Song of Olivier is the fourth episode of Solaria, the incremental composition project in which music, storytelling, and world-building proceed in parallel.
The composition is dedicated to Olivier, a boy actually met in Burundi, who in the narrative world of Solaria inspires the character of Anesh.
It is a piece for solo acoustic guitar, recorded live in a single take.
Meaning of the composition
In the story, Anesh lives hidden in a cave, and it is the butterfly Ku who inspires him to leave it. The piece follows this passage: the defined theme represents the safety of the cave, the protected and known place; the final improvisation represents the opening toward the outside, the choice to risk the unknown.
In music, this passage takes shape in the encounter between the two dimensions of composition and improvisation. The first is defined and recognizable. It consists mainly of a theme already clearly identified, presented both in the guitar’s low register and in its high register.
The second dimension, on the other hand, is spontaneous. It is formed by ideas born during performance, improvised fragments, and gestures not fully planned. This component does not function to decorate the main theme, but to stand alongside it and call it into question.
The two dimensions are organized as parts of a dialogue. The theme represents what is already recognizable and formulated; improvisation represents what can only emerge during the musical act. The composition does not definitively choose between order and freedom, but builds its own form through their relationship.
A diagram sketched by hand in the work diary helped bring these two planes together. The form is not conceived as a rigid succession of sections, but as a path in which the defined and spontaneous components somehow engage in dialogue.
The three performances
The final version was chosen from among three complete performances.
The first had vitality and spontaneity, but not sufficient precision. The third was more precise, but had lost part of the energy and naturalness present in the first. The second performance found itself at the point of balance between these two extremes, and was therefore used as the final version.
The choice of the second recording makes audible, in a concrete way, the principle that guided the entire work. The best performance is neither the one free of imperfections, nor the most absolutely free one, but the one in which precision and vitality manage to coexist.
Imperfection is thus welcomed not as a value in itself, but as a possible consequence of music that is alive. At the same time, precision remains important as long as it does not stifle the presence, risk, and intensity of the performance.
Olivier’s song
Within the composition appears a short musical segment derived from a song heard in Burundi.
Olivier was at the time a boy of about sixteen or seventeen, who had fled the war. During the meeting with Lorenzo, he sang a song tied to the experience of the conflict. One passage of the song contained a phrase whose meaning was: “free yourselves from the wild spirits.”
A fragment of that song has been inserted into Song of Olivier as a direct tribute to the boy. The material is not merely an external citation, but introduces into the composition the concrete trace of a voice, a meeting, and a story actually lived.
The piece within Solaria
Song of Olivier belongs to Solaria, but it was published without accompanying the video with a detailed explanation of its architecture. The choice stems from the desire to let the music be encountered directly.
Information about the creative process, the world of Solaria, and the symbolic connections remains available in the diary videos and in the pages dedicated to the project, but it does not constitute a necessary condition for listening to the piece.
This choice represents an important change compared to the previous fragments, in which the music was often accompanied by very detailed explanations. In Song of Olivier, the architecture remains present, but it is not placed before the experience of listening.
The composition can thus be perceived independently, while its connections to the story and to Solaria’s symbolic system remain as further layers, accessible to those who wish to explore them.
Narrative and symbolic meaning
In the world of Solaria, Olivier takes on the name Anesh. The character initially finds himself in a cave, where he meets the butterfly Ku. Ku’s arrival can be interpreted by Anesh as the search for shelter, but it is not necessarily caused by the storm or by an inability to continue flying. The butterfly may have headed toward the cave deliberately, to reach the boy and guide him.
After the encounter, Anesh and Ku begin the journey toward Yantra, the great city of technique. Song of Olivier is thus placed in a moment of transition: the boy is still bound to the cave and to his own solitude, but now stands on the threshold of a journey.
The instrument with which Anesh plays the piece is a gift received from his father when he was twelve years old. The father was a carpenter and also possessed some skills close to those of a luthier. In giving him the instrument, he told him:
You don’t need to become someone. Just don’t forget to listen to yourself.
The phrase originally belonged to the story, but during the composition it acquired an autobiographical meaning. The process through which Song of Olivier came to be consisted, in fact, precisely in listening to one’s own improvisations, recognizing what the music was trying to become, and choosing the performance in which it had remained most alive.
The theme of the piece is therefore not only Olivier or Anesh, but listening as a form of orientation. Listening to oneself does not mean closing oneself within one’s own identity, but recognizing a direction capable of relating one’s own experience to that of others.
Even the passage from the real boy to the imaginary character does not erase the original story. Olivier remains present in the quotation of his song, while Anesh symbolically continues his journey. Reality enters the imaginary world without being replaced by it.
The phrase “free yourselves from the wild spirits” takes on a double meaning in this context. It arises from the war in Burundi, from which Olivier had fled, but it also applies to the war of Solaria, which pits the Southern League against the Northern Alliance. There too, the conflict begins with the noise that prevents listening and grows through fear and mistrust: freeing oneself from the wild spirits means returning to listening, the same thing the father asks of Anesh.
Song of Olivier thus represents a moment in which the construction of Solaria temporarily stops expanding through new explanations and begins to free itself from what is not necessary. The Music Diary tells the story of this first step.