "Cherubini" Academy. in 1991 a committee, formed by Claudio Abbado, Salvatore Accardo, Gianandrea Gavazzeni, Carlo Matia Giulini, Riccardo Muti, Mauriaio Pollini and by the most renowned Italian critics and presided by Goffredo Petrassi bestowed on Company the "Mila" award, "for his outstanding lifelong commitment to the teaching of music".

As a composer, after following atonal tracks in his first works from 1948 onwards, Company devoted himself to serial technique. His present language avails itself of greater formal freedom: modality, melism, tonality, atonality and serialism appear but in a transfigured way which enables them to coexist without clashing stylistically as "archeological vestiges" of different moments.

Bacground and Genesis of La Seis Cuerdas

I grew up in a family very fond of music. My mother, like many middle-class girls of the beginning of the century, studied painting and music and soon decided to dedicate her life to these two arts. She lived with her parents at Viareggio and among the friends of the family there were local artists, painters and musicians, for example, Puccini, Catalani and Leoncavallo.

After having studied the piano and composition with Ruggero Leoncavallo and after his death she studied with Icilio Sadun (who many years later, 1946, initiated me into the principals of harmony). My mother's late marriage, at 39 years, caused her to give these activities up although she continued to play piano for her own pleasure. At the end of the second world war she taught me to play this instrument.

When I was about 14 I began to strum on the guitar and started my first "compositions". One day I heard A. Segovia on the radio and it struck me like lightning and I decided to take up the guitar seriously. At the same time I decided to aquire a thorough knowledge of composition so I started to learn under the guidance of of C. Prosperi. Prosperi was an advanced student of Luigi Dallapiccola at the Conservatory.

In Florence I found a set of young composers, pupils of Dallapiccola, among them were Bussotti, Prosperi, Bartolozzi, Benvenuti and Smith-Brindle (and myself set up the Schola Fiorentina in 1954). Meanwhile I couldn't find a serious and stimulating environment for guitar study. I had instruction for one year with the best teacher in Florence but remained self taught until I met Segovia in 1950 and studied with him for five years.

By this time I had already carried out research on the many timbres of the guitar stimulated by new experiences on other instruments by modern composers.

The "clarinet" timbre, produced by plucking the string exactly midway along its vibrating length and the "normal and pizzicato" sound effects on two simultaneously played parts (effects later used in Las seis cuerdas) are small discoveries of those previous years.

As to Segovia, besides his fundamental impact from both the technical and instrumental point of view, I was struck by his way of individualizing timbres like a palette of sound characters as can be found in a orchestra score. His frequent references to the sound of the oboe, the horn, the trumpet, the flute etc. led me in later years to try to locate a trimbral map of the strings to locate the spots where they could be struck to produce different timbral effects.

I had also understood that some of his indications ("with more nail", with more flesh:) were only a way of speaking not corresponding to reality: the length of nail doesn't allow him to pluck a string with his fingertips, but only to brush it gently according to the position of the fingers and the inclination of the nails; the very difference of the inclination of the nails vs the strings was essential in order to characterize, with more precision on the strings, that previously identified timbres. In the years preceding La seis cuerdas, I had singled out three different inclinations of the nails vs the strings:1) normal 2) harsh 3) very soft besides 4) without nails, with the thumb parallel to the strings or with the little R.H. finger which I keep nailless.

The compositions I wrote previous to Las seis cuerdas were for piano, for other instruments, for choir and for orchestra but besides a juvenile composition of 1950 ("Preludio, Cadenza e Fuga" for piano and guitar), I had never written a work for guitar. On the other hand, the contemporary literature for other instruments had shown me an evolution and transformation I didn't find in the guitar literature so I had to determine instrumental bases capable of shedding new light on the image of the guitar which was forming within my mind. Thus, at the end of 1959, before setting to compose Las seis cuerdas, I decided to sum up all the instrumental means and innovations I had been able to identify along the years. The result was a systematic classification which was to support me while composing. It comprehended, besides many absolutely new techniques, the whole store I had inherited from Segovia and which I had rationalized, isolating clearly definable single elements of gestures, in order to individuate various combination possibilities which, through a transformed performing technique, would give rise to a new style and to new sound cells.

