One of SISS’s areas of research concerns the perception and enhanced visualisation of the musical qualities of speech through the symphony orchestra (Screening sounds: Reimaging speech). An example of such a composition is Fabio Cifariello Ciardi’s Background Checks, which will be performed at the concert by the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto, conducted for the occasion by Sieva Borzak. The programme for the evening also features music by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture) and Sergei Rachmaninov (Second Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, with Maya Oganyan as the soloist).

Commissioned in 2019 by the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento, Background Checks refers to an event that occurred in the United States a few years earlier.
On January 5, 2016, at the White House, Barack Obama delivered one of his final speeches as President on the topic of background checks — the controls that, in the United States, should always precede the sale of any firearm — while commemorating the 20 students and 6 adults killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
It was a speech unlike most. The Washington Post described it as “President Obama’s amazingly emotional speech on gun control.” Obama clearly had notes, but he did not seem to be reading from them, nor did he appear to be using a teleprompter — the device speakers often rely on to maintain eye contact with the audience. The result was a speech that was unique, moving, and passionate.
Background checks “amplifies” and projects the President’s voice into the orchestra — his inflections, the tension of rhythm and pauses in his speech. It creates a utopian mimesis between the spoken voice and the instruments, in the illusion of translating into sound something of the inner life that animates the speaker: perhaps even glimpses of the thoughts that precede and follow the spoken word.
Large portions of Obama’s speech form a prologue, three sections, and a coda — all interrupted at various points by a kind of refrain, which only in its final appearance reveals its true purpose: to prompt us to frame the theme within a broader and more tragically familiar perspective.