Paolo Cognetti
Prelude
When I was six years old, my mother took me to visit one of her friends: bored, I wandered around the house until something caught my eye. It was an upright piano. I distinctly remember how my face only came up to the height of the keys, which seemed huge compared to the size of my hands at the time, and how I stretched up my arms to reach them, and then my amazement at the sound they made. Thanks to my mother’s fateful intuition, I shortly afterwards began taking piano lessons and, as soon as my hands became familiar with the instrument, my first compositional “experiments” began. A lot has changed since then but not my love for music, which has grown to become my deepest reason for living.
The piano and beyond
Paolo’s music comes from the piano, the instrument that has accompanied him since the outset of his journey into sound, and on which he wrote his first compositions, like a diary, a continuous and fruitful dialogue in the notes, characterised by an instinctive and direct expressiveness. The piano soon became a basis for increasingly wide-ranging explorations: he furthered his knowledge of harmony, counterpoint and orchestration, absorbing techniques and languages in a vast range of genres and styles. From his experiments with the sequencer of his first electronic keyboard onwards, he began putting into practice what he learned through studying and listening, familiarising with technology applied to music and developing a particular sensitivity to production values.
Awareness
Authenticity
Peace
Overwhelmed by social media notifications, newspaper headlines, political crises, a climate gone mad and a constant sense of impending doom, even before it materialised in the form of a global pandemic, the temptation to escape from our lives has never been greater. The growing popularity of floating therapy experiences, and the increasing success of musical compositions that encourage isolation from external stimuli are both clear proofs of this phenomenon. Paolo asks the listener to stay awake, to go beyond their comfort zone, to take responsibility for changing their lives rather than running away from them, and to take the risk of being happy.
Together
Music is either with others or it is not
Our culture still tends to see man essentially as an individual, a separate ego, free to relate to others or not. Asian traditions and the recent acquisitions of twentieth-century physics and cultural anthropology suggest otherwise: there is an original constitutive network of relationships in which the so-called “individual” is a link in the chain, in a perspective of differentiated totality. And it is the same with music: it does not exist in its own right, independently of everything and everyone; if anything, it becomes, it is made thanks to those who play it, listen to it, talk about it, love it, in short, thanks to all those for whom it holds importance. Music exists always and exclusively as a relationship and process.
