Musica

Rory - Outside Music. Right now, sunrise, Aia di Ama, there is an early morning concert featuring bird and beast, man and machine. The ostinato is played by unseen farm machinery in the valley below us.  Steady ticking hum from a tractor and intermittent whining grinding from the plow or something it is pulling through the vineyard.  The whining emulates the sounds of an unhappy ox pulling the same plow, mixed with the honking of geese. Another layer is a pretty regular chick-chick-chick-chick-chick-chick-chick-chick from birds closer at hand, underscored by the subtle tenor of pigeons, contraltos perhaps, rolling their R's.
One distant dog  sings in the register of the pigeons but with more percussive force.
An elaborate melody is repeated overtop at intervals by a lone bird. It could be taken as three bars of three perhaps.
A tractor climbing a paved road with a familiar slow upward glissando, repeated every time it changes gears.
Another farm vehicle keeping a steady beautiful interval, a low C it seems, with a whining high G two octaves above.  
Now the long slow arc of a distant train crossing the landscape, gathering steam as it passes through time, modulating gradually, fading partway, then stopping abruptly, proving it is no train at all, but something else.
A snare drum rattles into the soundscape in the form of a heavily laden wagon bouncing it's load over an uneven dirt road. Later another snare drum enters, an engine of some sort, playing a long fast roll. Then for a moment everything stops except the birds. The birds never stop. Now there are numerous elaborate melodies playing at once outside, too numerous, too elaborate to possibly explain.

More outside music, three days ago in Siena. Walking in the fading light of day through small unknown streets in search of our small unfound car, we heard the growing sound of a cello being lovingly abused by it's owner. When we reached the cello, the bow was bouncing and scraping against the strings, inserting rough percussive interludes between passages of lovely melody more usually associated with the cello. A lovely warm interlude in our rushed effort to get onto the road before dark, which was unsuccessful in any case, and we should have stayed for more cello abuse.

Another string player, yesterday in Firenze. Old man sitting on a low stool in the shade in narrow Via Ricasoli playing simple tuneful repetitive unadorned fiddle music, unadorned but for a wonderfully microtonal trill at the end of every line. I asked in best broken Italian if this was music of Firenze. He answered in much better Italian, no, then waved his hand into the distance and said something including the word borgata Ah.......village. I made a big circle with my arm, meaning village from around here? And he said si, and graze for the euros that dropped in his violin case.

Another street player in Lucca a week ago. A beautiful tall, buff, smiling young black man, ready for a leading role, played impossibly good, nuanced, exciting accordion music with no apparent effort to a crowd of diners at a nearby cafe in a little piazzale. We speculated as to whether this was an electronic gimmick requiring only the push of a button -- one button once and not many buttons in precise rapid succession. He finished, approached each table for a coin or two, pocketed them and went on his way. Another accordion (called fisarmonica here, with a soft s) played at two separate sightings in Lucca, with much less musical panache or depth, but by a man who could certainly play the part in a cheap Italian movie.

No shortage of music around here, and no wonder. The language itself is deeply musical. Something as simple as a friendly volley of insults between two young men in the main corso in Riomaggiore (which is music itself when you roll the R's and soften the G's and hold the E for an extra beat) turns into an aria. And it doesn't hurt that the setting is as beautiful as any opera stage set come to life. The great composers like Puccini and Verdi and filmmakers like Fellini, they didn't make it all up. They just watched and listened and took notes.