Radio Dublino Interview
An Italian radio-video interview for Dublin based Radio Dublino
A few months ago I was a guest on Radio Dublino, an all Italian Dublin based independent radio show presented by Maurizio Pittau.
We chatted for over an hour about music, Ireland, the US, the instruments that I play, my collaboration with Rhiannon Giddens, Grammy awards, Piano solo, carbonara and Italian culinary fascism, pizza, early music, multisensorial music and cooking and Substack…basically all the stuff that I always talk about here!
You can find a video of the whole interview here below.
It’s in Italian (the whole point of the show), but you can turn on the auto youtube captions in English, they’re not amazing, but good enough to be able to follow the conversation.
Let me know if you have any questions about my meanderings…
The early music scene in the US has sure changed quite a bit since the first time I came to Carnegie Hall with ensemble Arpeggiata. I remember the feeling tho back then, when even in NYC, in an establishment like Carnegie Hall, they didn’t really know what to do with us…I think most early music audiences expected to hear something still rooted in a classic era English early music movement style. Not to say that it doesn’t exist in Europe anymore, but the concept of early music has existed since the 70’s over here, and it’s spread in so many different directions, so you people doing very straight ahead stuff as much as Jordi Savall or L’Arpeggiata. When we came over to play at Carnegie, it was almost impossible to find any other gigs in order to make a proper tour out of it. And in Europe L’Arpeggiata is a top group that navigates the best circuit of venues and festival and for sure it’s an expensive band to tour so there is that too…
Lately I see more interesting things happening, and even tho I’m not super tuned into the scene, I think there is a lot of potential for it in the US. Even the few days i was teaching the students in Juilliard I saw that all the potential of reimagining early music from an American lens is there with the younger generation: musicians that can improvise, that can add traditional American musical elements, musicians that can groove! I think now the only issue is to maybe expand the possibilities of performing spaces to this music which in the end is way more modern and tuned into contemporary sounds than standard classical music is! I’m optimistic for the future of it in the US and I look forward to learning more
I understand the cultural identification part…but it seems to me very American-centric. As I mentioned, if a person whose great great grandfather came from Italy, doesn’t speak Italian, has never been to Italy says to me he’s Italian…then my question is “what am I then?”. We are different, we speak different, we eat different and we share very little culturally, as Italian American (or perhaps American Italian) is very much its own culture. For example my parents came from Sicily but they emigrated north, so I spent most of my childhood in Turin. My grandparents were there too, everyone spoke Sicilian, cooked Sicilian etc…I identify 100% with Sicilian culture (as opposed to northern Italian culture), but I would never even dream of saying I’m Sicilian, simply because I didn’t grow up there and don’t share that life experience with people that did (even tho i spent a lot of time there as a kid, and Sicilian kids were very prompt to remind me i wasn’t from there). They often write Sicilian musician about me in articles but that’s never my saying, when asked i say: my family is from Sicily, i grew up in Turin. As always things are complicated and multifaceted…
When I asked “why are you not calling yourself Italian American”, i got the answer “American is not a culture”, which left me flabbergasted! I find it quite strange that some Americans think that whatever has taken over the world from movies, to music, to food is not a culture. Unfortunately it is very rooted in hard core capitalism, but it’s still a culture. The only reason why i always bring this up (and byway irish people feel the very same) is that I find calling yourself “Italian” is a little disrespectful of Italians…that’s all