All of Billone’s pieces are very long and the musical material is so different from what we are accustomed to, that it is difficult to plan a musical tactic for these pieces. In a way, the music is very expressive and gestural, which made me choose for an intuitive approach: not really shaping or phrasing, just seeing what comes next. Using this tactic, you can also achieve his demand of moving from one movement of the piece into another without connection, as a total surprise.
In “Mani. Matta”, one should be very careful about connecting the different instrument-passages as smoothly as possible to one another. The marimba, log drums, woodblock and gong should be viewed as one big instrument and while practising the passages (especially in the middle section of the piece) where the three succeed each other very quickly and in a virtuosic way, there should be a lot of attention put forward connecting the three entities, despite the physical distance. The best strategy for me was to see the piece as a big choreography, with equal attention to the movements and the physical connections as to the musical text itself. in this way, the two reinforce each other and the whole comes out much stronger.