Antonio Marotta – Ancient Roots, Contemporary Outlook

Naples-born Antonio Marotta continues building bridges between modernity and the folk traditions of his homeland, guided not only by a genuine musical talent but also by a passion for theatre, one he's been able to put to good use following his pivotal encounter with the great Roberto De Simone. Fresh off the release of his fourth album ("Ritual", out a few weeks ago), which marked an interesting evolution in his musical path, Marotta agreed to answer our questions, retracing not only the artistic road travelled so far, but also discussing the role and necessity of folk music in an age of rampant globalization.

Can you tell us how you first approached folk music?
One of the things that has fascinated me most, ever since I was a kid, is the ability some people have to "give voice" — dare la voce. In traditional Campanian culture, "giving voice" doesn't mean singing some random tune as a kind of call. It means, instead, announcing yourself to a community through a specific melody, which is essentially a template through which a whole world gets told. In the past, it was often street vendors who "gave voice": thanks to them, you could in many cases trace things back to the very essence of folk song. Today, even though local festivals and neighbourhood markets are still fairly widespread, it's become almost impossible to hear an "authentic" voice. Exceptions do exist, though. Recently, for instance, I found myself literally hypnotized listening to the voice of what, where I'm from, we call the "ricottaia" — the woman who sells fresh ricotta door to door. It was the sound of a voice that still carried within it the legacy of an ancient time, a time "outside of time"... In short, I came to folk music precisely through the songs of the various street vendors I was lucky enough to cross paths with during my childhood. These are "functional" songs which, to be authentic, need — just like traditional religious and convivial songs — a certain expressiveness, musicality, motivation and stage presence, a set of qualities that only a true master possesses and embodies.
At a certain point, though, my passion for traditional Campanian music was slightly overshadowed by a desire to try my hand at rock music. When I was thirteen, my uncle gave me an electric guitar, and spurred on by what I was listening to at the time — which ranged from classic hard rock and heavy metal sounds to things closer to the so-called "indie" universe — I started strumming away with growing dedication. Later, around the age of sixteen or seventeen, I joined a band, which let me put what I'd learned to use, and also gave me the chance to compare notes with peers whose musical tastes were far more stimulating than average, ranging from progressive to noise-rock, from krautrock to radical improvisation. Even though we weren't exactly technical wizards, that experience left a deep mark on my musical personality. We were used to playing only our own material: no covers of other people's songs. We were searching for a language entirely our own, and we really couldn't have cared less what people thought of us or not. We wanted to experiment and to surrender to improvisation, even the wildest and most disjointed kind. For us, music was a way of venting whatever was boiling inside us. And that, once I later returned to the path of traditional Campanian music, helped me a great deal, because there improvisation plays a role that's anything but marginal.

What value does folk music have today? Why should young people approach it?
That's a great question! These days, a young person who approaches folk music almost always tries only to imitate what they hear or see. Of course, imitation is a human trait, since we all learn "by imitation". At a certain point, though, you have to leave the imitation phase behind, otherwise everything ends up frozen in place, consigning the tradition of folk music to the dusty rooms of an abandoned museum — which is a real problem, because tradition can never afford to lose contact with the living reality of the people. In some ways, folk music still survives at patron saint festivals, but sadly a high degree of chaos reigns there. There's a lot of confusion and plenty of superficiality, and, I'd add, not much style either. Lots of "gymnastics", little spirituality, and creativity close to zero. This is also partly because organizers, instead of relying on people who actually know what they're doing, often end up calling on whoever's just shown up, if not the "usual friends"... I still believe that knowledge of the traditional music of one's own region should be a fundamental step for any young musician. This used to be almost the norm among the great composers of the past, whereas today the gap separating new generations of musicians from their traditional musical heritage keeps growing wider.

I know you also build folk instruments. Does this help make you more artistically productive?
To be precise, I specialize in building frame drums, a percussion instrument found not only in Campania and other parts of southern Italy, but in many other areas of the world as well. I learned this craft through contacts I made over the years with elderly people from towns around Vesuvius. During the second half of the 1990s, when I was barely twenty, my passion for music pushed me to travel a great deal. That's how I got the chance to meet many musicians, wandering performers and traditional instrument builders from other regions of Italy. Later, once I'd better defined my role as a singer, musician and composer, I also started taking part in fairly significant music festivals, travelling between Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Morocco, Cuba, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Spain and so on. However, the most significant experiences for me, artistically speaking, remain the ones I had in Naples with Roberto De Simone's company. That was a very stimulating period, which further deepened my interest in the instruments of traditional Campanian and other music. In recent years, though, I've drifted a bit away from the instrument-building scene, mostly because I've become demotivated by the current obsession with speed and with individual technique, which more often than not is nothing but a way of papering over a total or partial lack of ideas. That doesn't mean I'm against experimentation, though. I accept it, but I firmly believe it should always spring from a constant, productive relationship with tradition. You can't experiment with new techniques if you haven't first grappled with those of the past...
Then there's industrial standardization to reckon with, which increasingly pushes "handmade" instruments into the corner of an ever-shrinking group of true enthusiasts. Instruments built using traditional techniques don't resemble one another: each one is, in the end, a unique piece, even if it might appear otherwise on the surface. When I build frame drums, I know I'll mainly have to fight against the homogenization that tends to crush the uniqueness of its products. This homogenization, though, doesn't only affect the ordinary enthusiasts who buy traditional instruments, but also many musicians themselves, who often judge as truly valid only instruments whose characteristics are close to an "industrial standard". But that standard represents precisely the death of anything that is, at once, traditional and individual! Naturally, my work building frame drums has radically changed my perception of sound, which has pushed me to engage with the traditional music of my homeland, with the aim of arriving at a sound I can truly call my own precisely because it has first come to terms with the past. However, this pursuit of authenticity has to reckon with those who, in the end, organize and run the various festivals, as well as with those who produce records. Every time I try to put on a new show at a festival or even just a small venue, I'm forced to waste a lot of time discussing and negotiating with people who have not the slightest interest in traditional music and everything that revolves around it, drawn as they are solely by base profit. Profit that, of course, comes above all through the most predictable, most recognizable offerings for an audience that, if left unstimulated, naturally ends up thinking traditional music isn't, deep down, all that different from what occasionally plays on the radio or TV.

