SATURDAY 30 APRIL 2022
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE SPACES OF TENUTA DELLO SCOMPIGLIO
AT 19.00  

Ivo Nilsson/Antonio Caggiano

Ryoanji

Fuori/Dentro 

John Cage                 
Child of Tree
Ryoanji

Ivo Nilsson
Sylfer

Maurizio Pisati
Shack

Ivo Nilsson                 
Endangered Species Trust  

Lucio Gregoretti  
Dei diversi versi

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Ivo Nilsson  trombone

Antonio Caggiano  percussion

In 2012, the Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio presented John Cage: 4’33” Lezione sui funghi (Lessons in Fungi), an important project dedicated to the great American composer on the double anniversary of his birth and death.  On that occasion, among the many offerings that embraced all the arts, was Child of Tree, a piece by John Cage that well represented the author’s strong interest in nature and oriental philosophies. 

This short piece aims to be the link between that project and the concerto, Ryoanji.  Fuori / Dentro, will be performed in the external and internal spaces of the Tenuta Dello Scompiglio, by the trombonist Ivo Nilsson and the percussionist Antonio Caggiano, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the death of the American composer and also his 110th birthday.  The subtitle, Fuori / Dentro, hopes to encourage reflection on the points of closeness and the differences that exist between the artistic activities that take place outside and those carried out in closed spaces.

The concert opens outdoors with Child of Tree, where John Cage uses a cactus for the first time as a musical instrument, along with other ‘object-instruments’, such as leaves, logs, bamboo and stones.

This is followed by piece that is the title of the event, Ryoanji, in the version for trombone and percussion, also written by Cage in 1985 and inspired by the garden of the homonymous Zen Buddist Temple in Kyoto.

The first open-air part ends with Sylfer by Ivo Nilsson, a piece for trombone and percussion inspired by the figure of the Sylph or Sylphid, an imaginary, elemental being that lives in the air, mortal but devoid of soul.  The existence of such invisible beings was first postulated by the medieval physician Paracelsus, who associated a different being with each of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water.

After this first part outdoors, the audience is accompanied into the SPE – Performance and Exhibition Space, to the welcoming modern and synthetic sounds of Shack, a piece by Maurizio Pisati that takes us back to the revolutionary world of the first hackers.  As the writer Stephan Levi says, “the hacker was connected with ideas of innovation, style and technical virtuosity”.

This is followed by Endangered Species Trust, a piece by Ivo Nilsson for trombone, percussion and video, inspired by the wonderful and surprising singing, in this case pre-recorded, of gibbon monkeys, which is the starting material for a concerto for three, with the glissandi of the trombone, the musical saw and the flexatone, in a calling game that creates a symphony of constantly different verses.

“Dei diversi versi” is the piece by Lucio Gregoretti, for trombone, vibraphone and percussion, that closes the programme and which the composer describes in this way, “The poetic verse is one of the most refined inventions of the human intellect.  Animal sounds, on the other hand, represent what is most spontaneous and instinctive in nature.  But if we think that ‘making poetry involves imitating, copying and aping, we can come to the conclusion that the different sounds (poetic and animal) are not so different, but that they have something in common.  And then a vibraphone that moves from the accents of a hexameter to those of a hendecasyllable, and then makes the journey backwards through the different intermediate lengths, is accompanied on this path by a trombone that first presents itself as a species of Vox bovi of Crumbian memory, and then evolves and transforms into a real shadow of percussion”.

Antonio Caggiano