Those post-1945 Italians we hear about most – Berio, Nono, Maderna – all needed their fix of serial thinking in the morning even if, like Maderna, serialism became a methodology to push against rather than to embrace wholeheartedly. But Aldo Clementi, who died as this issue was in preparation, belonged to a select enclave of Italian composers (hello Franco Donatoni and Niccolò Castiglioni) whose love-hate feelings about the 12‑tone mother music jumped them into a root-and-branch review of the relationship between pitch, form and time flow. Clementi began working with networks of interlaced canons that sent canopies of sound gliding, rotating, spacewalking through his music, leaving listeners’ perceptions triumphantly disorientated.

It could have all been different had Clementi’s canons obeyed the customary rules, but by piling canons on top of more canons – a snowblinding counterpoint of canon against canon – he defied harmonic gravity. Depending on how the overlaps work out, notes lose their point-to-point function but fundamental tonics and passing chromatics still sound like themselves anyway.

Writing for an unaccompanied instrument obliges him to fake it. Fantasia su roBErto FABbriCiAni (1980‑81) started life as a solo flute composition, with the player zig-zagging around a four-part canon mapped out over two staves. Studio magic engineers a 24‑part “sequel” here, as the flautist plays against six taped recordings of himself; Passacaglia for flute with flutes on tape (1988) hooks fragments of Bach, Schubert and Mozart into a canonic grid system; luCiAno BErio (1995) evokes Webern’s mirror canons.

This massed flute music is mesmerising in the extreme, yet one conceptual niggle bothers me. The ear obsesses inevitably on the live contribution over the filigree texture of canons underneath, which can sound incidental and under-composed. And, given Clementi’s intense compositional micromanagement, some might say that’s an inconsistency, and they would almost certainly be right. But the music’s alluring enough sonically for this not to matter too much.