Rocco Di Pietro is a renowned composer and pianist based in Columbus, Ohio. He is also a writer (among whose many publications is Dialogues with Boulez) and educator (currently teaching at Columbus State Community College). Visit www.dipietroeditions.comfor some of his works available online.

Q. What is the title of your latest work reflecting upon the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

   My latest work is called Taubes VII (Hiroshima Set). It is part of an ongoing series of interactions between photographs and other visual elements with a programmatic, even syncretic, interplay between music and visual art, which I relate to ectoplasms in sound extracted from a visual presence.

   The work does not directly reflect on Hiroshima in the sense of creating a threnody in the tradition of Picasso's “Guernica” or Goya or Nono, etc. All those Romantic notions of art bearing witness, as if it had the power to change the external conditions of life, were very important to me when I was young; but now at this point in my composing life, they have been drastically revised.

   When young I was very moved by the grand traumas in a humanist way, and composed, for example, a "Lt. Calley's Dilemma" and an “Elegy for Nha Trang” (when the boat people sank) -- both events heart-breakingly at the end of the Vietnam War. Both are piano pieces. But I would not do that now.

   I have paid my dues: Prison Dirges(I worked in prisons for more than ten years); The Lost Project for Christian Boltanski (I worked as social worker for ten years).

   But all that comes with a high price. It was fine as long as I was willing to destroy my own life, which any real artist must do, but now I prefer to live in my life a bit.

   Also I have come to prefer more and more to bear witness to my own little village, acting locally while thinking globally as in my work in prisons or my social work, not tackling those grand themes which one can do nothing about. I have become an artist who is making a statement, not someone who believes he could change people.

Q. In the process of composing this work, what have you discovered?

   The process of change and growth in this work has been an incredible journey that could only have happened at this point in my life. I had the idea for “Taubes,” in which I make music from visual sources, more than 40 years ago while in high school; but everyone was against it or thought it crazy, and I could not realize it and gave up.

   When in 2014 I started with the idea again, it very much had to do with the end of the Avant-Garde for me personally. This adventure through my teachers Lukas Foss  and Bruno Maderna had so impacted my youth, to the point where later I had to throw off the masks of previous composition or rather push through them, like screens, back to myself. And to composers I had abandoned because of the attitude of “we do not do that anymore” or “those composers are irrelevant.” Well, all that seems completely dated now and completely pre-Internet, of a moment in time that has vanished now that everything is connected.

   So I have used the visual element to discover my youth again in music from 12-18 years of age, before everything was wiped out. That's why you hear all kinds of things and people who know my work are shocked.

Q. How does your music deal with trauma -- especially the indescribable trauma of atrocities such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

   I am probably not the one to ask this question and there are at least two answers. If I knew the verbal answer to this question, I probably would not be able to compose the work I do; and the question requires a musical answer -- it can probably only be answered by music and not words.

   Having said that, I have no doubt that there is an emotional response, and you could say that all my work is a trance experience induced by some kind of trauma, but for me the traumas are mostly local.

   That is why I said I could not write a threnody of Hiroshima. The traumas of Hiroshima you call indescribable, and I would agree, but I would say you are in the realm of the unspeakable.

   No doubt someone has written about this, and in fact one person would be John Money, the psychologist who wrote a book on "The Unspeakable."

Q. Visual arts -- photographs of faces, above all -- have been integral to your recent works. How do you employ them in your piece on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

   If you had told me two years ago that I would interrupt my work on my Symphony -- The Art of Imaginal Listening -- and embark on a complex adventure, I would have resisted believing you. It seemed the Taubes adventure came out of nowhere and brought with it a line of research that on second thought, my confidant Ramsey Sadaka reminded me, “was something that was always there, waiting to be accepted.”

