Dello Scompiglio Autumn musical programme

In a season in which nature itself seems to stop and reflect on the transition, the Dello Scompiglio Cultural Association invites you to a musical experience that explores silence, death and rebirth, united by the common thread of improvisation.  Three unique concerts will guide the public on this journey.

In the opening concert of the season, Visioni sonore, the Blind Orchestra, founded and directed by Alfredo Santoloci, the first orchestral formation in the world, composed half of able-bodied musicians and half by blind or visually impaired musicians, breaks every mould and offers a new and unique perspective, demonstrating how music can overcome any barrier.

The programme ranges from the deep pathos of the baroque to the vibrant melodies of the Argentine musician, Javier Girotto, guest of the concert, whose poetics, originating from the solid academic training acquired at the Berkley School of Boston and grafted onto the music of Argentine popular tradition, represents the perfect synthesis between tradition and new music.

Stefano Battaglia and his Ensemble Tabula Rasa, together with guests Fulvio Sigurtà and Antonio Caggiano, present the original production Silent ways, inspired by Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way.  The programme arose out of a 2022 commission by the Accademia Chigiana and Siena Jazz, an enterprise within which Battaglia performs a valuable work on the recovery of the practice of improvisation, which led him to coordinate a community of improvisers and to create and direct the great organic Tabula Rasa Ensemble. The words of Battaglia help us to fully understand the meaning of the project; “The work aims to explore musically an archetype as fascinating as silence, emphasising how essential it is for the balance of sound, in its dialogue with sound.  And how philosophically necessary it is to construct musical forms that build creative space, rather than fill it.  And silence, the silent sound, thus becomes a virtuous gesture as much as that of the played sound”.

The season ends with the concert Lamentatio et Verbum, for solo cello.

The lamentation, ancestral expression of pain and loss, and the verb, source of creation and rebirth, are the pillars of this concert.  Michele Marco Rossi, cellist of extraordinary talent recently acclaimed at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, will lead the audience on a journey through the universal language of pain, hope and rebirth with the music of Bach, Hosokawa, Aperghis, Ligeti, Sollima and Piatti.

SATURDAY 18 novembER 2023
AT 7.30PM

CONCERT

Stefano Battaglia Tabula Rasa

Silent Ways

GUESTS Fulvio Sigurtà, Antonio Caggiano 

Fulvio Sigurtà trumpet
Francesco Panconesi tenor sax
Stefano Battaglia piano
Stefano Zambon double bass
Giovanni Nardiello drums
Antonio Caggiano percussion

music by Stefano Battaglia

Stefano Battaglia and his Ensemble Tabula Rasa, together with guests Fulvio Sigurtà and Antonio Caggiano, present an original production commissioned in 2022 by the Accademia Chigiana and Siena Jazz, where Battaglia teaches improvisation and whose virtuoso synergy has, for several years, brought about the realisation of an ambitious project related to the recovery of the practice of improvisation, which led Battaglia to coordinate a real community of improvisers and to direct the great organic Tabula Rasa Ensemble.

The production, at that time titled Another Silent Way, on the one hand undertook to pay homage to a sacred mountain of tradition such as In a Silent Way, a 1969 work, born from the visionary minds of the producers Teo Macero, Miles Davis and Joe Zawinul, and on the other hand sought and seeks to explore musically an archetype as fascinating as silence, emphasising how existential it is for the balance of sound, in its dialogue with sound.  And how philosophically necessary it is to construct musical forms that build creative space, rather than fill it.  And silence, the silent sound, becomes a virtuoso gesture as much as that of the played sound. 

The nucleus of the work is structured around this principle, conceptually organised in a devotional form between the references explicitly dedicated to or inspired by Davis’s masterpiece, in an alternation of sections and interludes in which the special “contaminated” turning point that helped to revolutionise jazz at the end of the Sixties, is intertwined with different compositional techniques, from canon to serialism, from oriental polymodalities to chamber orchestration.

Rather than offering a simple revival of tradition, the music of Miles Davis and Joe Zawinul becomes fertile ground for comparison and inspiration, and the new musical contribution is intended as a hymn, a celebration, and therefore a concrete gesture of love towards all those artists who preceded us in understanding the incredible generative-propulsive force of silence.

A force characterised by a constant tension towards listening and the economy of expressive means aimed at occupying space, the ever-increasing use of the destructuring of languages that has progressively led music towards sublime abstraction.  The exploration of the functions of the pause, an abyss of sound in which to immerse oneself until one sinks and from which to project the expected, and promised, tensions of the song.  Generating in the listening a perpetual and mysterious sense of nostalgia; nostalgia for the sound when there is silence, nostalgia for silence as the song amplifies, which naturally feels infinite nostalgia for the silence from which it was generated.