Let's dig deeper into your relationship with maestro De Simone...
I ended up at De Simone's house because I was working on a university project about the importance of dialects. It was my girlfriend's thesis at the time, and I was giving my small contribution. I told De Simone about my passion for folk music, my research into oral tradition, and how useful his studies had been to me in delving into a world — that of ritual — where everything has symbolic value and always points to something else. While I was talking to him, he gave a sort of start when he remembered having already seen me in Sant'Anastasia, a town on the outskirts of Naples where I'd been going for several years, together with elderly people from my area, to sing during the Festa della Madonna dell'Arco. During that first meeting, I also gave De Simone a tammorra I'd built with my own hands. It was a very light one with a mid-to-high pitch, and he liked it a lot. He gave it a few taps, then asked me to play it and sing him something. For me, it was an honour, and I obliged, offering him a piece for which I used the "head voice" technique, which is also used to hit high notes outside one's own vocal range. I'd learned it orally, during my wanderings among the various folk festivals. Once I'd finished playing and singing, De Simone seemed very struck and told me he was preparing a show for the Napoli Teatro Festival titled "Lo Vommaro a duello". He then asked me to join that show, which had a distinctly baroque structure and was marked by an aggressive, earthy prose typical of Neapolitan commedia dell'arte from the pre-Eduardian era.
De Simone is one of the greatest Italian artists of the twentieth century, and I was very lucky to work with him. What characterizes his theatrical work the most is his ability to stage the most authentic Naples, even while setting it within a contemporary — and in some ways still avant-garde — frame. Working with De Simone means being catapulted into an artistic universe where genres merge and blur into one another, and that took me back to the open-mindedness I had as a teenager, one I would certainly have risked never being able to recover and make the most of had I not met the right person. In the end, maestro De Simone was the booster shot within a kind of musical therapy I'd begun as a boy, when I first took an interest in folk singing.

What inspires you the most?
As I see it, inspiration is both an instinctive and an intellectual matter. Just as an athlete, when competing, draws on both body and mind to try to reach the goal in the best possible way, I believe a musician likewise has to "feel" their own "artistic project" with both body and mind. I know very well that inspiration isn't something you can control. Still, for it to bear good fruit, I believe an artist should always keep at least a rough plan of what they want to achieve in view. Without one, you run the risk of going in blind, of producing, in short, a sterile work devoid of poetic and intellectual depth. Another important thing is having collaborators who can help you come to terms with your own ideas and feelings. Fortunately, in every project I've done, I've always been lucky enough to count on talented musicians, which has also given me the chance to grow both musically and personally. Looking back at the path I've taken so far, I think you can easily make out two distinct phases within it. The first is my early period, when I had to fight for elbow room to find a space where I could express myself. The second phase, the more important one, began around 2006, when my adventure with the great Neapolitan director and musicologist started. From that point on I was able to merge my language as a young musician, builder and singer with the study of classical music. Ultimately, the essence of my "sonic identity" lies entirely in the mix of these two poles.

