We play and sing in Sicilian language in order to contrast this trend.
Our concert is made up of traditional songs and new original compositions.
Speaking about traditional songs, we have to say that there is un unevitable distortion of the original material when you propose it in a performing contest:
They loose their strong link with the original socio-cultural contest; they are emptied oud of their concrete function; they are performed by educated musicians which seep through their modern sensibility a material that come out from an historical and social background that we can call pre-modern, and uneducated.
Aware of this, we still believe that recovering traditional songs can be a way to look for the peculiar relation between music and place and culture, which once was spontaneous, and finally it can be a way to find again, or remember, some fragments of those sounds which connoted the Sicilian soundscape.
Sicilian oral musical tradition is not alive and fertile, but now is a written or recorded repertory; this is what happened in the last 60 years, when Sicilian people ended up to sing while working, or travelling, or living, from the cradle to the grave.
But at the same time the musical tradition in Sicilian language is not dead, thanks to the work of poets and musicians and songwriters.
In our concert we alternate traditional songs and new compositions of ours, which in some way represent the mixture of cultures that is sprouting from the multi-ethnic Sicily of these days.
Matilde Politi - voice, guitar, accordion, concertina, Sicilian frame drum and castanets
Simona Di Gregorio - voice, organetto, Sicilian frame drum, jew’s harp and panpipe
Gabriele Politi - violin, viola, oud
Lelio Giannetto - double bass / Enrico Tinelli - bass
Lajos Zsivkov - percussions