Teresa De Sio - The Voice, the Mask and Tradition

We met Teresa De Sio on the occasion of the launch of her project titled Pensiero Meridiano which, after the close of the tour dedicated to Pino Daniele, will see her embark on a new journey with an exceptional ensemble, made up of Sasà Flauto on guitars, Pasquale Angelini on drums and Vittorio Longobardi on bass. A trio chosen to rediscover a direct kind of music, made of the rough sounds that underpin what Teresa calls the “rock del popolo” ("the people's rock"), her own term for folk.

The artist opened the doors of her Roman home to us and welcomed us into a living room full of objects, a place of cultured disorder, scattered musical instruments conveying the sense of a life spent writing and devoting itself entirely to music. Every word seemed to emerge from somewhere deep and distant, considered, chosen, with a rigor and sensitivity typical of a writer. After all, Teresa's transformation is well underway, and the two novels published by Einaudi (Metti il diavolo a ballare – 2009 – and L’attentissima – 2015) reshape and establish her as a fully-fledged researcher, a spokesperson for a Southern Italian sensibility that is no longer just sung.

Listening to your records in sequence, Teresa, you can clearly hear the development of a journey. Over the course of your career, besides a change in the arrangements, there's above all a progressive transformation of your voice, which has gone from long and flowing, almost lyrical, to clipped and contracted. What do you think about that? Do you recognize yourself in this shift from "singing" to "expression"?

Yes. My voice has indeed changed. Partly because, unlike many other singers who keep their voice frozen at a certain youthful age, I let my voice change, just as my body changes, because the voice is an integral part of the body. And then, from a certain point on, it's true, I started using my voice more to "tell a story" than to sing.

That immediately brings to mind Fabrizio De André, thinking of words becoming an instrument for storytelling — in some ways your own work of excavation seems similar to his, understood as a journey into depth, into voice, music and tradition. Do you feel any affinity with him?

I grew up with Fabrizio's songs, so in a way he shaped me. He came into my life as an absolute master. When I was a girl I learned to play his songs, and it felt like, by singing those words, he managed to say something about me that I wouldn't have known how to say without his words. And that, to me, is the greatness of a songwriter: when you manage to speak through his words.

So calling it an affinity is putting it mildly. I felt a genuine connection. And I never would have thought that, growing up, I wouldn't just embark on a path in music, but that I would actually meet him, and have a relationship of friendship and collaboration with him, to the point of even singing on a song written entirely by me: "Un libero cercare". In some ways, too, the work he did on tradition and on dialect — work he began in the Eighties, a time when I was already doing that same kind of research — allowed us to cross paths and recognize an affinity in one another.

What led you to choose to reinterpret “Creuza de ma” in Neapolitan?

It was Dori Ghezzi who suggested it to me. And I remember that when she brought it up, I told her it was impossible, that it couldn't be done, that it was too difficult an undertaking, but then the idea started working away inside me, and I have to say that translating it (although "translating" isn't quite the right word — "transporting" would be better) from Genoese into Neapolitan, so from one language into another, was one of the most perilous undertakings of my career as a songwriter. In translating it, I tried to replicate all the assonances, as well as the meter of course, but what was truly difficult was having to immerse myself in a whole world, because dialects are worlds, or rather different systems of signs that don't translate the same universe we describe when we use standard Italian. Dialects are systems that point directly to different worlds. So when I found myself having to carry the text of "Creuza de ma" over from Genoese into Neapolitan, it was like diving into the sea of Genoa, becoming a mermaid, going underwater, and entering this magmatic world full of magical meanings. "Creuza" is a mysterious fresco, in which, unlike all of Fabrizio's other songs, the poetic power outweighs the narrative one. It's a dark world to decipher, as the deepest poetry always is, after all. And it was a piece of work that engaged and moved me deeply, and almost transformed me: a真正的 experience. And in the end the result came naturally, although I won't deny that the first time I sang it in Genoa I was a little scared. And I'm also very proud of the fact that now that song, in my version, also bears my signature — it's credited De André-Pagani-De Sio.

In your performances there's an increasingly evident quality of donning a mask, almost as though a theatrical element had crept into your work that wasn't there in your early records, or perhaps went unnoticed…

I think music strips away masks rather than putting them on, and shows you for who you really are. In that sense, I try not to wear any mask at all. But I understand what you mean when you talk about a theatrical approach on my part, and it probably has to do with the fact that I've spent so many years working with folk music, a genre in which masks carry real weight. On the other hand, the mask is a fascinating thing, because it's a symbol that condenses a whole popular history within itself. In fact, it's really the only "place of symbol" left, because in the past, popular culture used to distill the arcane into ritual symbolism and oral storytelling, whereas today, in our everyday lives, the arcane isn't represented by anything anymore.

In the world we live in today, the only things that symbolize existence are objects. And in that sense, I like being able to reclaim the idea of the mask as a symbol of a world that's slowly going out.

Do you agree that performing Neapolitan music always requires an element of acting? As if, in a way, everything has to be "exaggerated"?

Unfortunately, that's what other people want it to be. It's one of the many clichés about Neapolitan-ness. Let's say Naples has always been a place of struggle, and at the same time a place of the avant-garde, where things happened before they happened anywhere else. And while it's true that this "heightening" quality in the Neapolitan way of being can suggest exaggeration, I think it's less about exaggeration and more about an ability to be ahead of one's time.

It's as if a great soul emerges from folk and southern Italian music. A soul to be passed on, one that the performers and singers who work with it carry on their shoulders, sometimes giving up their own personal projects to connect with a dimension of "service". What do you think about spreading this heritage and, in a way, carrying the weight of such a responsibility?

