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       Roberto De Simone and Media Aetas

MEDIA AETAS
Michele Bonè, Marina Bruno, Roberto Carbonara, Antonio Castaldo, Raffaello Converso, Maurizio Chiantone, Pasquale Di Nunzio, Gianluca Falasca, Leonardo Massa, Piero Massa, Gianluca Mirra, Salvatore Morisco, Antonello Paliotti, Giuseppe Parisi, Marco Sannini, Roberto Schiano, Patrizia Spinosi, Mauro Squillante, Virgilio Villani.

Artistic Director: Roberto De Simone
Musical director: Antonello Paliotti.

Roberto De Simone: Presentation or "of journeying"

In the course of the last 50 years our relationship with this work of art has changed considerably. It is constantly being caught in the trap of outdated profitability and ever more perverted by cultural arrogance, by interpretative and philological presumption, whilst it has completely lost its revolutionary substance and its function as a living bridge of understanding between the past and future.
Quite the opposite, the society of our age is abandoning itself to an absurd present to the exclusion of all else, in which everything has to coexist without the least reference to history or to those forms of expression which have characterised art for thousands of years.
There have been, incidentally, countless artistic works which have highlighted this problem over the past fifty years.
In fact, the music on these recordings gathers together stylistic fragments of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries at one and the same level, as well as harmonic projections of the same, rather like the reflection of a distorted TV screen. Every now and again the whole work is placed on an autonomous rhythmic track, even if this has been arbitrarily set to a style of composition in which the rhythmic - schizophrenically rhythmic - reference wants to take the place of a formal identity. It is as if we were no longer capable of satisfying ourselves with one single rhythm and that we are aware that sometimes time can exist on two or three different planes. Be that as it may, the ideology of Messianic well-being in the world of consumption propagates with cunning, so that precisely this, the highest human achievement of this history is not the history, whilst that one, in one way or another, continues on its path.
And the Turks? Has the time now come, as the western arrogance of exploitation is forced to settle its account with the Orient, with the Islamic world, with Africa, which have been the victims of violence and egotistical and cynical market structures for centuries? In consequence, a metaphor. Apart from that, the term 'Turchi' / 'Turks' has always symbolised a different nature, an obscure fear of a mixed, irregular rhythm, an unfamiliar heart, which is unsettling for the hypocritical certainties of a Eurocentric, or rather a western-centric culture.

