On this page I have collected some texts that tell my musical journey. For those in a hurry, I can tell you which stars lit up my listening and research: in the 70s Johann Sebastian Bach first, Genesis, King Crimson, EL&P and Pink Floyd later. The 80s were under the sign of Steve Reich. The 1990s bore the sign of Arvo Pärt.
Slow return home
For years (maybe twenty) I explored, Cage and the Vienna School, Darmstadt and Messiaen, progressive rock and minimalism, electronics in all its applications. The rediscovery of the Mediterranean. Then: ethnic music! There is no land, in the world, of which we have not heard at least some. Of course, some are privileged: Africa, India, Java and Bali, the Caribbean, and many others. I had the good fortune to closely follow a John Blacking seminar before his untimely death; the good fortune to know him as a person of extraordinary humanity and openness, before being the one who said: ‘All music is folk/ethnic music’.
We move with agility between Gamelan and John Zorn, we talk about everything, but always on one condition: that we do not ask who we are, where we come from and where we are going. Why have we travelled tirelessly through music? For an escape into exoticism or to understand something about ourselves?
Exploring the music of the world, I encountered many languages, but above all many men and women, stories, customs, myths and fables. I recognised the influence of intelligence and the human body, which are, in the diversity of forms, always the same, whether we like it or not, always the fruit of the same genetic design. In this exploration I made a discovery; I claim the right to believe that it was also Blacking’s discovery and that mine came about thanks to him. Behind all the plurality of musical languages and structures, my great discovery was the human heart and its warmth, as well as the marvellous ability to create sound languages capable of communicating it, at least to the natives. Consequently, I realised that the value of a musical language, whatever it may be, lies in its suitability to be a sensitive and accurate instrument of expression of the dimension of the heart, of the human symbolic and emotional universe.
My ‘slow return home’ is a return to emotions, to speaking to the heart, without being ashamed to do so. My travels among the musics have taught me this: that nothing is more interesting than people, their lives, their search for ‘being in the world and the cosmos’, and that nothing is more precious than what helps them in this search.
My journey through music made me discover that the entire body of works by so many music technocrats is not worth a single page of the Quatuor pour la fin du temps, written by Olivier Messiaen in a prison camp and performed by the author and three other prisoners during the war. So much for negative thinking, so much for the Frankfurt School! In the Quatuor there is a man who resists the worst of oppression with the strength of his own emotions, his own search for a spirituality and inner strength. Does anyone feel like telling him that he was wrong to use those major triads because they belong to a language that history has dissolved? Certainly not me. We built a complex scientific, technological, financial world, but we became the third world of the heart and of humanity; as soon as we exported our model to what we thought was the real third world, ferocity and blindness produced monstrous offspring that we would like to disown and cannot. We believed that the search for a sense of being in the world was superstructure, but without it what we believed to be structural no longer holds and falls apart. In music it is the same thing: we believed that the symbolic and emotional dimension was superstructural compared to languages, but without it languages become stupid grammars, taxonomies of depraved ethnomusicologists, nothingness.
Excerpts from an article of mine published in the magazine Progetto Uomo-Musica n° 6. July 1994.
The Silence
It was 4 October 1990. Arvo Pärt was in Bologna to attend some performances of his pieces in the basilica of San Petronio. I had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours talking to him about music that afternoon. There was something he said that confirmed, and to some extent also consolidated and developed a way of hearing music in me. I can remember his words this way:
‘imagine you are in a place where there is nothing, there is nobody, there is no sound, no light, nothing and nobody, and therefore there is nothing you can do. Suddenly, though, you can make a sound, which will go through that silence and that emptiness. There, I, when I write my music, try to capture that moment.
(Arvo Pärt, personal communication)
It quickly became clear to me that this was also part of my way of searching for music, with a variation: once that silence is broken, I feel a burning, mystical desire to never meet it again, and I try to achieve this through musical iteration.
No more music?
In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles… Contemporary or postmodernist art… will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.
Fredric Jameson
Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed.
Mark Fisher
Writing at the piano
‘I think of a bearded American, with black eyebrows, sweltering with heat on the 20th floor of a New York building. Above New York the sky burns. […] The half-dark room on the twentieth floor is boiling hot. The American with the black eyebrows sighs, gasps, and sweat trickles down his cheeks. He is sitting, in shirtsleeves, in front of the piano, a taste of smoke in his mouth, and vaguely, vaguely, a shadow of a tune in his head Some of These Days. Tom will arrive in an hour with his flask flat on his buttock; then they will both sink into their leather armchairs and drink big glasses of alcohol and the fire from heaven will come to inflame their throats, they will feel the weight of an immense torrid sleep. But first this air must be noted. Some of these days. The clammy hand grasps a pencil on the piano Some of these days, you’ll miss me honey.’
J.P. Sartre, La Nausée.
All the music of the world
Today for us the music of the earth has no more surprises. We have made the entire human world spread out before our ears the music of every place. Players, dancers and singers from everywhere have laid on our tables the gold and silver of their songs and hymns and dances. And all of us, modern musicians, have united in a choral effort to mix, contaminate and fertilise those precious metals, creating unprecedented alloys, original and exotic flavours; we have filled the ears of the world with all that is most precious that the minds, hands and voices of humans have created over the millennia. Not content with this, we have delved into our past by reconstructing ancient and primitive flavours, hybridising them with Arab, African, or Nordic, or indigenous garlands. To our shining pianos, our glittering brass instruments, we have placed side by side instruments carved by dark hands, bound with strings and fibres from unknown plants; we have blown into tropical woods and beaten drums made of animal skins from distant lands. The sonorous wealth of the world is spread out at our feet in boundless piles, and we draw from it with our hands, never satiated, always greedy and unsatisfied. Our hearts do not shudder, our eyes do not weep, our throats do not sob. We taste rare spices with unique flavours with the bored expression of tired sommeliers. Of music we possess all that is superfluous and have lost the essence.
It is useless to do with more what can be done with less
From this Occam’s phrase derives one of the essential ideas of my music-making: less is more. If you can do with fewer notes, do it. Do not add a note if it is not strictly necessary. When in doubt, remove or cut. If anything, repeat the same note by varying the touch, the tempo, and even the silence. Better to choose from five notes than from twelve. When you improvise, start with silence, then a single note, two or three at the most. Listen to your body, your fingers, your breath. Listen to the urge you have to sing something.
