Pasquale Corrado                 
Com a tua voz, for solo voice

Giorgio Battistelli                   
Psychopompos, for 3 percussionists

Giacinto Scelsi                      
I canti del Capricorno no.15 and no.19, for voice and two percussionists

John Cage                             
A Flower, for voice and closed piano*
The wonderful Widow of eighteen springs, for voice and closed piano*

Elliot Carter                           
La Musique, for solo voice

Toru Takemitsu                     
Rain Tree, for vibraphone, 2 marimbas and crotales

Guo Wenjing                        
Elegy, for soprano and 3 percussionists

* the piano will be replaced by small percussion instruments

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Ljuba Bergamelli voice

Ars Ludi percussions
Antonio Caggiano
Rodolfo Rossi
Gianluca Ruggeri

photo: Simone Petracchi-copyright Tempo Reale

The voice is the first instrument of expression and communication that the human being experiences from birth. Through breathing and crying, a sort of Ur-schrei, each of us manifests their own presence in the world and invokes the relationship with the Other.

The voice is a body within the body that tells us about itself and the subject it inhabits and to which it is inextricably linked. It is the bearer of an archetypal power independent of the word; in fact, before being a vehicle of logos, the voice is phoné, it is sound.

And it is always through the sound of the body that the human being discovers the pulse and invents the first percussions; the link between voice and percussion therefore dates back to the dawn of time and leads us back to an ancestral temporal space.

The union of melody and rhythm, through the meeting of voice and percussion, recalls a ritual gesture, at times mythical and mystical: Voci svelate is a path of listening and listening to the elements of the cosmos that leads back to an archaic beat and recalls a deep connection with the body, with the earth and our vital heartbeat.

In the programme Voci Svelate, the protagonists reveal their multiple voices, starting from the solo voice song Com a tua Voz (2011) by the Lucanian composer Pasquale Corrado (1979), which takes inspiration from the famous fado Com que Voz and from the verses of Luìs Vaz de Camões (1524-1580) which are reworked using two vocal techniques described by the author.  «The first is focused on the text’s reworking: from the non-vocalised consonants we proceed towards the vowels. The second creates spiral volumes in which the words assume a fast, swirling and very dynamic form. The speed of the diction builds the words, like a colourful silk that defines the contours of a body in motion. The music does not follow the meaning of the text in a didactic way, but creates it.» 

Psychopompos (1988), a piece by Giorgio Battistelli (1953) dedicated to the Percussionists of Strasbourg, was born as a sextet. On this occasion, it is presented in the new version for a trio, created by Gianluca Ruggeri in 2023. The Psychopompos is a mythical figure that accompanies souls from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead, beyond the Great River. Duality is an element that characterises the Psychopompos, in which two elements form a single body. The piece aims to give a body and a voice to an imaginary Charon who, on stage, is represented by three performers and six instruments. During the dialogue, the voices emerge like those of an invisible chorus, almost a set of souls that inhabit the cylindrical body of the archaic drum.

The instruments used in this piece are six friction drums of different sizes and a five-octave marimba. “This type of friction drum is called putipù in Naples and throughout Campania” explains Battistelli. “I chose the putipù because this instrument is the one that best represents the idea of the double. The putipù symbolises bisexuality The cylinder is the female element, the stick is the phallic symbol. It is the hermaphrodite instrument preferred by Pulcinella, an archaic character from the Commedia Dell’Arte, who despite having fun always dresses in the colours of death: the white costume and black mask. Psychopompos is a cantata for six voices that dialogue in a low and medium register. The sound is produced both by means of the archaic technique of the instrument and with a new creative technique”.

Voice and percussion come together to present two of the twenty Canti del Capricorno (1962-1972), by Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988), a monumental work of 20th-century vocalism, born from a meeting with the Japanese singer, Michiko Hirayama, whose flexibility and experience inspired Scelsi in exploring the potential of the vocal gesture.

In this work, the composer investigates the relationship between oral and written form, choosing to abolish the texts and to adopt only phonemes for the intonation of the song, to place the emphasis exclusively on the sound and the timbric possibilities of the voice. During the gestation of the work, Scelsi was interested not only in the investigation of the “cultured” vocal experience of his time, but also in the singing of Buddhist monks and Indian Rāga, merging timbres and gestures typical of the East and the West.

The text is also absent in the piece by John Cage (1912 -1992), A Flower (1950), for voice and percussion sounds originally on a closed piano, composed for a choreography by Louise Lippold. The singer vocalises a small melodic line through phonemes such as “uh”, “wah” following some notes in the score that recall the animal world.

The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, for voice and piano, in this case also replaced by small percussion instruments, is from 1942 and draws inspiration from a passage of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Here too, the vocal line is composed of only a few notes but, together with the percussive sounds, manages to create a particularly evocative sound world, becoming one of Cage’s best-known vocal pieces.

The purity of Cagean expressiveness flows into a more intense and lyrical vocality in the short solo song by Elliot Carter (1908-1992), La Musique (2007), born as an homage to Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, from which the poetic text is taken: “Music often carries me away like a sea …”. 

The evocation of water continues with Rain Tree, a piece for vibraphone, two marimbas and crotales from 1981 by the Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu (1930-1946). In the words of the Maestro: “The rain tree seems to make it rain.  Every time it rains at night, for the whole of the following morning, the tree makes drops fall from all its leaves, like little fingers.”

To close this dialogue between human voice and percussion, Elegy (1996), a piece by the Chinese composer Guo Wenjing (1956), written specifically for Ars Ludi. In the first part of this elegy, the voice intones Chinese folk melodies, surrounded by instruments typical of the oriental tradition, such as the Chinese drums, Thai gong, tam-tam, and the Xiao-Bo, Nau-Bo and Chuan-Bo cymbals. In the second part, the voice becomes more lyrical and the percussion instruments (marimba, vibraphone and timpani) create sounds closer to the western tradition.

Ljuba Bergamelli