René Pandis: Re-launch for Roberto De Simone

Why a re-launch? This is the question interested buyers or chance listeners to this CD who are coming across Roberto De Simone for the first time will be asking. Because it would be really disrespectful to launch this encyclopaedic artist, who is now 70 years old and whose work has stretched over the decades, like some innocent debutante, just because this is the first real public release of his music for over 20 years! Those who know more about him, whose memories still reverberate from the echoes of a certain 'Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare', the group which Roberto De Simone and a handful of young, enthusiastic musicians founded in 1967, will have been waiting for this latest update with anticipation.
The discovery of cultures within another culture! In the fifties and sixties of the last century there was - in Italy more than anywhere else - a strong musical ethnological movement to a starting point for new and more radically creative approaches. The special characteristic of the 'NCCP', that which electrified the public and brought the group international recognition was their contemporary, urbane and decidedly non-philological re-working of traditional music from Southern Italy, and actually mainly from Campania, the region whose capital, Naples, forms the central point of attraction and the most mysterious allegory.
Roberto De Simone is born in one of the poorest working-class districts of the city, Pignasecca, as the scion of a family of theatre people and musicians. He graduates from his course at the Conservatory, be of existential need and also of rejection of the elitist 'industry' of culture, he breaks off a very promising career as a pianist and his Arts degree. He then takes any work in keeping with his talents (cembalist, jazz pianist in American post-war bars, composer of stage music, canzone arranger etc.) and turns to anthropological and musical ethnological studies in Campania.
Over the years De Simone researches the regional shepherding and farming culture: a magical-religious, fantastic and matriarchal universe, the communities of which are enmeshed in a web of extremely complex ritual relationships, a parallel world to that of 'historical' society, a world which could only preserve its codex by adapting to a traditional Catholicism and its cult of the Virgin Mary, which the Church finally superimposed onto the old pagan beliefs. The music of this culture - always in a ritualistic context and executed by virtuoso masters of their art - could best be placed between the purest Cante Jondo music of Andalusia, the shaman trances of Central Asia and the modal traditions of the Orient.
Whilst De Simone allows the results of his research to flow into various works and documents, he is dipping ever deeper into the river of archaic forms of expression, but in equal measure he follows his instinct as a contemporary artist with an academic background and a very pronounced historical insight. This provides the final impetus to a phenomenal career, which will make him one of the most productive and impressive creative minds in Italy, and a living legend in his hometown.
In 1976 Roberto De Simone and the 'Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare' appear at the 'Festival dei Due Mondi' in Spoleto 'La gatta Cenerentola', a musical and theatrical masterpiece freely adapted from the 'Fairytale of Fairytales' by Giambattista Basile (1575-1625), one of the first literary interpretations of folk tales in Europe. De Simone used this archaic version of Cinderella (Cinders) in Neapolitan dialect as a crucible in order to fuse together magical customs, folk music and composed music, various theatrical styles, impenetrable mysteries and fairy-tale crudity. After the 'Gatta' the adventure of the ‚NCCP' with De Simone as its mentor slowly comes to an end.
"At this point I also wanted to take a close look at the tradition of our school of music, which had indeed taken much from the folk tradition over recent centuries. For in any case the tradition of the Neapolitan School of Music is one of the belcanto and not an instrumental tradition. We have a tradition of song. It begins in the 16th century with folk tunes, the villanelles, and then develops into the great Madrigal School with Gesualdo Da Venosa. Gradually it changes into a school of melodramatic theatre and then slowly goes over to church music. But, to a great extent this all happened on the basis of forms which have their roots in the rural tradition. Christmas songs, and also classical music, have taken their rhythms from the bagpipers who played the songs of the Christmas cycle. The forms of the singing and the belcanto melismata of an old Neapolitan tradition with its origins in the Middle East, just like the 'tammurriate' are closely related to much of the music from North Africa. Thus, all these elements have been incorporated into the Neapolitan School of Classical Music over the course of time and have naturally been stylised there, just as this also occurs in the artistic processes involved in painting, sculpture and even in the theatre.
Those were the basic principles, according to which I have composed music, written plays, managed productions and done other things." (Roberto De Simone, in conversation with the author)
Likewise, the cultural history of Naples is hybrid as well as continuous. This continuity, however, incurred damage through political suppression as a result of the national unification of Italy, through economic decline, through the emigration of the population and the resulting identity crisis, and was finally forgotten by the stereotypes of a new, bourgeois 'Neapolitan identity'. With 'La gatta Cenerentola', Roberto De Simone creates a link to this former continuity in a spectacular fashion and above all reawakens the Neapolitans' awareness of it themselves.
At the start of the eighties the 'Media Aetas Teatro' succeeds the ‚Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare'. Thanks to its multi-faceted nature, Media Aetas became the ideal interpreter of the maestro's works: here a travelling music theatre troupe of unusual scale in these penny-pinching times, there a musical ensemble made up of actor-singers trained by De Simone and brilliant instrumentalists, equally at home with traditional music, classical or jazz. Virgilio Villani has been conducting the Media Aetas in its entirety since the group began. He got to know Roberto De Simone in 1971 and a quasi-lyrical symbiosis has grown up between the creator and the man-of-action over the course of the years. Accordingly, Roberto De Simone's syncretic universe has never stopped producing brilliant works. A tiny selection:
