The 2014 Milano Musica Festival, this year dedicated to Fausto Romitelli, has commissioned a new work from Riccardo Nova. The piece, Yagé Howl for ensemble and electronics, will be performed by Repertorio Zero at the Piccolo Teatro Studio Melato on November 15.

Nova was a close friend of Romitelli and recalls that one of the projects they would have liked to undertake was to compose a piece together. Their idea was to combine what was at the time Nova’s fondness of polyrhythm and Romitelli’s harmonic “deformation”. Romitelli’s Professor Bad Trip, which arose out of his reading of the works written by Henri Michaux under the effect of drugs, has inspired the writing of Yagé Howl (Yagé is a brew with hallucinogenic properties), which aspires to be that desired joint work.

In the piece Nova gives great importance to the realisation of the “harmonic deformation”, produced above all by two keyboards for which the composer has elaborated and programmed a complex network of 26 different tunings.

Ricardo Nova: work list