Il colore dell'ombra (2010)
(for piano trio)

In Il colore dell’ombra, Iannotta intervenes on the instruments themselves, rebalancing the ensemble in one of many acts of homage to Ravel’s piano trio. The polished bourgeois voices of the violin, piano, and cello are alternately detuned, muted, and relegated to extreme registers. In restructuring the piano trio’s natural resonance (as Ravel did), Iannotta invokes sounds that signify our instruments’ language of materiality: wood, hair, resin, metal, flesh. The grain of each instrumental voice comes to the fore, creating uncommon texture and vibration. The slack, de-tuned strings vibrate loosely and gutturally; low piano strings, muted at precise harmonic points, ring in falsetto and emit a strange acoustic glow.