AN INDEX OF METALS

Shortly before his death (ten years ago), Romitelli together with his friend Paolo Pachini and the poetess Kenka Lèkovich, resurrected the dream of a total scenic art (a furnace of sensations, they called it, an initiation rite) in the manner of the Futurists: rhythms and gleams of light striking metals (for the video part), poems in iron and chrome singing of fusion with matter (Kenka Lekovich), acoustic/electric music highly amplified, filtered, spatialised, in as artificial a manner as possible... To the poetics of anamorphosis and distortion he inherited from his great spiritual brothers, Romitelli added a new watchword which would soon become all the rage: saturation.

An Index of Metals bears vigorous witness to this determination to go beyond: sizzling orchestration, electric and psychedelic; a voice which plays on effects, murmurs with reverb, cackles into a megaphone, screams like a pop star; and an electric guitar score of a kind that no ‘serious’ composer has ever written, sliding across an infinite range of tones with a lightness of touch and blurring of contours.

But that's not all. Something more funereal, more strongly dissolving is given off: a fierce melancholy, and the echo, as it were, of a long Gnostic lament over the fall of souls. Index of Metals is saturated, first and foremost with this madrigalism of the Fall: an endless sliding of all melody towards the grave, of all harmony towards its dissolution, of all timbre towards its own outworn noise. All this, nevertheless, was filtered by that most refined pair of ears: Romitelli was, essentially, a harmonist. We can be sure that this reprise of Index, for the opening of the Milano Musica Festival (celebrating the 10th anniversary of the composer’s death), will confirm all the wealth of this ‘electric poem’ lasting almost an hour.

Did the composer have the premonition that this would be his last work? Modesty prevents us from seeking to answer directly. One of the musicologists closest to the work of Romitelli, Alessando Arbo, nevertheless allowed himself a cautious approach to this taboo and to raise, in connection with An Index of Metals, the fascinating question of the ‘last work’ as a unique and paradoxical gesture, both innovative and melancholic. Driven by the urgency of doing what had never been done, freed of all inhibition — but equally haunted by a need to recapitulate the past and weighed down by weariness, the final work of an artist can give “the feeling of neither being of its place nor of its time,” to cite Edward Saïd (1). His fractured gesture thus offers for those who remain an enigma with a particular vibration, more troubling perhaps than the works of his youth that expressed the optimistic desire to do battle with the world. Thus it is with An Index of Metals, a paradoxical masterpiece, torn between heroism and exhaustion.