Programme notes

The art of persuasion has always fascinated me, especially the skill and originality of street vendors, who with extravagant gestures and speeches try to convince you to buy their products or services. In Italy, several figures have become iconic for their bizarreness and madness, so much so that they have become myths of popular folklore. By now, many of these figures have almost disappeared in our hyper-technological/globalized world, but they still evoke lively and playful childhood memories. Characters such as l’arrotino (the knife grinder), il coccobello (the coconut seller on the beach) or the histrionic door-to-door greengrocer were able to transform an economic transaction into a real theatrical performance, and it is precisely to these three icons that I wanted to pay homage in Oikonomia (from the Greek , “economy”).

The knife grinder passed through the streets with his van, broadcasting a tape from the loudspeakers that has now become a cult object. After introducing himself eloquently (“Donne! È arrivato l'arrotino”/“Ladies! The knife grinder has come!”), he offered a bizarre combination of services: knife sharpening, umbrella and gas stove repair.

The greengrocers who stop at street corners prefer instead a live “performance”, improvising to the speakers a flurry of lists of vegetables, numbers, polite phrases, shouts and much more that to my ears sounded like a brilliant musical comedy. The greengrocer's text comes from a recording I recently made in Monopoli, a small town in Puglia (Apulia).

Finally the coconut seller, a character worthy of the commedia dell'arte, an entertainer on Italian beaches. A storyteller, poet, modern minstrel, he performed with playful rhyming phrases to convince you of the sensational qualities of coconuts (aphrodisiacs, fertility, etc.), sometimes displaying a scurrilous and bawdy language enriched by sexual allusions. In the piece I have collected some of the most popular ones.

This lively carousel led me to give a caricatural-parodic character to the composition, but the idea of the piece comes from a deeper critical thought which is revealed in the finale: the reflection about the dehumanization of the economy in today's society. When it comes to goods and services transactions, most of the richness, the complexity and even poetry that once characterized exchange relationships seem to be all but lost in a world predominantly oriented towards web marketing. At the end of the piece, after an open improvisation that retraces and merges the previous three parts, all the lively and picturesque vibes spread by the three characters faded into a dystopic ritualistic atmosphere. Here a sort of profane Communion starts, accompanied by the solo vibraphone like a church organ: the singer is now a delivery person, a courier, a sort of celebrant, delivering hastily parcels to the musicians; they get the object, one by one, only a dry exchange of customary words. The last disciple is the percussionist, who has to stop playing. He takes the parcel, says “amen”, and leaves.