I am now the proud owner of the score of Bruno Maderna's 1972 orchestral piece Aura, nearly twenty inches in height. The USC Music Library has been giving away boxes of scores; I picked up this and Frank Martin's Passacaille, to form an odd pair. Maderna, the most generous and least disputatious of the Darmstadt avant-gardists, died young, at the age of fifty-three, and there is no telling what he might have done if he had lived to a grand old age. In his last couple of years, he composed Biogramma, notable for its glittering textures and intermittently songful lines; the chamber opera Satyricon, a proto-postmodern explosion of collage and pastiche; and the meditative, mystically inclined Ausstrahlung, written for the Persepolis festival of 1971. Aura, for its part, is an intricately structured work in which hectic episodes for minutely subdivided ensembles are interspersed with deep-breathing silences. At the end comes a haunting spell of controlled improvisation, in which horns, trumpets, and flute rotate through eighteen fragments over a slowly shifting mist of muted strings. Aura, Maderna playfully wrote, is "the essence of things, the essence of sound, and something like the aroma that pervades a room from the chicken cooking in the pot."
