Alvin Curran
Live in Spigolizzi (film)
03.03.2021 – 03.28.2021
Alvin Curran
Live in Spigolizzi (film)
03.03.2021 – 03.28.2021
Alvin Curran
Live in Spigolizzi, 7 September 2019
documentation of the live performance, duration 40′
It was not by chance that I travelled to the original “Spigolizzi” home of Patience Gray and Norman Mommens in Presicce to perform a special version of my “Endangered Species” in the “Aia” – in the old circular threshing ground of this former masseria/farmhouse. I had long known Patience and Norman in the middle 1960’s when they lived in a remote farm outside of Carrara and were refining their skills-of-living as modern survivalists in the post-industrial age. Together with Edith Schloss, an American painter living between Rome and Liguria, not far Carrara, we instantly became friends with this marvelous utopian couple. Visited them once at Spigolizzi in the mid 1970’s and again with my wife Susan in 2000 shortly after Norman’s death. Yes, the late 1960’s were utopian times, but Patience and Norman were not just “hippies” but had long studied and practiced the art of living naturally and in their works and life became inspiring “gurus” for many people, myself included. Just hanging out with them gave one insight into commonplace things – like stones, or weeds or wind, north or south, brass or gold…war or peace. Unlike many foreigners they sought the inherent beauty and wisdom of the Mediterranean directly from the peasants, farmers, and artisans who knew its secrets.
Living as they did at the near end of the world, visits were limited, so even after their deaths, my return in 2019 – at the behest of Laura Perrone and Luca Coclite with warm invitation from Spigolizzi’s hosts Maggie Armstrong and Nicholas Gray was for me a personal completion of a circle, a moment of return to two dear friends, who, in life, without ever hearing a note of my music, knew instinctively that it was also their music.
Setting up in the “Aia” on a warm early September under the gaze of Norman’s goofy otherworldly sculpted 4-5 mt high human column, known as “il PAZZO” (the crazy, mad, screwball, nut-case).. I felt as if I had returned “home” to this improvised out-door theater where almost anything you said, did or thought became part of a ritual which belonged only some people yet to be discovered..
So for these few hours, where I set up my electronic and acoustic gear ( for in addition to my keyboard driven computer which plays the sounds of the whole world – I used a special rain-stick, a sea shell and shofar made from an African Antilope Horn)…I felt more than any other time in my performing life as if I were in a space which was in some way, also my own. A magical primitive stone circle, which while originally constructed to thresh grain in, had now become for a few hours, a place to thresh pure sound in.
Like most of my solo performance music, I have developed a personal vocabulary and language crafted from junk, archaic instruments, found sounds, field recordings and sophisticated electronic processing with which I construct “al fresco” – literally heaving sonic paints and plaster in real-time/tempo reale. Unlike the lasting presence and gaze of the Pazzo, my “Endangered Species” exist only for the duration that you hear them, in their one-time only existence. Begun in the late afternoon to coincide with a spectacular sunset… This performance in memory of Patience and Norman will for me, last as long as long as I will have memory of it. With many thanks to all who made this event and its documentation possible.
Alvin Curran
March 1, 2021
Rome, Italy