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The attempt to transpose an intimate perception in the abstract of the music realm, a place ruled by physical relations and linguistic conventions, brings one to a clash between fragility and resistance. Therefore, composing music means waiting until, almost unexpectedly, this delicate embrace comes true.
My sequence of musical images follows a path where pictures had to be frozen, outlines blurred, the narration of the moment let free to reiterate until it reveals its inner frangible nature. All was driven by the perception of a city that's drifting away, making us unaware spectators of its energy and slumber at the same time. I've been searching for a possible soundtrack of a disturbing aimless movement, a picture of a city as seen from the distance, ravishing with its lights and reverberations, lacking frictions and contrast, and, finally, calmly closing in upon us.
Within this evocative frame I singled out some guidelines. These I regard as the path I followed, rather than a partition within the performance.
Steps across the road: the observation of the "stranger", his rhythm, his fidgety pace.
Lumière: the dream, the transfiguration;
The man in the crowd: the city's magnetism, the incapability to break free and transform oneself
In this urban landscape the cello's chant, my voice, takes on new identities , coarse and airy, so as to narrate the intimate perception of an evanescent city.
The inspiration came from the movie "Berlin, die Simphonie der Grossstadt" by Walther Ruttmann (1926), as well as from E.A.Poe's "The man of the crowd" and from a collection of still unpublished poems by Dora Lapolla written between 1985 and 1995. Ruttman's movie, a documentary of a day in Berlin, succeeds in capturing the city's defining elements in their contemporary symbolic value, by transforming its energy and friction, into minimal, hypnotic, abstract images. Poe's tale focuses on a character who is unable to break free from the crowd, and follows him in his wanderings and intimate loneliness. Dora Lapolla's poems are the personal and fragile chant of a city that's disappearing, oblivious of us.
A short story: The bow-man
I remember my first cello teacher, a man of Sicilian origin, a musician son of a musician father. The latter, commanding and resentful, once broke his hand because he wasn't able to play some exercises the right way. One day he told me that sound is improved by suffering. I changed teacher, even though I held him in high esteem and admired his noble and powerful figure. Since then I've felt that a change was necessary in order to release the cello from that dramatic aura in which it was, and still is, trapped: an icon of lonely sensuality that badly needed to liberate airier sounds.
My first approach with music was in a church, a protestant community where everybody sang and harmonized, just like in those movies about American pioneers. I liked feeling different then, a protestant, even if a few years later, I was 11, at the academy of music, I felt that the Jewish were more important and, lying, professed myself Jewish.
The same year I met Nino Rota at the theatre "Nicolò Piccinni" in my hometown, during a staging of "Gianburrasca" that I took part in. Nothing helped me improve my school performances though: I was expelled from the music academy and the following year my registration was rejected.
A few years later I was an adolescent who believed, perhaps rightly, that the problem of man and humanity had no solution. After I met Enzo Mansueto we decided to start a band, the Skizo, a post-punk group with a nihilistic bend; the rehearsal room stood very close to the music academy; more exactly downstairs from the apartment of the man who in two years would be my cello teacher. I've never told him I was one of those.
The group split up and I decided I would try to be accepted once again where they had kicked me out. Cello, sol-fa, piano, ensemble music; all that would make me a legal , authorized, musician. Even though when you are 20, disillusioned, and often drunk, things may get tough. Despite this, after a few years with my cello teacher Vito Paternoster, I reached some unexpected achievements.
Many experiments have followed: different musical itineraries, languages, sounds, genres. One day I hope I'll have time to write my biography. Today I am to face this new challenge with my usual companion: the sound. Even though I'm not going to abuse it this time, but simply appease it, disorient it, with the lightness and swiftness of my bow strokes, rending the air and whistling.
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Italy
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