METAMORFOSI TRECENTO
From 28 May 2024 to 28 May 2024/ Germany / COLOGNE
Metamorfosi Trecento is a programme built around the power of Myths and their resurgence in music in French and Italian Ars Nova. The first piece of the programme “Si chome al canto della bella Yguana” talks about Ulysse’s famous voyage and the singing of the Sorceress Circe which distracts him from the Return for one year. It’s an evocation of the mesmerizing singing of the sorceress and of the sirens too; in the end of the magic of music in general, its dreaming and allucinating power. What Jacopo and the other Italian and French maestri had already understood and translated into their polyphonies is that music is the most powerful magic which transforms us and produces Metamorphosis.
“These things never happened, though they always are”. This was Salustius' sentence on myths. And in fact, beginning with the fourteenth century, Western music always drank from the myths' source. When the story was not sacred, the composers turned to the myths as a great and unsurpassed repertory of exemplar stories, narrative archetypes in which everyone could and can always recognize himself. A come back to the ancient which begins in the fourteenth century and characterizes the long way to the most important secular genre, up to the first Florentine and Mantuan experiments: the opera.
“These things never happened, though they always are”. This was Salustius' sentence on myths. And in fact, beginning with the fourteenth century, Western music always drank from the myths' source. When the story was not sacred, the composers turned to the myths as a great and unsurpassed repertory of exemplar stories, narrative archetypes in which everyone could and can always recognize himself. A come back to the ancient which begins in the fourteenth century and characterizes the long way to the most important secular genre, up to the first Florentine and Mantuan experiments: the opera.
In order to bring to a vision the ancient tales only quickly mentioned and given as known in Ars Nova pieces, they asked to Nuria Sala Grau, a dancer specialized in narrative dances (the indian bharatanatyam one above all) to tell with gestures and body language the myths cited in the lyrics. Hence the idea of a danced concert, during which myths are given a shape in front of us, as if dance would be our secret memory of the ancient stories alluded to by the music.
