dances and songs

Ex Novo Ensemble

Daniele Ruggieri flute
Davide Teodoro clarinet
Carlo Lazari violin and viola
Carlo Teodoro cello
Aldo Orvieto piano

“I can say that the time spent on this kind of work is the best time of my life and I would not exchange it for anything else in the world.” This was Béla Bartók‘s answer to those who asked him about his research trips into folk music. The study of Hungarian, Slovakian, Romanian, Slavic, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Turkish, Arabic and, during his years of exile in the United States, American Indian melodies led him to a surprising conviction: the similarities between the music of villages isolated from outside influences, even thousands of kilometres away, are strong: the declamatory style, the modal roots, the rhythmic structures always recur. Never were such songs based on the major and minor modes typical of Western European music. Therefore, they are spontaneous and constitutive forms of human feeling, as we know from the studies of Claude Levi-Strauss, who places music alongside the myth that is of man as a species and is the tale of origins that each group preserves to identify itself. There is a substantial gap between this search for a new mother tongue and the use of popular elements in Western music so frequent in the Romantic era. Even Dvòràk composes his melodies, he does not transcribe them, he does not rework them, he simply intends to capture the flavour of the folk song.