The first rendition of the series was scored for two violins and it spans about 6 minutes, which is quite long, regarding the historical context of the instrumentation. Historically, the instrumentation was written with a pedagogical or rather a recreational purpose - for a student and a teacher in a setting of a violin lesson, much alike what Leopold Mozart had written. This piece aims to go further than just a mere recreational one.

 The title hints to the modified version of a Ritornello form, which was commonly used in concertos in Italian baroque era. Thinking of the original meaning for the word “concertare” are both to compete and cooperate, the piece is indeed a “concertante” in its nature. However, the relationship of each instruments are blurred, and sometimes gets exchangedbeat-per-beat, making it a truly cooperative experience.

 Also the trace of an italian baroque music is also evident in the piece. The improvisatory nature is explicit in the middle section in D Major, as the section is based on the composer’s improvisation based on the original material based on the “La Bergamasca”, an italian dance music from early Baroque era (the rendition is the one by Marco Uccelini) – (metaphorically) getting lost in the way and then returning home somehow.

 “The smell of death and Italian food is in the air!” - someone exclaimed these very words somewhere on the internet and it has stayed with me for quite some time now. How will they smell like? Quite fresh, I would assume.

 This work is the third piece in the "the smell of death and italian cuisine" series, composed for (baroque) cello and harpsichord, with a performance duration of approximately 8 minutes. It is one of the "neo-Baroque" works written this year, closely tied to the Italian Baroque tradition in its use of counterpoint, rhetorical devices, and abrupt shifts in character. The piece reflects on the performance conventions of musicians long gone, as well as musical habits that no longer function as conventions today, attempting to internalize these historical practices and reconstruct them anew within a contemporary compositional language.

The material of the work distorts and variously employs the bass pattern of a Spanish dance derived from (or associated with) an indigenous dance of the Canary Islands. Although records show this dance became fashionable in France and even Italy around the 17th century, I focused instead on the extreme simplicity of its bass pattern.

This dance was chosen because, historically, Baroque dances curiously functioned as melodic and harmonic frameworks that were widely shared across generations and social classes, not confined to any particular one. This universality provides an ideal foundation for experimenting with, distorting, and recombining compositional techniques drawn from Italian Baroque music. These materials, being secular in character, carry a high degree of variability — they can accommodate extensive transformation without losing their structural identity, a trait that may well be closely tied to their original historical function.

Thematically, the form of this piece is a set of variations; structurally, it is a sonata da camera — yet it was ultimately designed to function as a single organism built around one theme. This piece blossoms at the point where the boundary between the sonata da camera and the sonata da chiesa begins to blur.

 “The smell of death and Italian food is in the air!”—a phrase encountered online—has lingered with me as a poetic condensation of these ideas. It evokes a tension between decay and vitality, distance and immediacy, that underlies the work as a whole.

 I dedicate this piece to Arcangello Corelli alongside my teacher Agnes Hyunjeong Lee. Its subtitle hints at a tribute-piece composed by François Couperin but numbered #1.5 to acknowledge his admiration towards the old master, and mine to Mr. Couperin too.

  This work is the fourth piece in the "the smell of death and italian cuisine" series and is scored for viola and an orchestra of 46 players. It expands and recontextualizes a violin duo composed earlier this year and has a total duration of approximately eight minutes. The work is playful in character while maintaining a close relationship to the Italian Baroque tradition, particularly in its use of counterpoint, rhetorics, and abrupt changes of characters. It reflects on both the performance practices of historical musicians and on musical conventions that have since become obsolete, attempting to internalize these practices and rearticulate them within a compositional language of myself.

 The musical surface contains traces of Italian dance basses and melodic schemas such as the Ciaccona, La Folia, and La Bergamasca. These materials undergo transformations of varying intensity, ranging from clearly recognizable quotations to highly obscured references. The degree of transformation is governed by the perceived familiarity of the source material and by a temporal logic akin to “comedic timing,” which determines how and when these historical gestures re-emerge.

 These particular dances were chosen because they functioned historically as widely circulated melodic and harmonic frameworks, shared across social classes and generations. Their ubiquity renders them especially suitable as sites for compositional experimentation, allowing techniques derived from Italian Baroque repertoire to be tested, distorted, and recombined. As secular materials, they possess a high degree of malleability: they can sustain extensive transformation without losing their structural identity, a quality that may itself be fundamental to their historical function.

 The orchestration replaces the piano with a harpsichord, positioned facing the conductor in reference to Baroque orchestral practice. While the harpsichord frequently assumes the role of a basso continuo instrument—fully realized in the score—it also functions intermittently as a secondary solo voice within the ensemble. 

 Formally, the piece employs a heavily modified ritornello structure, examining the perceptibility of returns and the gradual erosion of formal clarity. Rather than reinforcing the stability typically associated with ritornello form, the work foregrounds processes of repetition, deviation, and partial recognition. In this respect, the piece may also be understood as a condensed sonata da camera: it retains the formal outline (and also its capricious nature) of the genre while replacing its internal logic with a transformed ritornello-mechanism—one that metaphorically enacts a continuous return toward an increasingly unstable point of origin.

 “The smell of death and Italian food is in the air!”—a phrase encountered online—has lingered with me as a poetic condensation of these ideas. It evokes a tension between decay and vitality, distance and immediacy, that underlies the work as a whole.

 I dedicate this piece to Arcangello Corelli alongside my friends Yuya Haryu and Jaewon Lee. Its subtitle hints at a tribute-piece composed by François Couperin but numbered #2 to acknowledge his admiration towards the old master, and mine to Mr. Couperin too.

(Joonghyun Lee, September 6, 2026, at Jeonju)