Download "Adagio cantabile" (mp3, 5.3 MB)
"Adagio cantabile" by Carlos Caicedo
"Adagio cantabile" [scored for flute, violin, viola, cello, and bass] is a humble tribute to the Classical period of music. I don't make use of an actual historical style, because I wrote the music through a sort of unconscious process rather than applying strict forms and rules. This movement is more a brief reminiscence of a glorious but fateful past when cultured, refined people gathered together in luxurious surroundings for an evening of delectable cuisine and exquisite musical masterworks without a thought given to the tragic ending their own social blindness would bring to that brief "golden age."
The calligraphic ornament above is based on a fourteenth-century design detail appearing in Plate No. 11 of W. R. Tymms, The Art of Illuminating as Practised in Europe from the Earliest Times ... (London: Day and Son, 1860.) The roundel frames above were derived from a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript depicting the "Vision of Isaiah" attributed to Girolamo Da Cremona, now housed in the Libreria Piccolomini, Duomo, Siena.
