The Times Quotidian

Electroacoustic Music from Sicily, Instituto Musicale Vincenzo Bellini of Catania
By Aram Yardumian

Islands are geographically unique in the ways they generate life and culture. On them we find species and traditions which have been forged in the crucible of isolation, from pollens and ideas that blow in with the trade winds, take root and grow without the pressures they would face on the continent. Remote islands such as Soqotra and the Andaman archipelago are renowned for their unique flora and fauna and outlying cultural tropes, while others like Zanzibar and Bali, closer as they are to the continental mass, respond more regularly to transmissions from culture-at-large. The Regione Autonoma Siciliana is, like all islands, the interface for multiple cultural inheritances: Greek, Roman, Norman, Spanish, Arab, Moor, and modern Italian. Sicilians have collected aesthetic forms from all these diverse colonizers and now boast a musical tradition both unified and diverse–something that has attracted the attentions of many, Alan Lomax not the least of which.

Sicily’s location between continents–two so very different continents–must be the beginning of any historical analysis of its music. On the island we find a great variety of religious and secular music played on instruments found only there. For example, the cupa cupa, a fricative percussion instrument, and the donax reed pipe. And unusual harmonic structures are found in both folk and choral music, some of which is due no doubt to the influence of the Arab tonal system. That we also find a sophisticated school of electronic music in Sicily should come as little surprise, especially to those who follow concomitant schools in mainland Italy. Sicily’s electronic music is remarkable inasmuch as we can best hear the ancient and the modern, the historic and the avant-garde, the intellectual and the emotional, the East and the West in one tradition.

For a rather short time the island even boasted the Electronic Music School of the Istituto Musicale Vincenzo Bellini of Catania, under the guidance of Alessandro Cipriani (who himself studied with the venerable Barry Truax). And though it is now defunct, its approximate ten years of life has given us a small treasure box of Musique concrèt and pure electronic sound, the best of which is available on the Electronic Music Foundation’s 2003 CDr release, Electroacoustic Music From Sicily. The eleven featured compositions were recorded between 1995 and 2003 and include a few familiar names as well as several names unfamiliar even to someone who pays far too much attention to this sort of thing. Massimo Carlentini’s piece Mutamenti was featured on the Fondazione Russolo-Pratella label’s XXII° Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo Di Musica Elettroacustica, 2000, and Vincento Cavalli has produced or recorded the odd CD. The rest are quiet geniuses, hopefully preparing new electronic masses in monastic isolation.

Speaking in terms of the Sicilian music tradition, the compositions on Electroacoustic Music From Sicily actively cross the threshold of the traditional before our ears. Recognizable forms slowly grow unrecognizable, while always some vestige of the old folk narrative survives, for each piece (with the possible exception of Rapisarda’s  Almaquae) tells a linear story or at least describes something literal. Mario Valenti’s Inside describes “the conflict engendered by the refusal to accept solitude, squalor, death” and was recorded in the village Agira. The piece, for all its heavy topic, is the most settling of the eleven with its light rain and church bells–not to mention its sense of humor: a snoring old man is looped beneath the campanile. Vincenzo Cavalli’s Idea, the entire sonic field and narrative of which is drawn from baritone and soprano saxophone sources, is a progressing figurative piece “coordinated with a work of spatialization in the stereo sound field” in order to generate specific sonic bands. And yet the piece stands not so far apart from jazz sounds of the Italian sixties.

Inside (1999) per nastro, Mario Valenti

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Idea (2000) per nastro, Vincenzo Cavalli

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While none of the old folk melodies or modes, per se, are employed in the compositions, the donax reed pipe is sampled by Massimo Carlentini, who also uses didgeridoo in his composition entitled Recycling recycled. Overall this piece builds an ambiance not unlike Jorge Reyes’s early albums and some of the work of Kenneth Newby and Stephen Kent. This piece has shares less with European electroacoustic music than the others and as such stands apart. The title refers to Carlentini’s approach, which he characterizes as “[sonic] material, duly processed, coming from different cultures, [each with] a message to deliver”. Anna Maria Gervasio’s Calvario Metafisico likewise is weighted with the sense of urgency in its message, for it is not a single but a double allegory of the fourteen stages of Christ’s journey to Calvary, and in turn a message of hope for those who suffer. One can hardly imagine watching Enrique Irazoqui marching up to Golgotha to the tune of this; in fact, the piece draws on no part of the Christian sacred music tradition. Something melancholic is there beside the tragic hope, and something mysterious but never divine, something perhaps redolent of Pasolini’s words, “I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.”

Calvario Metafisico (2001) per flauto, piano e nastro, Anna Maria Gervasio

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Speaking outside the purview of Sicilian music, some of the compositions also share a reverence for Stockhausen’s vari-scale microtonal structure (even if the Arab tonal system may be the ultimate source in some cases), and obsessive attention to granular texture. There is also a distinct awareness among these artists of the implications of the sound sources they are using. Massimo Fragalà, in his piece entitled Contaminazione, utilizes sounds originating in (unspecified) nations of the former Soviet Union, juxtaposed with the sounds of his voice and some taken from “contemporary reality” as a sonic allusion to “the cancellazione of the cultures and traditions of these people,” on the one hand, and on the other, “their resurfacing in all of their strength”. (I believe we can translate cancellazione here to mean diminution, not literally “cancellation”).

Contaminazione (2003) per nastro, Massimo Fragalà

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Given what we know about the mechanics of cultural transmission it seems unwieldy to make statements about what traits and innovations belong to what set of people or to what authority. Taxonomy, as Asif Agha said “is taxidermy”. What may be worth asking is how the dynamic relationship between ideas and physical culture relates more specifically to geography, that is, to landscape and available materials (beyond the Diamond Hypothesis); and how historical memory mitigates these processes. On islands such as Sicily, where the sea both mitigates and obstructs social interactions, these processes must be continually re-imagined.