The music that lives in the mind

Somewhere there is a catalogue of more than twenty works for piano that no one has ever been able to leaf through. No manuscript, no file, no pencil sketch. Every note lives in one place only: the mind that imagined it.

Everything begins with an image. A lake at dusk, a falling snowflake, the scent of a winter wind. Sometimes it is a pure musical intuition, a chord that suddenly lights up; at other times music itself gives birth to more music. From that spark the ideas surface: some as brief as a harmonic progression, others as vast as an entire movement.

Edoardo fixes them one by one and stores them in what he calls his “fridge”:

“The moment an idea takes shape, I fix it and store it in one of the compartments I have inside my mind. A kind of fridge full of ingredients. I never write music down, I simply memorise it. When I return to the piano, even many months later, all I have to do is open that ‘fridge’ to cook the dish. If the dish is missing something, it goes back into its compartment, frozen, waiting for new ideas.”

Edoardo Brotto, interview with Massimo Crispi, Gli Stati Generali (translated from Italian)

To lose nothing, he relies on an ancient technique, the memory palace: every idea has its own room, and there it waits until it is needed. Then the ideas become the tiles of a mosaic. He moves them, turns them over, pairs them in ever new ways, following a precise logic. It is the longest and most delicate part, and it can take months. Until the moment comes when, as if from a mountain summit, the whole structure reveals itself at once, and among a thousand possible forms he recognises the most beautiful one.

That moment can come anywhere. In sleep. On ocean cliffs, facing a storm front advancing through the sunset. Or simply at the piano.

Only then does the music descend, in its final form, onto the keyboard, and it is captured directly in the recording: the album is the first and only written form of every work.

A year and a half in the “fridge”

Siberian Blizzard, Op. 10, was born this way. The first four minutes came almost in one breath. Then silence: the piece could have ended there, as a simple étude, but it asked for something more, and that something was slow to arrive. It stayed in the “fridge” for about a year and a half. Then, in a season of flowing creativity, everything else was born, together with The Devil in Love.

It was guided by the snow-covered Dolomites, recalled from memories and photographs, and by a sensation lived first-hand: a blizzard at 3,000 metres, with winds above 100 kilometres per hour. The piece is in E flat minor, written E♭ minor. Edoardo calls it “The Edd minor”, like his initials.

There is something ancient in this way of composing, the same memory through which songs and poems were handed down for centuries. And something deeply personal: in The Night Suite the theme of the Waltz of the Fairies, Op. 11, returns in every movement like a memory that wanders and changes shape. Music born from memory, returning to memory.