Max Fuschetto - Between modern classical and Mediterranean melodies

Max Fuschetto is the winner of OndaRock's readers' poll for best Italian album of 2022. Certainly an unexpected achievement for a composer whose music isn't exactly easy listening, one who managed to outdo the approval ratings of musicians far better known to the general public (which of course confirms the quality of OndaRock's readership). But the success of Fuschetto and his “Rhythmic Non-Rhythmic” – released by the label NovAntiqua – has also taken on a European dimension with the interview on Radio France by journalist Rodophe Bruneau-Boulmier, who introduced him like this: “A bit of sweetness to close out this season. Surprising music, this ‘Rhythmic Non-Rhythmic’, a beautiful record, I confess I listened to it track after track. We're floating in the air and discovering an Italian composer, Max Fuschetto: contemporary music, jazz, film music, improvisation; he's also a saxophonist, an oboist, and composes electronic music. It's impossible to tell where this musician comes from. All the better, actually, because his collaborations are countless. He's hard to classify, and that's precisely why, deep down, not much is known about him, because he can't be pinned to a specific trend. He writes music halfway between these various influences. We no longer recognize the instruments when listening to his music. It's the idea that dominates, and here's how he himself describes his music: ‘The line takes shape, deforms, is crossing and contiguity, metamorphosis and resolution, without edges, it draws on mystery, balanced on the edges. The music has listened to the night’”.

Hi Max, I imagine you weren't expecting the outcome of this vote. What went through your mind when you saw the chart?

Let me take a step back, to the fact of having been chosen by the magazine among the musicians and works up for voting. OndaRock has always paid close attention to my work, and making the shortlist, which I was very happy about, confirmed the idea of a magazine that is genuinely pluralistic, attentive to innovation and to the quality put into the field. In my case, an excellent presentation of the work by OndaRock, and the readers did the rest, proving that nothing is ever a given.

Many readers don't know you, can you introduce yourself? When did you decide, as a young man, to become a musician? Did you study at the conservatory?

It wasn't a decision but an interest. Music seemed to me a universe of unfathomable mystery. Seeing, as a child, a guitar, an old-fashioned piano abandoned in a corner, the brass bands marching at village festivals, gave me the feeling that understanding how they worked would take me straight to the heart of that mystery. Music has been that ever since, one of the highest adventures of the intellect, aimed at discovery and wonder. What's more incredible than the intricate polyphonies and polyrhythms of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa, so close to the music of a Reich or a Riley, yet dating back to the dawn of humanity?

Actually, often the listener, and perhaps the musician too, and even more so whoever is selling the music, needs a comfort zone. Something to identify with that goes beyond the music itself. Dylan at Newport, bringing the electric guitar into his sound, unsettled a good part of his audience. And yet, especially within the classical world, drawing on popular languages (styles) has often meant injecting vital new energy. In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the popular melody L'Homme Armé was worked into the Mass, and thus into sacred music, by almost all the great European polyphonists. And from the second half of the Sixties onward, rock made its own a good deal of the experimentalism of classical composers from the previous decade and its own era. Minimalism, in turn, owes a more or less significant debt to African music, just as twentieth-century popular music does too — just think of the blues. Movement and innovation tear down the barriers erected here and there by a classifying mania that, in art — a realm of universes and constellations, of original voices — lasts only for a season.

Your main instrument is the oboe – when did you start thinking about making a piano album?

The piano represents the ultimate challenge for a composer, I think. It has an enormous body of repertoire, much of it created by brilliant minds. So coming up with something original for this instrument means accepting a fairly high risk of failure. I tried to work out what territory I could move in to say something new. That's how the album “Mother Moonlight” came about, a synthesis of my study of sub-Saharan African music. My goal was to do something different from the influence that this music had on composers like Reich and Ligeti. A passage from Robert Hauspurg's German presentation on NDR Kultur in Hamburg reassured me about the results: “Fuschetto's music is not immediate. The motifs and rhythms are constantly changing. The individual streams move completely independently of one another. No form is established. There is almost no repetition.” So I had managed to move beyond certain categories, first and foremost the repetitive must of minimal music.

Which composers do you feel closest to? If I remember correctly, in your albums you mention Bela Bartok and Arvo Part.

The list would be a long one. Every original composer has opened up new paths. Depending on what I want to achieve, I pick a reference point that can be very different from one record to the next, or even from one track to the next. Having reference points, for me, is simply a way of looking at an object from different angles. Then of course my own exploration begins. From the later Beatles I keep the beauty of always finding yourself facing unique songs that give the records the mystery of the unpredictable. From Bartok, Stravinsky and Debussy, the importance of folk sources both for renewing one's own style and for engaging with the world. Part is a master of subtraction and of using limited sound materials: a scale, a single harmony, and when it works, that poverty of means mysteriously reveals a wonderful world. But my favourite composer is actually a painter: Paul Klee, whose movement between the figurative and the abstract is a model of variety and beauty.

