M A N I F E S T O
Emotion, Harmony and Beauty
Polo Piatti is a strong advocate for the protection and promotion of melody and consonance in contemporary classical music. His lifelong engagement and leadership regarding the promotion of melodic and harmonious music is legendary. He remains unapologetic about writing music he considers to be beautiful, as he strongly believes that beauty is not, as traditionally believed, “in the eye of the beholder”. On the contrary, real beauty for him is universally recognizable due to the fact that it respects the traditional principles of symmetry, balance, and well-defined natural laws. Expressing these thoughts over many years, he has led groups and workshops, given lectures and is currently writing a book about the subject. In it, he describes how we have forgotten all about the real and immediate power of music.
Unlike other living composers, Piatti isn't interested in reflecting reality. Instead, he is completely focused on reflecting on how the world could be. He believes that creating beautiful harmonious music can contribute to making classical music become more accessible and therefore more popular with the wider public. For him, the old wisdom regarding how beauty in music (and the arts in general) can help humanity progress, has sadly been largely ignored or forgotten.
He says: “Unfortunately the prevailing fashion is still dictating that contemporary classical music be avant-garde and intellectual, which invariably means dissonant, atonal and bereft of melody. In other words, music for the intellect, not for the heart (there is nothing really “new” about that type of music as experimenting and shocking audiences with musical dissonance has now been around for more than a century!). I firmly believe, now more so than ever, that what humanity needs in these difficult times as a counterbalance to all that is going on around us, is beautiful, tuneful music to make us feel all the range of emotions it can evoke, in order to recover and heal. And for me personally, as a composer, only by touching people’s hearts is writing music still worthwhile. Otherwise, classical music is in danger of becoming elitist and therefore completely irrelevant.”
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"The only things that future generations really treasure are the ones that are beautiful, good and right"
Polo Piatti
'Civilized man, living in a world riddled with artificiality, is in danger of forgetting primary phenomena. In our day it seems necessary to point out that melody is such a primary phenomenon, and that there has never been a period in history when melody was not the essence of what people considered to be music.'
Hans Gál (‘Franz Schubert and the Essence of Melody’ - London 1974)