'Carmina Vivianea' pays homage to Raffaele Viviani, the great power of renewal in the Neapolitan theatre in the first quarter of the 20th century. 'Stabat Mater', with the incomparable Irene Papas, contrasts a sacred ritual in the style of medieval mystery plays with the Stabat Mater of Giambattista Pergolesis. The 'Cantata per Masaniello' celebrates the peasants' revolt of 1647 and its tragic main character, whilst the 'Messa di Requiem in memoria di Pier Paolo Pasolini' unites classical choirs and traditional song, symphony orchestras and the Neapolitan blues of James Senese, dedicated to the spiritual brother who was struck down. 'L'Opera dei Centosedici', a contemporary beggar's opera, extends its danse macabre of the consumer age to the Latin-American favelas, whereas Duke Ellington, if he were still around, would have enjoyed 'Da Dioniso ad Apollo', a jazz project with Marco Sannini, produced from a Bach fragment. And 'L'Opera Buffa del Giovedì Santo' (The Comical Opera of Holy Thursday) is a tragic and opulent fresco of 18th century Neapolitan life, which ends with the Jacobin Revolution of 1799, which was nipped in the bud. The leitmotif of the opera: a eunuch's fate of mythical remembrance, both passion and a cutting metaphor for the conditions to which the artist - today more than ever - is subjected.
It is not easy to commit oneself to life without compromise, and the same applies to insight. De Simone categorically refuses to make any kind of concession which would blunt his performances or make his work more pleasant in favour of wider circulation by the media, just as he has always refused to leave Naples, although there would be no lack of reasons for him to leave behind the city which is his burning love, but which is an extremely shady Cinderella of a place. And the Media Aetas Teatro, officially one of the best ensembles in Italy, has to practice in a psychiatric clinic sentenced to closure because it lacks a theatre of its own. Behind the walls of the Leonardo Bianchi Institute, acting, music and poetry combine with the sadness of the handful of patients still remaining there: artists and 'lunatics' under a common roof, both a grotesque and coherent image at the same time.
Now, what does it mean, these travelling Turks?
At first glance 'Li Turchi viaggiano' appears to be just another success emanating from Roberto De Simone's untiring force of creation: a hybrid work, extremely authentic and amazingly modern, an unbridled play with extreme hybrid elements driven by the energy and the emotions of these unbelievable Neapolitan voices. But when we look and listen more closely, we are drawn right into the heart of De Simone's universe from the first note, a complete spiritual landscape appears before us and we participate in the course of a whole way of life.
The Turks are on the move... In the Neapolitan tradition the 'Turks' were often used in earlier times as code to signify the threat from the Orient. In magical symbolism, however, they also represent the souls of the dead, above all when these souls walk amongst the living during the annual period of the 'break in the planes'. The situation is similar to that of the traditions: they die out, but they can continue to travel in an artist's creation, if only in a new form.
The traditional world, for which Roberto De Simone has made himself a chronicler and interpreter, had already reached its last zenith when he was engaged in his field research. The master singers, the master tammorrists (tammorra: a traditional frame drum), the storytellers and innumerable others have to a great extent taken their art with them to the grave. The carnival rituals, where Pulcinella definitely does not play the buffoon, but the chthonic hermaphrodite leader, who is equipped with confusing ambiguities, are dying out. And what is happening to Cinderella and her six (!) step-sisters, who, in a wondrous manner, eclipse the annual round dance of the seven Madonnas of Campania? The ugliest, the black, the one from Montevergine, turns out to be the most beautiful and radiant at each winter solstice, for she awakens life once again... or awakened it once upon a time. It was Pasolini who was most ruthless in dissecting the mechanism of the eradication of folk cultures by hedonistic society.
And so the Turks are on the move, "under the tempestuous hand of the old craftsman, after all is said and done". De Simone gives birth to chimeras and they create bridges in our hypocritical present. The ingredients of his alchemy: medieval villanelles, theatrical songs, magical tarantellas, sacred tunes, comic operas, street singer ballads, jazz phrases, random Baroque... How many memories does he keep safe, how much music which he might conduct "che cazzo vuole", as a bystander near him quite rightly described it! Are they verses or a kind of formula now pumped up, invented or twisted round? Did he think up this melody himself, cleverly re-shaped, distorted or simply just shown off to advantage in an indefinite 'associated' context? Ah, well, what the hell! In any case the Italian national anthem quite suddenly finds itself once again in a satirical Carnival song with a tarantella rhythm like a hung-over dignitary in the bed of a hourly hotel ('Italiella'). Good morning, present-day Italy!
It is perhaps no accident that 'Media Aetas' means both 'Middle Ages' and also 'Age of Transition'. On the one hand, this freedom to pilfer from the timeless banquet of authentic expression, on the other, this dramatic age of language crisis of ours, in which western society thinks it is that of communication. Roberto De Simone has completed his metamorphosis, he shimmers in natural multi-coloured mimicry, in his artistic expression, IN HIS TRADITION, resisting all the schizophrenic stammering of the mass media. Thanks to him the Turks continue their journey, the circle is closed. 'Li Turchi viaggiano' is an invitation to the dance of the spirits, conjuring up the Orient hidden deep within our hearts, a ritual that drives out the fears and stultification for all time, or at least for the time it lasts.