   Astonished, I became 12 years old again and began to unearth all the music of my youth, as if I had just begun my career as a composer at 65. Yet this was no mere reversal or neo-return to some kind of safe anodyne music as if what I went through in the Avant-Garde had never happened. No, this was a historical taking of stock, away from what Ligeti called “the terrorist impact of the systems music,” which for me was represented by the shock of Lukas Foss's Echoi that turned my world upside down at 17.

   The visual material was loosely aligned to the music in the early versions of Taubes I, II, and III. Once the visuals coalesced, the music flowed forth chaotically by way of colored arrows making the cartography of the work messy. A workshop situation developed that required weeks of navigation with my own ensemble to actually compose the work while performing in rehearsal -- what Maderna called “comporre concertando,” to compose while performing. A very direct and sound-tested environment evolved.

   Originally I worked with only heads, and each head had a halo performed by a harp; each cameo portrait had an inner monogram of the sensation I received in music from the portrait, and an outer monogram -- an atonal cipher based on the person's name. Gradually I incorporated torsos and full bodies and juxtaposed them with Classical heads and portraits from Bronzino and others.

   Many, many times the photos were completely destroyed as they produced no music, and I realized I was too concerned with trying to get a visual education -- I always wanted to be a painter but was seduced by the piano!

   The way I finally worked in Taubes VII (Hiroshima Set) was to juxtapose Asian people I know, or sometimes do not know, putting them on the outside of each Taube looking in on Western dramas. Sometimes they look through peepholes in homage to Duchamp and find very Western dramas -- for example when the composer Patrick Chan looks through a peephole to see Leo with the embodied Dead Christ of Mantegna in photo rough collage.

   What spoke to me about the project was the notion of striving for peace and acceptance of the co-existence of parallel universes! That seemed like a worthwhile project, so I composed all new Taubes on this theme for this occasion and asked Weiyi Pan, my student from China, to be the soloist on the gu zheng, a Chinese zither, which has a tuning that is all about peace and meditation and the tuning out of bad Chi energy. So the ensemble is unique: gu zheng, Weiyi Pan; guitar, Larry Marotta; trombone, David Nelson Tomasacci; and myself conducting from the piano; with ambient Asian instruments played by Romulo Vazquez.

What do you want your audience to take away from the premier performance of this new composition on August 9, 2015?

   In most of my music I do not ask this question at all, since I write for myself. That does not mean that my music is not very expressive and cannot be directly communicated to those ready to be communicated to -- I have learned that I am not as alone as I thought I was. But, for example, I do not turn red for a red audience or blue for a blue one -- not at all. And since I rarely do commissions the question never comes up.

   However, for this occasion and for Taubes in general these expectations of mine are being challenged, so I can offer an answer here. I would hope the audience might hear the struggle between two parallel universes in sound without going to war, so to speak, over the differences, since it seems that differences are what we really have and not at all the similarities we have been taught that we have.

   This translates in music to listening to the different sections to see Weiyi tune and meditate the stormy sections. It's an interesting balance of the tonal and atonal. Even the tritone-diabolus interval has been absorbed by the gu zheng into something accepting and peaceful, but then the Sturm und Drang is never far away.

The world premier of Taubes VII (Hiroshima Set)by Rocco Di Pietro will be held on August 9, 2015, 7:30 p.m. - 9:00 p.m., at Columbus Mennonite Church, 35 Oakland Park Ave., Columbus, Ohio.  Free and open to the public.

Rocco Di Pietro, Mark D. Stansbery, Yoshie Furuhashi, and others involved in the events commemorating the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Columbus, Ohio thank Puffin Foundation West for generous support.

Mark D. Stansbery and Yoshie Furuhashi are activists in Columbus, Ohio. This year they have collaborated with Rocco Di Pietro and other local artists and activists for the Columbus events commemorating the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including a vigil on August 6 (Goodale Park Gazebo, 7:30 p.m.), a peace activist conference on August 8 (First Unitarian Universalist Church, 10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.), and the premier performance of Taubes VII (Hiroshima Set) on August 9. For more information: walk@igc.org or 614-252-9255.