1. SOUNDSCAPE
Musical perfomance for double-bass and reciting player.
Massimo Ceccarelli, musics, double-bass, voice.
Armando Pettorano, lyrics
In this particular and challenging musical experiment, the double-bass
voice slips perfectly into the musician-actor’s one.
It’s a curious, “schizofrenic” dicotomy, because for the first time a stage
is set where music player and lyrics interpreter are the same person, on
a very daring effort in which the music is difficult to play and the
speech is not a simple reading but it has an intense and dramatic energy
to be spread.
The performance is expressed by a delicate balance between the two
artistic forms, melted perfectly and not letting one prevail on the other.
The show is made of two acts.
In the first, “Timing D Blues” the scenario is made by an urban,
fascinating corrupted surround, where the delirious mind of the
performer is obnubilated by an daft and crazed idea: to stop the time…
Musically there’s nothing more than a pendular motion, suddendly
surfaced by a Bach’s Sarabande that slowly hides behind a relenteless
walking, getting faster, persistent like the performer’s soul, until the
unexpected.
A pause.
A void.
A nonsense…and the pendular motion gets back, Bach appears again, such
as the the certainty of uncertainty, the time is on time again and new
again.
Knowing that it’s what has been lost.
New is unknown…the now is absent, just like the D note that can be only
heard in the very end, just like a liberatory and unaware mistake.

2. In the second act, “Le onde sopra se stesse” (“The waves upon theirselves”),
a famous story by Hemingway is put upside down and the liquid seaworld
is seen by the fish’s eyeview.
So if the struggle between the man and the rebel nature is still the core
meaning of the story, this time are the Marlin’s thoughts that surface
within his fears, his weakness and his power, until the poetically heroic
resignation.
Sound is vibration, vibration is motion, just like the sound of the sea.
Sciarrino tried to reproduce it.
Here it’s possible to hear the sound that evokes the sea abyss, a
corporeal creature, alive…just spiritual.
The sea sounds through a low note, a G Sharp, repeated, that suddendly
breaks into the subsequent A note, that spins like a soul’s motion, going
on, changing through arpeggios and thundering, then turning into
nocturne pizzicatos, tired but not quiet…
In the end this musical vision of the sea evaporates gently in a calm
backwash, tending to trasfigurate the two characters, now united into
just one, inescapable fate.
Already played in many occasions, this piece had much positive reviews
by academic and jazz audiences.
These kind of appreciations gave a firm belief about the original
quality of the show: the attention is gathered by the music and the
evocative lyrics, so that many people from the audiences came to
personally congratulate, shocked and moved by the performance.
This success brought “Music Without Future” to think about the original
idea of “Soundscape”: to represent all of the natural elements. So the two
missing music surrounding, air and fire, are about to be soon unleashed.
MusicWithoutFuture