大象传媒

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?

Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body’s end?

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

To talk about Shakespeare today suggests two things: on the one hand a look into a remote past around the time of Shakespeare's work, and on the other the awareness – also in the region of Italian culture south of the Alps – of a reality common to all locals.

Each time you stroll through Verona, it is inevitable to think about Romeo and Juliet’s balcony.

We tried to solve this ambiguity while respecting the past and also in the awareness that, by using Shakespeare, we turn to someone whom Shakespeare already knows the identity of.

The idea of writing a song for a Shakespearean text, with the purpose of creating a piece of contemporary music and nothing more, opens a whole universe of possibilities.

We decided to limit the choice of instruments to the instrument I play, the cello, both acoustic and electric, and to a few inserts of other electronic instruments, and to omit common pop music clichés such as drums, guitar or electric bass. The result is a creation somewhere between pop music and classic music.

To compose a song for a Shakespearean text raises the question of how to use it. Back in those days the music composed to texts usually focussed on emphasizing single nuances of a text, a characteristic classical approach. I’m referring to the so-called madrigalisms, in which a musical passage was created to express a single word’s meaning.

Pop music is very different because it almost never emphasises a single word. It prefers to create a flow, a global musical sensation that does not fragment the text’s narrative or emotional aspects.

We took this challenge and opted for a harmonious, rather uniform development of sound, an arrangement aiming at joining rather than at breaking up the individual parts of the text.