What you're saying is true, but it's a weight I've personally always tried to shake off. It's true that folk musicians carry this "mission" of "perpetuating the eternal", but I think you can be part of folk music in a less radical way too. There's certainly a philological approach taken by those who try to perform songs without manipulating them, in order to carry forward a sort of "pure tradition" — although it has to be said that in music, the idea of a pure tradition is a very fragile concept, since tradition itself is made up of nothing but research that, at the moment of its creation, started out as experimentation and simply settled over the years. In any case, I've never really done that kind of work myself, except perhaps when I made my debut album, "Villanelle popolaresche del Cinquecento", with Musica Nova.

The truth is that since I started writing, and stopped being just a performer, my view of music has changed and broadened, and folk music has become something I might call a foundation on which to build my work and from which to take flight. In that sense, I sometimes feel like a hot-air balloon that can travel incredibly far thanks to music, but with an anchor firmly planted in the ground — an anchor made up of the roots I come from. Tradition means I'm never groping in the dark, and without it I probably wouldn't have done the work I do. But at the same time, it's not enough for me on its own, because I come from folk music, but I'm not a folk musician. I listen to a huge amount of music, all sorts of things, which I then try to blend together.

For me, folk music is never a lament, but always a cry, a place of struggle. Just like rock. In fact, I like to define folk as "the people's rock", because both genres rely on rhythm and its power, which is the backbone not only of music but of our entire existence. Without rhythm we'd be suspended in nothingness, because rhythm is time. We are rhythm. What we're doing right now, talking, gesturing, is rhythm, energy. And folk, like rock, is steeped in that. For that matter, if I had to define myself as an artist, I wouldn't call myself a folk musician, but a folk-rock musician. Beyond that, I can say there's a huge difference between the music of the other regions of the South and Neapolitan music, due to the fact that Naples was the capital of a Kingdom, and so its folk music was transcribed by court scribes, and was studied and continually reworked over the centuries. A "manipulated" music, so to speak, studied by great authors, and mixed with all sorts of contaminations, shaped by the various dominations that followed one another — Turkish, Spanish, French, and finally, American.

For these reasons, it has few equals anywhere else in the world, apart perhaps from Brazilian music, which resembles it in certain ways: a music that is at once cultured, composed by learned authors, yet also popular, that is, belonging to the people. Songs like "I' te vurria vasà" were written by towering poets and, at the same time, sung by the women of the Neapolitan slums, in a blending of high and low, of the cultured and the popular, which is an absolutely unique phenomenon.

Salento music, on the other hand, remained much more confined to the rural world, and so evolved far less, or rather, it was passed down almost solely through oral tradition. This, in my view, is the fundamental difference between the two traditions.

And what about the decision to dedicate an entire album to reinterpreting Pino Daniele?

Let me start by saying that my real job isn't being a singer, but being a songwriter and composer, which is a difficult and demanding craft. Everything else, for me, is fun and pleasure, an adventure made up of encounters with others. That's the spirit in which I approached my reinterpretation of Pino Daniele, which I experienced as a break, an almost relaxing parenthesis that allowed me to immerse myself in other dimensions.

Pino's world, it should be said, is very close to mine. He was a true trailblazer who, together with those Neapolitan groups active in the Seventies, brought in a wave of novelty, introducing the last of the dominations that have run through Neapolitan music — the American one. What's more, unlike others, he did this through songs, using the most pervasive tool there is, because the song form is an incredibly powerful instrument that allows for immediate communication.

I always say that to best explain Pino's innovation, you should think of him as a farmer who ploughed a furrow, into which other musicians later planted their own seeds and grew their own plants, which in turn helped give rise to an entire field sown with music…

I also liked the idea of interpreting Pino as a classic, because I really believe he can be considered one in every sense. As Calvino said, "a classic never stops saying what it has to say." His music can be made to resonate in a thousand different ways.

From a technical point of view, I tried to carry over the part tied to his songwriting - his words and his music - into my own world, which is definitely more folk-rock than his, since his is built on blues arrangements and sounds close to African-American music.

Picking up on all these cross-influences you're describing, it makes me think there's a gypsy quality to your music, something itinerant...

Absolutely, yes. My path through music has been a wandering one. In my career I started out in folk and ended up making records - as everyone knows - much more tied to pop, moving out of the specific territory I started from to eventually embrace territories that even touch on electronic music. But it's not just that. I think that, in general, in this line of work you always have to be a wanderer, because music isn't just a way of looking at reality, it's a dreamlike place - you could say music is the world dreamed by angels... A world you have to navigate, wander through, open doors in, meet people in... and it's no coincidence that my career has been marked by decisive encounters, from Fabrizio De André to Brian Eno, all the way to the great Paul Buckmaster, who arranged my 1986 album "Toledo e regina", and who - just to mention a couple of things from his immense career - arranged "Your Song" by Elton John, as well as records by Miles Davis, the Rolling Stones and Guns N' Roses, so being able to share something with people like that is a truly rewarding way of being a gypsy...

And what will your new project, titled "Pensiero meridiano," actually consist of?

"Pensiero Meridiano" came from the idea of putting together a power trio - strong, electric, made up of bass, drums and guitar. It will be a way of telling the story of what I've done over these years, and more broadly a way of telling the story of the South, through my own songs and those of all the great masters of southern Italian music, from Pino Daniele to Domenico Modugno to Matteo Salvatore, with the aim of exploring the same universes that poets, philosophers and writers talk about, but through the language of music.

It's an ambitious project we're already rehearsing, but it will officially get underway once the tour dedicated to "Teresa Sings Pino" wraps up, which in turn will close on February 16th at the Teatro Politeama in Naples.

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