Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck

Franco Donatoni (1927-2000) was a much-admired Italian composer and composition teacher. In 1967, in the middle of his career, Donatoni experienced a compositional crisis where he lost the will to compose original material and limited himself, rather, to transforming existing materials according to his personal working habits. The first piece to be composed under this regime was Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck, a work totally derived by a set of automatisms from the first three beats of the eighth bar of the second of Schoenberg's Five Piano Pieces (0p. 23). Far from any kind of loss, Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck reveals itself to be a virtuosic example of composition technique. This book uncovers all the automatisms applied in the process of the composition of this seminal work.