One of the things I have always thought about Solaria is that it should represent a circle of fifths, a musical object that connects all twelve notes. This was necessary for me to translate the story of its inhabitants into music, but also to transform music into symbols and concepts: free analogies useful for expressing my vision of the world.
The circle of fifths is the object that makes the coexistence of the twelve notes possible without absolute hierarchies, and Solaria is born as its symbolic equivalent: a map in which every point is necessary to the others, in which none can be isolated without losing meaning. It is not like a progressive line, where meaning would lie in reaching a goal, but a circular geography, in which meaning is found in rotating, in returning, in connecting points that belong to the same form—points that are in fact already connected, already close, even though some may appear to be opposed.
The Three Dimensions of Solaria
In Solaria, three major areas can be distinguished, which are not territories in the classical sense but rather fields of experience.
The Austral League, located in the southern part of the island, represents the world of technique, concrete action, production, and the operative bond with nature. It is the place where knowledge becomes doing, where intelligence measures itself against matter, energy, time, and space. The Austral League is symbolized by the notes of the C major pentatonic scale: C, G, D, A, E.
Opposing it is the Northern Alliance, which symbolizes the world of science, organization, and structured thought. Here, the laws that hold the cosmos and society together are investigated; it is the place where reality is examined, understood, and formalized.
The Northern Alliance corresponds to the notes of the Gb major pentatonic scale: Gb, Ab, Bb, Db, Eb.
Between these two polarities lies human experience, the field in which consciousness, through art, emerges as a response to the world. It is the space where human beings do not merely know and build, but interpret, contemplate, and create—not for a specific purpose, as happens in the other nations of Solaria, but in order to respond to their own existence. To be human.
The connection between consciousness and art, understood as the synthesis of all human knowing and doing, is represented by Ku, my guiding butterfly.
Unfortunately, however, as I have already mentioned, a war is currently underway between the Austral League and the Northern Alliance, and human experience lies precisely in between: it is up to it to hold the possibility—and the responsibility—of either deepening or healing this fracture.
Intervals of Action
Within this tripartite structure are articulated the seven regions I have written about previously, each defined not by a single capital but by a pair of cities. This choice is not decorative, but responds to a principle of dynamism and complementarity: each region in fact lives from an internal tension, from an unstable balance between two poles that call to, correct, and complete one another. Exactly as happens in a musical interval, in which each of the two notes that compose it owes its identity to the other.
For this reason, the musical relationship between the two notes corresponding to the two capitals of the same nation is— with a single exception that we will see later— a perfect fifth, that is, the combination that produces the most stable sound between two different notes.
The Southern Capitals
The Austral League is made up of the territories of Iridia and Theknus.
The capitals of Iridia, the region of Nature, are Prahna (the note C) and Gea (the note G).
Prahna, in Sanskrit, means the vital breath that permeates everything, the invisible principle that makes life itself possible.
Gea embodies the solidity of the earth, attention to the organic and biological world, to the care of what grows. Together, the two capitals represent a nature that is at once body and breath, form and flow.
Theknus, the region of Technique, is structured around Sankofa (the note A) and Yantra (the note E).
Sankofa is an Akan word, from an African language spoken mainly in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and it means “go back and get it”: it is technical memory, the archive, the tradition that builds upon the experience of the past.
Yantra, in Sanskrit, means machine; it is the device, the mechanism, the citadel of industry where knowledge becomes tangible production, where technique oscillates between memory and project, between repetition and innovation.
The Northern Capitals
The northern states are Castalia and Axia.
Castalia, the region of Communication, lies between Qo (the note Bb) and Amal (the note Eb).
Qo represents the domain of empathy, affective and emotional resonance, and the earliest forms of non-verbal language; that condition which makes encounter possible before communication organizes itself into stable and narrative structures.
Amal, from Arabic, means hope: the pedagogical vision that transforms the future into a shared aspiration. In Amal, the word is the bridge between the present and the possible; it is education, psychology, and also linguistic and philological research, an attention to the deep structure of words and to their history. Above all, Amal is the capital where the Game of Knowledge is celebrated, a form of symbolic and analogical language of which its inhabitants are great virtuosos: the game Zu.
