La poesia delle montagne

[Caption: "Once there was a little boy. And he went outside." --Harry Partch.]

The poetry of the mountains. Two short poems I wrote upon first arriving in Collemacchia, in August of 2023:

una passeggiata nella mattina

(6 August, 2023)

mentre cammino

saluto le lucertole e gli uccelli

con deboli sussurri e fischi

ma loro scappano e si nascondono

avendo dimenticato

cosa significhi

non sapere

le minacce

alla loro sopravvivenza

a walk in the morning

as I walk

I greet the lizards and birds

with faint whispers and whistles

but they scamper and tuck away

having forgotten

what it is

to not know

the threats

to their survival

...

il gallo 

(6 August, 2023)

ogni giorno

punteggiato

sporadicamente e metodicamente

dalla chiamata klaxon

del gallo

vicino

the rooster

each day

punctuated

sporadically and methodically

by the klaxon call

of the rooster

next door

...

[Caption: ('The accidental rooster of Collemachia')The first recording I made in Collemacchia, August 2023. Testing the acoustics of the top-floor studio space with the window open, punctuated by the cuccurucucù ('cockadoodledoo') of the rooster next door.]

My earliest memory of the composer Harry Partch was hearing his piece The Letter for the first time. I was fifteen years old. It was a revelation. I was completely transfixed by the sound of his voice intoning the words from a letter, accompanied by an 'adapted guitar' and other almost unidentifiable instruments. Harry Partch is a deep dive, and I shan't go into too much detail here. Since my teenage years he has been one of my favorite composers, and an immense influence on my work and personal conception of what music is. In a nutshell, he composed his own music using tuning systems based on mathematics and on ancient Greek and Chinese music theories. He invented new notation in order to communicate it to the performers and built his own instruments in order to perform his compositions properly.

There is also a lot of poetry in his work, whether it is his own or adaptations of ancient Greek. The Letter to me, still, is poetry. And in the tradition attributed to ancient Greece (amongst many other cultures/eras), and in Partch's own tradition, word (poetry) and sound (instrumental music) are one and the same. To paraphrase from Partch's tome Genesis of a Music, his greatest qualm with music history, and the trajectory of music performance, was the unfortunate separation of word from sound, poetry from music.

The ancient Samnites, in their cultural and economic exchanges with the Greeks of Magna Graecia in southern Italy, most assuredly had a similar musical tradition of words intoning music, music intoning words. Many of their painted vessels depict dancing and instruments, rituals, celebrations, and myths. One instrument in particular is the aulos. According to Greek myth it was invented by Athena, who summarily threw it to the ground because she did not like the way it distorted her face when she played it. The satyr Marsyas picked it up and challenged Apollo to a musical contest. For his audacity to challenge a god, Marsyas was then flayed alive.

[Caption: Left: Athenian red-figure column-krater depicting Marsyas the satyr playing the aulos. Center: Etrusco-Campanian bronze statuette of a youth blowing a trumpet in front of a terracotta statuette of a woman playing the aulos (left), 480-460 BCE. Right: Apulian red-figured rhyton drinking vessel in the shape of a bull's head depicting a satyr playing the aulos, 370-350 BCE. All from the British Museum, July 2024.]

And so, inspired as always by Harry Partch, and by the imagery of the Samnites' painted ceramic vessels and votive statuettes, I constructed my own version of an aulos. An actual aulos uses vibrating reeds and is made from wood or cane. My aulos was made by superglueing two plastic recorders together, and taping up the finger holes on one to create a drone while the other can be used to play melody.

[Caption: Homemade aulos with snail shell.]

In my search for the historical cultural identity of Molise, I recently came across the Molisan poet Eugenio Cirese (1884--1955). He writes in dialect. For example, the word for 'mountain,' la montagna, in dialect is lla muntagna; the word zampogna (Italian bagpipes) is sampogna. Although he was from the Campobasso province of Molise, while my focus has been that of the Isernia province, his poems offer another window into the culture, the language, the music of Molise. As he writes, 'Dialect is language...The possession of dialect facilitates the search for forms in effective attitudes and proper imagery: in sum, it increases the possibility of giving--and this is for me the vital need of dialect poetry--something new to itself and , why not?, to the literary language.'

[Caption: A short improvisation for a fake plastic aulos.]

I began thinking about the air up here in the mountains, the air it takes to play a wind instrument (hence the name) like the aulos or the zampogna. And so I found two short poems by Cirese: All'aria fina ('In the Fine Air') and Respire ('Breath').

All'aria fina 

(Eugenio Cirese, 1953)

All'aria fina

de lla muntagna méia,

i' sule sule,

a resentire dentre

lu vàttete de core,

e fore

a refiatà la vita

co lu suspire de la matutina.

In the Fine Air

All alone

in the thin air

of my mountain

to feel within

the beat of my heart,

and outside

breathe in life

with the sigh of dawn.

...

Respire 

(Eugenio Cirese, 1949)

Respire de prima matina

acquara de lu core:

m'allegerisce

com'a na calandrella

e vóle senza scénne.

Breath

Early morning breath

heart's dew:

it makes me as light

as a skylark

and I fly without wings.

...

I set about writing two short compositions using these poems, but not in an intuitive, organic, or even programmatic fashion. No, I began by transliterating them, via a process of my own design which I have used countless times in the past: reducing the alphabet down to only the letters used in a text; assigning numbers to this reduced alphabet; assigning numbers to notes, in this case a scale; finally, using the numbers to transliterate each letter from the text into a note on the musical staff.

[Caption: Initial sketch for the first poem, All'aria fina.]

My first intention was to write these poems for my homemade aulos instrument, having the melody set atop the drone. However, after a bit of pondering and attempting to play them, I thought it might sound better played by a 'cello, and there would be more options for tuning vs. drone (i.e. double-stops on the 'cello), expansion of range, etc.

[Caption: Excerpts from first drafts for my setting of two Eugenio Cirese poems for violoncello.]

Stay tuned for more.