Prima Materia, Roberto Laneri – Harmonic Epiphanies

For the West, Roberto Laneri is the foremost master of overtone singing, an art that, in his interpretation, never settles into an orientalism for “Sunday” spiritualists. His solid conservatory training, his countless experiences in the field of Art Music straddling the 60s and 70s, as well as his encounters with several key figures of the second half of twentieth-century music, make him a composer and musician of the first rank.
Now past his half-century mark, his discography shines with an eclecticism that is equal parts deliberate and deeply felt: from the cult album “The Tail Of The Tiger” by the Prima Materia project in 1975 right up to the present day, Laneri, born in 1945, has built an artistic path that embraces world music, avant-garde, jazz, minimalism, ambient and drone music, giving each piece an unpredictable character that is nonetheless underpinned by a dazzling structural solidity. Born in Vicenza and a lifelong resident of Rome, he lived fully through an America fractured between protest and flower power, before traveling the world in search of his own sound, and finally discovering the harmonies that weave through every audible sound, having awakened his ear to the music that sums up all others: the music of Creation.

Maestro, in the documentary “Soundwaves Soundways”, in which you are the protagonist, you mention an episode that I'd like you to recall for us: namely, when you first began to feel the overtones.
It was the late 1960s. It happened one summer evening when I was relaxing with two other friends on a wonderful Roman terrace: I began to perceive the sound produced by the wind, clearly distinguishing the overtones that made it up. The knowledge one usually has of overtones is intellectual in nature, and I, like every musician who has studied at the conservatory, possessed an understanding of them that was purely theoretical. At that precise moment I passed from theory to genuine harmonic experience, and it was like recognizing a sonic structure present in everything around us, even in nature. Something similar happened to Pythagoras, who, while walking down a street in Crotone and hearing the hammers striking anvils coming from a blacksmith's shop, began to hear the intervals of a fifth, a fourth, a third, and so on.

How did that sort of epiphany influence the way you listened and composed?
My musical perception reached a new level of depth. From the standpoint of compositional criteria, I arrived at what I call “harmonic convergence”. Specifically in the field of overtone singing, the structures through which it is practiced in Tuva or Mongolia are very different from how we conceive them in the West; for me, then, it was a matter of rediscovering myself in a world still entirely to be built through this particular mode.

In '68 you were in the States. Was the minimalism of Terry Riley and La Monte Young an inspiration for your research? The vocal style of your solo phrasing, for instance, reaches such depth that it brings to mind the kirana of Pandit Pran Nath.
The names you mentioned influenced me enormously. I knew and spent time with Terry, as well as with Steve Reich, whom I consider, in terms of sound manipulation, a great composer. I'd also like to mention Frederic Rzewski, who wrote pieces like “Coming Together” (inspired by the Attica uprising) and “Les Moutons De Panurge”, a composition I urge every minimalism lover to listen to, since it's really superbly conceived. And I'd also like to mention my own “Memories Of The Rain Forest”.

How did the Ananda label come about?
What is now called a “label” was back then nothing more than three musical entities (Prima Materia, Giacinto Scelsi and Alvin Curran) who had joined forces to find a better outlet for their work. We chose the Sanskrit name “Ananda”, meaning “bliss”.

I'd love to hear a couple of words about Scelsi.
He was a very well-known figure in Rome: accompanied by his driver, he would go to hear virtually every kind of concert. So it wasn't unlikely to find him in the audience at some underground basement venue. We probably met at a concert: at the time I often performed in the Nuova Consonanza concert seasons and in other settings connected to Contemporary Music.

What can you tell us about him as a man?
Like me, he wasn't one to get personal. Conversations were mainly about music. The fact remains that he's one of the people I miss the most. Of all the people I've known, he was the most open-minded when it came to every kind of musical genre. Many like to say that about themselves, but then there's a lot they simply won't listen to. He, on the other hand, approached every sonic experience with an open mind. Both of us, moreover, were deeply immersed in the question of overtones, and often, with Prima Materia, we'd go to his place to try out various things.

Why does he remain one of the great composers of the second half of the twentieth century?
Because of his ability to create music as a stream of consciousness.

If you close your eyes and go back to the San Diego of your formative years, what's the most vivid memory that comes to mind?
The first time I walked into the music department, I saw a lush tropical plant in a huge vase, onto which someone had jokingly attached empty tequila bottles like IV drips. A little further away, a mariachi ensemble was playing. That image, inside what I considered the sacred temple of Contemporary Music, had a huge impact on me. Unfortunately, European Contemporary Music ended up expressing less and less feeling. The opposite of what happens in Indian music, where every raga — that is, the various technical frameworks that characterize the piece — also has a precise rasa (its "essence"), and these two elements influence one another.

Slowly but inexorably you drifted away from the "schools" and the many "families" that dotted Europe and the United States in the Sixties. What made you uneasy about them?
On one hand, the fact that I've always been wary of the very concept of family. Then there are musical reasons: playing a score by Berio or Boulez or Stockhausen means having to study and rehearse it for at least 4 hours a day for a week. You do that willingly as long as you believe in what you're playing: once doubts start creeping in, well, that's when things change. Maybe people say Schönberg is the greatest composer who ever lived, and yet, as it happens, I prefer Duke Ellington. What also pulled me away, in this regard, was the influence of jazz.

Regarding the use of drones in musical composition: what's the least obvious effect you want to trigger in the listener?
One should also ask why the drone technique is so widespread all over the world. There must be a specific reason. I'd start from John Cage's aphorism, according to which "if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If it's still boring, then try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two minutes... eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all, but very interesting." The drone expands the boundaries. Whether you like it or not, you're forced to listen in a deep way. Think of an instrument like the tampura: you enter a dimension that moves on different brainwave rhythms. Western music has progressively abandoned what ethnomusicologist Curt Sachs, in his book "The Wellsprings Of Music," calls "the sources of sound." So we've gone from a deep Theta state of consciousness to something close to a Beta state. Through the drone, on the other hand, the whole concept of what's desirable in music changes, the concept of climax changes, and so does the concept of time. The listener is thus invited to enter a dimension where what happens can only be known by them. That's also the beauty of certain psychedelic music.

What considerations lie behind your preference for the concept of "sound" over that of "music"?
It's something I share with many others. We've already mentioned one, Scelsi. Actually, I'm fascinated by both aspects. In fact, I recently released the album "Songs Of Surrender," which contains some piano compositions that might recall Schumann. I love playing with sounds, giving them a special architecture: there's a beauty in natural sound where nothing is done to it, but there's also another kind of beauty that comes from building a sound according to cultural conventions. We could say that delving deeper into the question of sound leads you to let sounds sink into you, until you really feel them in your gut. In a lot of structuralist music, on the other hand, sounds stay stuck in the head.

Who conceived of sound in a pioneering way?
Bartók, Debussy and Schönberg were certainly pioneers, and after them, people like Ligeti. But there are also names who marked the end of the road!

And who would those "end of the road" figures be?
Xenakis, in the sense that you reach a point beyond which you simply cannot go any further.

Steven Halpern worked on a process of cleansing the chakras through specific frequencies. If I'm not mistaken, you also addressed the issue in your book "La voce dell'arcobaleno." Let's clear things up, so we can free ourselves from the nonsense peddled by so many self-styled musical healers: what can frequencies actually do, and what is merely a product of our hopes?
Music and sound can indeed be traced back to frequencies, to vibrations. What I object to, though, is the widespread anxiety to find, say, the right sound for the liver or the beneficial sound for the kidneys and so on. In reality, sounds are far more interesting than a mere sine wave. At best, there's a sincere desire to improve our condition by finding the "right vibrations." But I can't count myself among the supporters of some absolute frequency; music has this particular trait: you can even change the pitch and frequency of the notes that make up a piece, but the information carried by that piece remains.

Can you debunk the myth of 432 Hz tuning?
It's not just the madness of 432 Hz, but also that of 417, 444, and 888 Hz. We're caught between ignorance and manipulation. A mediocre musician playing at 432 Hz doesn't suddenly get better. The whole thing rests on false premises, a bit like the story of Schumann resonance (the frequency of the Earth), which, among other things, changes every year. Or like that pseudo-news story claiming that a sort of trumpet was found in a pyramid, tuned, of all things, to 432 Hz. The problem is that certain self-proclaimed experts in healing music use mystifying arguments as their crutches. Let's put it this way: the tendency to look for some philosopher's-stone frequency that will fix all the world's ills has nothing to do with a musical mindset.

And what about Giuseppe Verdi officially requesting the adoption of a tuning lower than 440 Hz?
He was a pragmatic man, someone who loved getting his hands dirty in the soil: his concern, to be honest, was that opera singers weren't able to reach high enough to hit the notes written in his scores. What's more, to be precise, he wasn't talking about 432 but 435 Hz.

After a lifetime of practicing and studying overtone singing, what do you consider the most significant lessons you've drawn from it?
It's a rewarding experience on a physical level, in terms of the relationship a musician has with their own instrument. Overtone singing has also opened up a universe I've been able to access, expanding my capacity to perceive reality on increasingly subtle levels.

By using ethnic instruments from cultures other than the Western one, your compositional approach doesn't seem interested in replicating the spirit of those cultures. Fortunately, you don't seem bound by ethnomusicology.
That said, I do like to learn the history of the instruments I use; when you come into contact with ethnic instruments, there's a question you have to ask yourself that makes all the difference: "What use do I want to make of it?" Of course, in the case of the didgeridoo, for instance, I have no interest in becoming an Australian Aboriginal. What matters to me is bringing the spirit of these instruments into my music in an effectively integrated way.

Does an overtone generated by an AI algorithm have the same qualities as one you can sing or play yourself?
All musicians, even the greatest ones, embrace imperfections. A comparison, to give you an idea, could be made between fast food and slow food: in the first case, the taste of a dish is always the same, while in the second, the same dish varies depending on who made it. Coming back to music, just think of my work "Harmonic Crystals": I could easily have made it using pure sine waves, since overtones, acoustically speaking, are sine waves. Instead, I chose to use the voice, first of all because it was more fun for me, but also because, if you listen to the individual tracks, you'll notice almost imperceptible pitch fluctuations due to the imperfections of the voice, which make everything more interesting. If you listen to Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 played through synths and compare it to a performance by a symphony orchestra, the second case will feel far more immersive, partly thanks to those very imperfections I mentioned. That said, it's also very compelling to practice the voice alongside digital sound and hear what happens.

Which jazz musicians do you feel are closest to your own musical journey?
Gil Evans and Duke Ellington. In fact, just these past few days I finished a project coming out in September in which I play every instrument, simulating a big band. And I'd also mention Jelly Roll Morton, who wrote and played truly wonderful music in the tradition — typical of New Orleans — of "high-class brothel" pianists, who were genuinely virtuoso musicians.

And among saxophonists?
Parker, Sidney Bechet and Coltrane.

Speaking of Coltrane, there's a piece that particularly intrigues me: his interpretation for voice and tampura of "Spiritual".
It relates to the concept of harmonic convergence I mentioned at the start; there's this pentatonic scale, and the theme is made up entirely of those notes, except for one, and in its simplicity it has a structure that allows for increasing complexity. The idea is that when I change the fundamental to the second fundamental, I'll produce a harmonic at the same frequency as the one I produced with the first, which won't have the same number but, from a frequency standpoint, will coincide with it. This undermines the tuning of the fundamentals, taking us outside our own system of tuning and turning the theme of "Spiritual" into an infinite generator of intervals, a kind of "de-temperament".

In every decade of your artistic career you've carved out a milestone work: in the 1980s we have to mention "Two Views Of The Amazon".
That came about thanks to the Berlin broadcaster Rias – which no longer exists today – which commissioned me to write a piece for overtone singing of considerable length. Once I'd recorded the piece in their studio, I got to thinking that, besides overtone singing, I loved playing instruments in a certain way, so I chose to compose and record what became the second side of the album, containing "Rhapsody In Pink" and "Circular Crossroads". "Rhapsody In Pink" is a piece of Indian music with Western elements: I treat the soprano sax as if it were an Indian shanai. "Circular Crossroads", on the other hand, is more influenced by crossover things, like Jon Hassell. Incidentally, I've just finished putting together a reissue of these two pieces, which I'd like to release alongside the original versions.

In the 1990s, with "Memories Of The Rain Forest", your inspiration matches that of the best Hassell.
My favorite record. It's a tribute to African music, especially the Pygmy tradition, which differs significantly from the rest of the continent. It's music that's almost exclusively vocal, with quite particular vocal emissions – similar to falsetto – that make it "detimbred" and therefore close to the sine wave of overtones. Another distinctive trait is its contrapuntal sophistication: after 5 seconds of listening to Pygmy music, you realize that when they tell you at the conservatory that harmony is a Western prerogative, they're feeding you nonsense. What interested me, though, was not simply imitating African music, and in fact my approach was also serial in nature.

Among your masterpieces of the new millennium we must mention the monumental "Harmonic Crystals" from 2023: how would you sum up for a non-technical reader the fascinating conceptual foundation behind this extreme work made up of 12 cassette tapes?
Actually, I don't think of it as something to be listened to, but as a harmony manual for a composer who wants to use the sounds contained in it, or for a singer who wants to improvise over them. It's a compendium of musical intervals, from the semitone to the major seventh, in which the overtones common to these intervals are identified. As far as I'm concerned, each piece should last an hour, but we limited ourselves to fitting it into 8 minutes. The second box set is coming out soon, again on the Blume label and again in a cassette-tape box, and it's even more interesting than the first!

What makes it more interesting?
There we have groupings of 3 or more sounds that, through their overtones, generate other chords; so it's not a matter of converging on a single point, but on a different chord altogether. Which means – and this is the craziest part – that you can have a major chord of fundamentals generating a minor chord of overtones, a kind of harmony that's literally unheard of.

What do you want to draw out of the clarinet?
I love playing sax and clarinet. When I was eleven, I spent a summer in the countryside at my aunt and uncle's place, and that's where I started approaching the piano. Then I saw the film "The Glenn Miller Story" and fell in love with the trombone, but my parents wouldn't let me play it. Then I saw "The Benny Goodman Story", about Benny Goodman's life, and discovered the clarinet. I started out as a classical clarinetist, then moved into the Roman free jazz scene with figures like Giancarlo Schiaffini and Bruno Tommaso. My studies with Bill Smith were crucial – a musician for whom there are no adjectives adequate enough, since besides being a contemporary composer and a great jazz musician, he invented multiphonic techniques for the clarinet. Having grown tired of being a Serious Music clarinetist (seriously, an extremely difficult job) and having taught the instrument at the conservatory, I began developing my own "pneumatic" interpretive idea based on a vocal approach, similar to what's done in the world of Indian music.

What did you take away from the unconventional lessons of Charles Mingus (in which you were the only student)?
What I appreciated most was the way he used harmony while playing piano. He'd come into the room and, without saying a word, sit down at the piano and start "playing around". And what came out of it was the sound that defined modern jazz. The way he arranged the different voices on the keyboard, as if they were instruments in a big band, reminded me of Monk.

Do you think today jazz can still hold the revolutionary charge it possessed up until the end of the 1970s?
The million-dollar question. It's hard to talk about something while you're still immersed in it. It seems to me that, from a structural standpoint, jazz has exhausted all its possibilities. Harmony, from 1920 to today, has done nothing but grow more complex, and so has rhythm. Above all, I fear that something beautiful I call "the age of the great solos" has come to an end. Think of certain things by Parker, or "Blue Lester" by Lester Young, or Getz, or Coltrane. It's not that the music has died: that kind of music survives through its legacy in other musics. Today the main value of jazz is that it helps revitalize many other genres around it. It probably doesn't make sense to play jazz in 2026 hoping to do something new, but rather with the idea of letting others hear how a certain kind of music used to sound. A bit like a classical orchestra performing a Beethoven symphony.

In your teaching work on overtone singing, what's the most valuable lesson to pass on to a student?
It depends on what the student wants to do. For instance, when it comes to overtone singing, I position myself mainly as a musician: for me it's about using it to rebuild from scratch a tradition of which only a few traces remain. The most important thing is that everyone has to find, in their own life, the way to apply what they've learned through overtone singing. And I imagine there are many ways of doing this that haven't even been imagined yet.

Western and Eastern sacred music obviously differ due to geographical, cultural, historical, linguistic reasons, and so on, but ultimately, transcending these factors, do they affirm the same message?
In the end, everything affirms the same message, but in very different ways. One truly divisive musical criterion is that when you, as a Western musician, try out scales, you do so in a discrete way, whereas an Indian musician, for example, uses a kind of glissando. This means that our attack on notes makes counterpoint possible, which doesn't exist in Indian music.

What's the greatest illusion Western society is immersed in today?
Total improvisation. But the underlying problem is that contemporary society's capacity for listening – once called, not by chance, "the art of listening" – is severely compromised. It's a bit like voting, which shouldn't just be a right but rather a right-and-duty. In this sense, practicing overtone singing can help society, because it works as a way of recovering and deepening listening.

I don't understand what's illusory about total improvisation.
In music from all over the world, in all eras, virtually every musician was capable of improvising. But no one has ever managed to improvise beyond the code they know, which to me makes total improvisation a rather pretentious illusion, all things considered.

Not even with the introduction of chance procedures by Cage?
Let me give an example to explain myself better. I teach composition at the conservatory. A student of mine brings me a piece consisting of 5'40'' of silence. We all know Cage's silent piece, 4'33''. The information in this student's work no longer exists, because what compositional work lies behind it if I can determine a piece simply by changing a number? This is one of the limits of conceptual art.

What's the most extraordinary aspect of being an artist?
One light-hearted answer is that one's work is a game, and vice versa. Another answer, complementary to the first, is that the information contained in a work of art is a genuine universe (in the literal sense, not metaphorically), with its own laws, geometries, spaces, and times. So you can literally enter into a painting, the way director Akira Kurosawa does in his masterpiece "Dreams", where the viewer steps into Van Gogh's last painting, or into Bach's "Musical Offering", or into the poems of E. E. Cummings. All of this should be taken literally, as a realization of the Buddhist maxim "Thought creates reality", in keeping with quantum physics, which recognizes an energy in thought, which therefore generates "infinite possible universes". And, for now, let's stop there.

(13 September 2026)

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