Axia is the territory where Science is cultivated and it hosts Mugen (the note Db) and Nexus (the note Gb). Mugen, from Japanese, is raw infinity, the universe before it is understood, that which exceeds any system of thought. Nexus, instead, is the bond, the network of physical and mathematical laws that gives structure to infinity. The dialogue between Mugen and Nexus embodies the limit of reason and, at the same time, its necessity.
Altaluna
Altaluna, the region of Mysticism, lives divided: its two capitals, Nuru and Qamar, are in fact located respectively in the Austral League and in the Northern Alliance.
Qamar (the note Ab), moon in Arabic, points to reflection, contemplation, matter becoming a mirror of the spirit. Nuru (the note D), which means light in Swahili, is the divine making itself visible as a creative force within reality. Altaluna thus exists in tension between action and contemplation, between inner recollection and the irruption of the sacred into the world.
The interval between these two capitals is different from the one formed between the others: it is no longer a fifth, the most stable and constructive interval, but a tritone, the symbolic interval, that is, etymologically, the coming together of two distinct parts that together form a whole. In music, the tritone is symmetrical with respect to itself: its two extremes can be inverted without changing its nature; and this is what happens to the two dimensions of Altaluna, where action and contemplation are nothing but the two forms taken by the same mystical experience.
Alma and Eos
Alma and Eos have a peculiarity: unlike the other nations, they each have only one capital. The reason is that these two islands, the geographically most distant and separated areas of Solaria, represent Unity. A unity that must be recomposed.
Alma is the observing subject, bare consciousness, the place of mystery concerning the nature and origin of humankind. Its eponymous capital is the only point of landing on the island, which is surrounded by what the inhabitants of Solaria call the Horizon of the Multiple, the extreme threshold beyond which every distinction dissolves and the self merges with the One of the Whole. It is a zone of absolute silence in which even natural elements, such as wind and sea, produce no sound. No navigator approaches the route to Alma without fear: the few who claim to have traveled it have spoken of losing their thoughts, of being afraid of losing their identity forever.
Eos is the region of Art, and its capital is Ruah. The name Ruah, in Hebrew, indicates the breath, the creative spirit that crystallizes into a work. In Eos, this breath takes form in the arts: music, painting, sculpture, poetry, theater, and all practices in which an idea, an emotion, or a vision becomes objects, sounds, images, spaces. The art of Eos is meaning made material, a concrete gesture that becomes a message.
The Meaning of Solaria
Alma and Eos also form a tritone, since the human soul and art, consciousness and information, the question and the answer of human experience, stand in an inevitable, symbiotic relationship.
Between the two territories there is no linear continuity, but a leap that must be made by passing through the other nations: in Solaria, the work of art represents an attempt to cross the Horizon of the Multiple—a gesture that translates the unity of consciousness into the multiplicity of artistic experience, accepting the loss that this entails.
The experience of the world is therefore always incomplete and mediated: it arises in consciousness, takes shape in art, and—if possible—returns to consciousness transformed, enriched, but never resolved once and for all. In this continuous movement between Alma and Eos lies the meaning of Solaria: the impossibility of holding on to unity without breaking it and, at the same time, the impossibility of giving up the search for it through forms, images, and works that bear its trace.
The distance between Alma and Eos is what makes the rest of Solaria possible: without Alma’s question there would be no need to build, study, communicate, perceive, or pray; and all these activities are synthesized in the artistic experience, in the imperfect response of Eos, without which consciousness would remain closed in on itself, in solitary unity with the Whole. The tritone that binds them is therefore the deepest vibration of the entire system, the one in which the human being is recognized as an open question and, at the same time, as a creative gesture.
A Geography of the Possible
If the war of Solaria were ever to end, it would not describe a pacified world but a world in tune: a geography of the possible—possible also in our real world, where meaning does not emerge from the elimination of opposites, but from their continuous dialogue.
To listen to and learn about the first two parts of my composition, you can watch the related videos on YouTube:
01 - The game of music: winning or playing?
02 – The Game of Music: I created a palindromic composition
Or listen to it directly on Spotify: