Transumanar - giulia lorusso

Giulia Lorusso’s Transumanar takes its title from the Italian verb coined by Dante Alighieri in Paradiso (Canto I), meaning “to transhumanize” or to transcend the limits of human experience. In Dante’s vision, the word seeks to describe a passage into the ineffable: the transformation of the human soul as it enters divine light, a realm where language itself becomes insufficient.

Lorusso translates this idea into sound through an exploration of transformation and permeability. The music constantly shifts between states of density and fragility, from pure tones to noisy textures, from unified gestures to fractured echoes. Sonic material is stretched, blurred, and dissolved, creating the sense that each sound is in the process of becoming something else.

The work’s structure mirrors this gradual metamorphosis: what begins as discrete, fragile sonorities expands into resonant fields of sound, at times overwhelming, at times vanishing into silence. In this way, Transumanar suggests a musical journey that transcends boundaries between the physical and the immaterial, inviting the listener into a space where sound itself becomes a metaphor for transformation beyond words.

(Program note written by Don-Paul Kahl, based on texts by Giulia Lorusso)