Wild paths: the courage of contemporary music
 

Sentieri Selvaggi is the Italian name of a 1956 John Wayne Western, The Searchers, which, like most Westerns, talks about the courage of pioneers in a hostile land. Perhaps this is why it was the name that three Italian contemporary musicians, Carlo Boccadoro, Filippo Del Corno and Angelo Miotto, chose for an ensemble they founded in 1997. Modern music is not the easiest field of culture in which to work, particularly in periods of budget restrictions such as the present. More significantly, this area of culture seems to be losing a connection with the general public. It would be difficult for most people to name even one or two living composers of “serious” music.  It is often said that works by Handel, Beethoven and Brahms were relatively unsuccessful in their day, only to become classics in later years, but the problem with this argument that it has not really happened for modern music. Schoenberg and Stockhausen are still extremely hard going for most listeners. In a hundred years’ time, when people look back at the early 21^st century, will they celebrate our contemporary “classical” composers, or rather our film composers, video game composers and so forth?

Whatever the answers to these questions, Sentieri Selvaggi have worked tirelessly in promoting modern music to audiences throughout Italy and abroad. Their performances are often multi-medial, with projections and theatrical elements accompanying the music. They have established an excellent reputation over the years, and have worked with many renowned composers including Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, David Land, Ivan Fedele and Fabio Vacchi. Some of these composers have done a great deal to bridge the gap between the general public and modern music, with Nyman famous for his film music, and for his albums, that he describes as “Is it soul? Is it rock and roll? It’s all and none of them.” Sentieri Selvaggi perform regularly at La Scala, the Venice Biennale, and other cultural events in Italy and abroad. They organize an annual contemporary festival in Milan, with concerts, lectures and masterclasses. They have reached relatively large audiences with some of their productions, such as Nyman’s The man who mistook his wife for a hat, a chamber opera which tells the true story of a singer, Dr. P. who suffers from visual agnosia, a condition in which the sufferer is unable to recognize familiar objects or faces. (The real story was narrated by Oliver Sacks in the like-named book containing 24 descriptions of patients with brain function problems. Another essay in the book, about a man who has lost the ability to form new memories, provided the basis for the Christopher Nolan film Memento.)

2012 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the ensemble, and to celebrate the event, there will be a series of eight concerts titled Portraits and landscapes. The portraits are of composers, from different generations and musical genres. Each portrait concert will begin with an informal discussion with the composer. The landscapes refer to important contemporary music trends, highlighting composers with very different languages and styles, from avant-garde to post-modern. The ensemble themselves realize the difficulty that many people have when confronted with modern music, and say that the project “wishes to address prejudices about contemporary music, showing that it need not be incomprehensible or boring, but in actual fact can be loaded with meaning and pathos when it is well performed and when the audience is introduced into this cultural area.”

The 2012 series of concerts begins on 26 March 2012 with a portrait concert dedicated to Michael Gordon, an American composer whose hallmark combination of minimalism, dissonance and popular culture produces direct and powerful sounds. He co-founded the New York festival Bang on a Can which has something in common with Sentieri Selvaggi’s approach. The Bang on a Can All-Stars visited Milan in March 2010, playing a piece by Gordon at the Teatro Elfo Puccini, mixing classical instruments with electric guitars and drums.

The Sentieri Selvaggi ensemble comprises Carlo Boccadoro, conductor, with Paola Fre (flute), Mirco Ghirardini (clarinet), Andrea Dulbecco (vibraphone, percussion), Andrea Rebaudengo (piano), Piercarlo Sacco (violin), and Aya Shimura (cello). If you would like to go to see them, on Friday 11 November they are performing at Santa Cecilia in Rome (info and tickets at santacecilia.it). Sentieri Selvaggi also have a “home” in the form of a residency at a theatre in Milan, the Teatro Elfo Puccini on Corso Buenos Aires 33, which has been restored after decades of ruinous abandon. But wild paths are never easy, and for Sentieri Selvaggi’s type of music, it looks like you’re going to have to wait for next March!

Henry Neuteboom