Roberto Paci Dalò

Tenebrae (2019)
Roberto Paci Dalò – composition, clarinet, bass clarinet, voice, live electronics

Production: Giardini Pensili, Ars Electronica Festival

A solo work for clarinet, bass clarinet, voice, and live electronics, originally created for the Marmorsaal of the Augustinian Abbey of Sankt Florian (1071), near Linz, Austria.

In his Confessions, Augustine describes the soul as an inner space to be explored, evoking the vast “palaces of memory.” For Salvatore Sciarrino, memory is instead an almost empty threshold, made of traces, shadows, perceptual remnants, and “acoustic dust.” Tenebrae emerges from this idea of memory as a fragile sonic imprint.
The work is a meditation on the forms and memories of Western music, from Gregorian chant to echoes of Claudio Monteverdi and Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa.
The title Tenebrae (“darkness”) refers to the ancient Holy Week ritual in which candles are gradually extinguished until the congregation is left in darkness. At the end, a sudden strepitus breaks the silence, marking a passage toward a new condition.
Through an extended exploration of the clarinet’s timbrical possibilities, the work evokes distant traces of both historical and electronic music. Acoustic space becomes an essential part of the composition: resonances, sound persistence, presence, and distance shape an immersive listening experience.

The concert unfolds as a journey through a succession of “sonic rooms”—not architectural spaces, but places of perception. Each section opens a different environment and a different relationship between memory, imagination, and listening. The movement between rooms is less a linear narrative than a meditative practice of passage and observation. The room, as a space of retreat, contemplation, reading, and memory, has a central place in Western imagination. In mystical traditions, moving through successive rooms becomes a metaphor for the exploration of inner space and the deepening knowledge of the self.