What about jazz?

Coltrane, Evans, Davis. “Africa/Brass” and “A Love Supreme”, with their wild percussive force, long harmonic drones, the melodic acrobatics of Coltrane's saxophones and the cry of the other brass, all steeped in an extremely refined philosophical and compositional vision, show how the primitive and the restless concerns of the contemporary world – political, racial, existential – find a unique synthesis there, in that overall sound.

Lennon is one of those cases that shows how, from the 20th century onward, in art, personality matters more than technique. During the most intense period of his work with the Beatles, he developed, together with McCartney but with more extreme aesthetic results, his own personal methodology based on chance. He composed with the TV on or amid the murmur of a conversation, sometimes under the influence of drugs, catching fragments and inserting them into a lyric, drawing inspiration for a melodic incipit all the way to the collages of “Revolution Number 9”, “I'm The Walrus” and “Glass Onion”. An original use of a procedure conceptualised in those years mainly by John Cage.

I've changed. And so has my music. I've felt an ever stronger desire for unity. Compared to “Sùn Náa”, “Mother Moonlight” is a monochrome record, being entrusted mostly to the piano. Even in “Rhythmic Non-Rhythmic”, despite the variety of the tracks, an overall unifying idea of suspension and waiting dominates: in spite of the deliberately provocative title, “Ritmico” (Rhythmic) actually conveys an idea of stillness. “Midsommar Choral”, for instance, with its string quartet made of sustained tones and unusually juxtaposed harmonies, is an opalescent grey cloud hanging like a natural satellite over Nordic skies.

Today in contemporary music there are various strands, from minimalism/post-minimalism to chamber music linked to the avant-garde. Do you recognise yourself in any of these definitions, or do you prefer others?

Granting that Berio's idea that “everything is Music” is the one that clears the field of all fences, the definition that best suits my work might be the one coined by Girolamo De Simone, namely frontier music. Artists like Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Jim O'Rourke, with their inclusive experimentation, are definitely placing themselves at the borders.

Was there a musician who, when you were young, made you think you wanted to devote your life to music?

As I said earlier, it was music as a mysterious universe that drew me in an irresistible way. As a child, I had no idea who was playing or singing on the radio, in TV theme tunes or in film scores. Everything I liked simply gave me a powerful emotion. It was also a matter of sound itself – for instance, I found the opening flutes of Pino Daniele's “Annarè” magical, and I wondered where they would take me, together with the recorder in “The Fool On The Hill” and the magnetic harmonies of “Scarborough Fair”: all of Oceania in a single vibration. I could give a thousand examples, but music itself would be the definitive one. What interested me was gaining entry to its court.

Just a few days ago on OndaRock we published the list of the greatest original film soundtracks, and Popol Vuh were among the most voted for. I mention it because I sometimes sense a connection with your music. Is that fair to say? Is there a particular record of theirs you prefer?

Some time ago a Jesuit priest, commenting on "Sùn Nà", my 2015 work, surprised me by telling me he'd found it very spiritual. I went back to look at a review you wrote that same year, and you too, with remarkable foresight, described that work as charged with spiritual energy and compared it to "Hosianna Mantra" by Popol Vuh. Although I only listened to it afterwards, I find that beyond the spiritual dimension, the two works - Popol Vuh's being a very beautiful one - share a disorienting mixture of timbres, strings, voice, electric guitars, oboe, all of it very fluid, leading to a psychedelic, visionary dimension, which is what I love most in art: Fellini, Klee, Van Gogh, Pollock.

Have you ever received offers to score soundtracks?

My music has been used in numerous documentary films - the most recent being "La Sposa nel vento" (2022) by Giovanni Coda - and although I find it too structured to work under images, directors clearly see it differently. These days, in fact, I'm working on an original score for a documentary by Cristiana Lucia Grilli, "Sniper Alley - To my brother", which tells the story of a man who, as a child, survived his brother's death - his brother was killed by a sniper while they were playing in the street during the siege of Sarajevo. The documentary was filmed between Italy and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and involves award-winning war photojournalists, Italian and Bosnian journalists, survivors of the siege, and internationally renowned artists.

Tell us about your upcoming projects?

Coming up at the end of April is the release of the video "Planet e nostalgia", based on Alexander Gerst's text "Message To My Grandchildren", featuring Valerio Mastandrea on vocals and choreography by the contemporary dance company Eko Dance Project, directed by Pompea Santoro and Paolo Mohovic, with Cosimo Morleo directing. In June I'll be in Venice for the presentation of Viral Human, curated by Mirn Art, under the patronage of the Ministry of Culture, the Venice Academy of Fine Arts and other institutions such as the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory: a sound installation spread virtually across the island of Venice, traveling in parallel between two historical eras, the plague and Covid. Another important date will be the presentation of some of my work at the Fondazione Morra - Contemporary Art Archives, curated by Konsequenze, also in June, at the Festival Percussioni 2023 as composer in residence.

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