12 Preludi

Raffaele Bellafronte’s music is free, mobile, rich in distant echoes and yet tenaciously reflecting today’s reality. It has a strong communicative character without slavishly tracing traditions that can no longer be exhumed. It shows an enviable tenacity in blending singing qualities, tonal propensities, and paroxysmal ostinatos that never expire in minimalism. It lives off an expressive density that is also made of harmonic harshness. It exhibits a stubborn lack of craftiness in building a sound world full of points of support, while at the same being never fully predictable. Bellafronte’s music is certainly also calculated. Nonetheless, it has the felicitous happenstance not to present itself only as such to the listener: it moves, pulsates; it lives beyond and above possible exegeses; it narrates something that ultimately makes one want to listen to it time and again. Raffaele Bellafronte’s music always communicates. But it is not “easy” music that strives to please. it does not do somersaults, it does not wink. Sometimes it actually does, ironically, however always towards itself – never towards the listener. Bellafronte is not a composer in search of the new for its own sake: he is not afraid of using tradition and transcend it through a language that is always direct, original, and communicative. His personality is such that, in the context of a series of nuances and scents, in some cases evident, in others more subterranean, he manages to create a sound-imagery that never excludes the listener’s perception, never sets itself entirely in rethinking the idea of certain historical and historicizable forms.

Modal and tonal harmony are constantly challenged, disrupted through dissonances that never obfuscate the underlying clarity of the musical narrative. In this sense, I can proclaim unwaveringly that Raffaele Bellafronte’s music, specifically in these works, has reached the apex of classicism without becoming neoclassical. His neoclassicism, should we prefer to define it that way, is therefore not linguistic or stylistic, but philosophical in nature.