Before this latest work, you released "Siriana – PeZzi FaTti in CaSa", the culmination of a broader project called "Casa Marotta"...
I think it's natural for an artist to wear a mask in order to relate to the world around them. The mask acts as a bridge between the real and the unreal, and in that sense I think it truly conveys the essence of Art. Working in music and theatre, I've almost instinctively developed a real reverence for the masks I've been lucky enough to wear: they protected me for a long time from the pitfalls of real life. I'd put them on and become someone else, while still remaining, deep down, always myself. Unfortunately, though, while working on "Siriana, PeZzi FaTti in CaSa", I had no escape. Reality came crashing down on me quite literally: no filter or mask to help soften the themes I'd be touching on by making this choice; just a small camera to film the heart of the whole operation — a house. My house! I spent entire days photographing, filming and finally scoring my small daily actions. After about three years of work, during which I went out almost exclusively to get the equipment needed to set up a home recording studio, I realized that scoring pieces of real life can be truly alienating. The album's primary aim is to talk about real things: to put yourself on the line and sing about life from the point of view of a man desperately trying to turn his sacrifice into theatre, just to stay alive. Using the "problem" as a resource was my key. Disability can also disable the family member who cares for the disabled person, since it often stirs up a feeling of shame, because society, despite all its fine proclamations, still holds an ambiguous attitude towards disabled people. I have to admit, though, that talking about my mother, about her severe schizophrenia, and about the effects this illness has both on the person who suffers from it and on those around them, was heavy for me, but also deeply liberating. At the start of the project, I thought my training in music therapy and my experience as a musician/ethnomusicologist might shield me from the psychological fallout I'd naturally have to face from being in daily contact with someone affected by schizophrenia. But it wasn't that simple. I had to resort to artistic transfiguration to stay afloat. I had to lean on music, but also on moving images. The small scenes of everyday life were thus first filmed and then scored, turning into proper music videos that, in some cases, even broke past the hundred-thousand-views mark. That's the true essence of the "Casa Marotta" project, which also gave me the chance to self-produce, freeing myself from the constraints that, unfortunately, always try to limit your creativity, one way or another, when you're dealing with the "official" record industry.

Can you tell us how your lyrics in Neapolitan come about? Is yours the language of everyday life, or does it also draw on a more archaic form?
My attention to music as a language doesn't exclude words from my compositions — quite the opposite! I write a lot of lyrics and I'm fascinated by words and how they're used. I'm also very interested in the symbolic complexity of words. When I work on a composition that also involves a written text, I put a lot of energy into finding the right balance between music and words. Sure, it can happen that I give more weight to one or the other, but that's not usually what interests me. I don't like writing in a didactic way, and I've never favoured one direction over another for mere commercial convenience. Up to now, I've almost always written in Neapolitan because it's the language I know best. It's the language I grew up with, but it's also a language with a centuries-old history, one that has expressed itself through a genuinely respectable literature. In short, Neapolitan isn't a dialect, as many still believe, but a language in its own right. When I write a text, I'm well aware that my instinct leads me towards the traditions of my homeland; I'm well aware that my language carries the sound of the rural world, a world I try with all my strength to transfigure through words. Of course, I realize that younger generations use an increasingly Italianized Neapolitan, often also mixed with inflections from English. This, though, hasn't dented, and I don't think it ever will dent, the love I hold for the "authentic" word. That doesn't mean I'm against the use of the Italian language (a language I've already used both in some of my own songs and in ones written for other singers, achieving results that are anything but shabby): I'm only saying that, if you really want to use it when making traditional music, at least try to frame it all within an artistically coherent path.

Let's turn to "Ritual". In this new work, Campanian folk music loses any folkloric or museum-piece connotation and becomes living matter, at times pulsing and electronic. What need drove the choice to merge archaic ritual with club culture?
It comes from the need to restore to ritual its primary function: that of being a collective, bodily, cathartic experience. Today the club and the dancefloor are among the very few places left where people gather to seek a trance through rhythm and repetition. Drawing inspiration from the cult of the Seven Madonnas of Campania — figures suspended between paganism and deep devotion — I wanted to merge the procession with the club, the piazza with the dancefloor. There's no opposition between sacred and profane once the beat reduces everything to its essentials.

From a production standpoint there's a radical choice: seven tracks, seven loops, no synthesizers. How do you build such a contemporary sonic architecture using only organic material?
I wanted the pulse to come from the breath of real, material instruments: voice, tammorra, chitarra battente, castanets, scetavajasse and even work tools. Every drum I played, I built entirely by hand. I didn't use any synths: every bass line, every arpeggio or rhythmic pattern is the result of digitally manipulating acoustic recordings. The vibration of the drumskins merges with the loop, joining the visceral impact of the acoustic instrument with the precision of electronic music.

Before becoming a vinyl record, "Ritual" had a nomadic, workshop-based genesis tied to the Ritual Circle. How much did the live dimension and the audience's physical response shape the writing of this album?
It had a decisive impact. The Ritual Circle was the first real spark: a workshop with neither stage nor audience, where the music was born out of pure interaction between voices, bodies and drums in real time. Over the past three years I've taken this research everywhere, from the mud of wild festivals to the concrete of raves and clubs. Playing live, often improvising and dissolving the line between performer and listener, let me understand which rhythmic patterns actually triggered a bodily release. Every loop on the record is the crystallization of that energy, lived out in the field.

Between the theatrical dimension, music therapy and the essence of ritual, what political and human message lies at the heart of this work?
"Ritual" is an act of sonic resistance. We live in an atomized age, where the body is often isolated or virtual. Through repetition and rhythmic pulse, words lose their logical function and become mantra, turning listening into a single collective organism. Restoring to rhythm its sacred value and its power of social connection is, today more than ever, a political act and a necessary bridge towards the future.

(13 September 2026)

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