It could seem pointless to talk about Giorgio Battistelli’s music without carrying the discussion onto the subjects of the theatre, dance, the visual arts and narrative. There is a not a page Battistelli that is not inhabited by a “double”. There is not a composition that does not make explicit the connection from which it drew inspiration and does not result in a form of dramaturgy. And yet, as the catalogue of his works gets longer, it becomes increasingly clear that the associations with the great works of literature, cinema or visual arts do not reveal the essential character of his music. Battistelli’s production is one that reflects on the very destiny of music today, on its links with the present and with the tradition, its scope for independence and freedom. It is a reflection that does not proceed by arguments, but by trials. And for this very reason it must be defined as experimental. Each new composition by Battistelli engages in a test; tries to give musical shape to an experience. So it is no surprise that from one work to the next he never repeats the same formula. The unity of Battistelli’s work cannot be measured against the parameters of style, but against the coherence of a problem tackled each time with the assistance of ever-different instruments, sounds and extra-musical references. It is the problem of the forces that the music must perceive in the world around it, to ensure that they are channelled into a new form. Battistelli’s crucial intuition is that music can no longer be viewed as an island; indeed not even as an extension of, or supplement to, a universe of cultural experiences that live independently of music. His work on vocal ranges, on the action accomplished by hands on orchestral instruments or on objects that the composition transforms into sounding objects, are just some of the means he uses to claim for music almost a function of overall control; it is as if the texts, the visions and dramaturgical opportunities were merely the magnetic poles in a field of energies generated each time by the movement of the sound. For this reason the works in Battistelli’s oeuvre conceived for the theatre and those for orchestra do not belong to different “genres”, but are instead phases of the same research, chapters of the same plot. It is music, therefore, that is understood as an impure form, constantly in dialogue with what is different from it, though rooted in the terrain that is its own. If Giorgio Battistelli’s work looks to the theatre, to gestures and to images, it does so because it is prompted by an impatience that impels it to press ahead, as if to fulfil a necessity one simply cannot evade. It is the “impatience of freedom”, as Michel Foucault called it.