In the first stage of composing, drawing inspiration form ideas suggested by these new techniques, I came to write pieces in which these peculiar features were specifically highlighted, for example, in the first movement-a "sextet" for six strings a melodic pattern, with its repeated resonances is outlined in the most subtle timbric variations which are attained by different positions of the nails vs the strings; in movements I, II and IV the percussion is clearly defined in its elements: determinate and indeterminate sounds, the latter ones with precise connotations of pitch and timbre; in movement III and IV and I used special rasqueados, in V and VI the pizzicato and normal effect, and so on. But the greatest surprise while writing was that the music itself suggested new technical possibilities I hadn¹t though of before, for example the simultaneous performance of different parts played by the R.H. and L.H. independently, see movement II and v, simultaneous chords whose sounds have different timbres in movement V, the exclusion of any sound produced in a normal way in movement IV and so on.

After finishing the composition I noted that thanks to the enrichment of new gestures and new performing techniques the guitar appeared totally transformed, well becoming a new sound world but without losing those mysterious spiritual roots I still continue to value very highly. Think only of the quotation from G.Lorca's "Las seis cuerdas":"La guitarra hace llorar a los suenos". Years later G.Petrassi, who has always been keen on instrumental research, said: "Today you can't write a piece for the guitar without having studied Las seis cuerdas by A. Company".

My Aesthetics of Music
One of my aims as a composer has been to achieve a way of writing which clearly defines the performing of musical gestures, shunning of any graphic estheticism however tempting but alienating because it is incapable of suggesting and determining a corresponding sound result. The specular aspect of the same goal and ethical commitment, experienced this time in the role of the performer consists in avoiding, on the other hand, any arbitrary performance without yielding to the allurements of those instrumental and interpretive effects not fully corresponding to the spirit of the score.

My activities as a performer has thus influenced me as a composer and vice versa. As a guitarist, I believe that the most important aim is that of being able to "improvise" a preexisting musical creation. This implies an almost punctilious observance of the score (from the general structure down to the smallest detail) which must be assimilated as a body of graphical symbols. Transforming these symbols in a consistent and meaningful emotional images, you interiorize a project allowing you to discover, each time you play, the possibility of new interpretive experiences without altering the slightest detail of the score. Only through this ripening it is allowed to tackle a written composition as if it were an improvisation. It would be thus possible to reexperience the score with the feelings and the spontaneousness of a new gesture, as if it were happening for the first time with its whole load of inventiveness and emotions. A performing artist is a composer who creates what has been suggested to him and forgetting what has been suggested. Being a performer, I've therefore been led as a composer to think highly of the function of human gesture and their intimate relationship with music as if it were a flowering of the human body in this wholeness.

In such a context, the page written by the composer becomes a graphical representation of gestures which have been perceived and planned in order to translate mood in sound events capable of kindling the music. On the other hand the performer has to follow empathetically the opposite procedure finding out and putting into effect the instrumental practice which allows him the most subtle tuning with the written page. Such an attitude has influenced- and still continues to influence my way of writing music, leading me to perceive structures which reflect this deep seated human connection in order to relive, in the music, rhythm through the very heartbeats and the breathing and the gestures through the fullness and emotions of ever changing feelings.

Post Scriptum
This way of conceiving a musical event has taken more and more shape partly from the 36 years spent as a guitar teacher at the Luigi Cherubini State Conservatory of Florence. It allowed me to work out a precise psychophysical technique for musicians. In the eighties I gave this the name of "music biodynamics".

This technique tackles the physical and psychological problems of posture, movement, breathing and gesture. It develops musical consciousness in the psychophysical relationship between breathing, gesture and the weight-space-speed components of rhythm. It deals with the problems of expression in its dynamic-psycological manifestations (its character, its expansion and its containment). It proposes a thorough inquiry into the structure of the score, in order to identify the experience of the performer as suggested by the analysis of the composition, studies the relationship with space (concert hall) and the public and the movement of the actual performance.

In this dimension the score is experienced as a journey of the performer who establishes a constant dynamic-psycological relation with the various thematic elements of the music. While alternating, they appear like symbolic characters acting in the course of events. The distinguishing quality of these characters and the musical situation (experienced as a psychological situation, scene of sphere, flowing instant amid changing surroundings) face each other in a continuous dynamic relation of expansion and containment, excluding any stereotyped situation. This kaleidoscopic dualism, giving rise to feelings and moods, allows the interpreter to identify and realize moments in a continuous modulation, arousing each time new and genuine feelings.

The metamorphosis of the character and the situations emerges in a subtle/spiritual logic which brings about a hierarchy of values and this discloses the interior formal meaning of the piece, i.e. the psychological frame of the whole structure. To experience the journey of a performance in such a sphere of affections (inside the structure of vibrating energies) gives each time rise to a "new story" of the composition in the fullness of its always renewed genuine meaning.

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