Max Fuschetto - Between modern classical and Mediterranean melodies

Among the musicians of Campania's prolific contemporary scene, composer Max Fuschetto stands out more than most for the originality and personality of his work. A son of 20th-century art music yet equally drawn to pop melody, he has managed, ever since his first solo album in 2009 ("Popular Games"), to combine the complexity and maturity of a contemporary avant-garde musician (which he can easily be called) with elements of popular music, whether pop - in its more refined form - or traditional. In fact, his solo work is a clear example of music that manages to be both complex and accessible, rooted in tradition yet innovative, the offspring of a long Western compositional history yet indissolubly infused with Eastern and ethnic elements.

Fuschetto's style manages to find a meeting point between popular and classical music, between ethnic music and the avant-garde, between East and West; it's a music capable of tearing down walls, whether geographical or generic. To achieve such an ambitious goal requires instrumentation so varied and complex that it turns the composer into a kind of conductor of contemporary classical music, drawing on a remarkably rich palette: oboe, sax, guitar, clarinet, viola, violin, cello, flute, piano, percussion, horn, bassoon, trombone. One thing is constantly surprising across all the tracks: the complexity of the rhythms and harmonic solutions, combined with the clarity of the sounds and the ease of listening — qualities that are very rarely reconciled.

A lifelong lover of popular music, with a particular fondness for the Beatles and their knack for finding melodic solutions that are both immediately effective and innovative, he graduated in oboe from the Nicola Sala Conservatory in Benevento.

The Eighties and Nineties saw him take part in various collaborations that allowed him to discover and explore a wide range of musical languages: from popular music to jazz, from twentieth-century avant-garde (Bela Bartok, György Ligeti, Igor Stravinsky) to sub-Saharan African music. These ongoing experiences, which saw him play oboe, sax, percussion and piano, led him in 2009 to release his debut solo album, fittingly titled Popular Games, a testament to Fuschetto's bond with popular music, albeit one rooted in academic study.

Popular Games seems to explore the idea of music of origins, the music of the first humans, inherent to our human nature, or even — pushing the idea further — music that was "never born", already present in nature itself. It's an idea already explored, albeit in a different way, by composer Lino "Capra" Vaccina, particularly on his first solo album, "Antico Adagio". The composer himself points us in the right direction in his liner notes: "I've always listened to music, but living far from its main roads, it's as if it reached me by chance, as though carried by the wind. And I followed it, the way one watches clouds. It appeared evanescent, like a spirit. From a certain point on, I felt its presence." These words say it all: a music that must simply be grasped, not created, already present even if invisible, like a ghost. The musician is the one who has the ears and the "heart" to listen to and reproduce what is already "in the air" — in a sense, the soundtrack of our life, of our origins, of the nature that surrounds us. The references to John Cage and Brian Eno are evident, though more in intention than in the final result. This idea closely recalls the naturalistic literature of Emile Zola, where the novel is already written, and the writer need only observe and describe, as faithfully as possible, what is already before his eyes — but which only he is able to see and describe.

The opening track, "A Sud delle nuvole", really does give the impression of music already present in our minds — all you'd need to do is close your eyes to hear it. The gentle piano of "Yee Moon Ye Lo" is played by maestro Girolamo De Simone (who also appears on the following "Bianco su Nero"), while "Yee Moon Ye Lo Reprise" comes across as a brief, joyful, playful jest. On "Valle Valle" and "Portami con te" — both sung in the Arbëreshë language — we find the splendid voice of Antonella Pelilli, while on the following "Frase Rem" the opening is entrusted to a delicate, repeated minimalist pattern over which the voice of Daniela Polito makes room for itself; it's impossible not to hear echoes of Terry Riley, the pioneering musician who combined avant-garde and Eastern spirituality.

"Saltarello" draws on a traditional dance from the Apennines and once again introduces a repetitive pattern, though this time more hypnotic and unsettled — one of those tracks that could go on forever, repeating itself without ever growing tiresome. We then encounter the voice of Irvin Vairetti on "Harsh Voices", where this time it's the percussion creating a hypnotic underlying bed of sound. The closer, "Bill's Mood", is a personal tribute to Bill Evans, and although clear jazz references are present, it never strays from the borderless music — as De Simone would put it — created by Max Fuschetto.

In 2015 the Campanian composer returned with his second solo album, Sun Na, the perfect culmination of his ideas. The ease with which the composer manages to blend together such disparate elements (classical, ambient, Eastern music, Latin music, ethnic music) is striking, and allows him to introduce Western audiences to distant cultures, to archaic musical languages that still survive in a handful of African regions.

Fuschetto carries out his "mission" through ten short tracks that together embody the very essence of Sun Na, of the dream. The atmosphere is at times almost religious, an approach that can only recall, at least in intention, on one hand "Hosianna Mantra" by Popol Vuh, both for Antonella Pelilli's voice and for the sheer religiosity of the musical landscape it recreates, and on the other the Third Ear Band, for its attempt to merge folk tradition with classical music. Just listen to "In Preghiera", which in barely a minute recreates the places of worship of a religion that seeks not to divide but to unite different cultures — precisely the ultimate goal Florian Fricke always pursued. And indeed, as Fuschetto himself tells us, prayer is a universal gesture, present in every kind of culture.

As with the mission of Popol Vuh, Fuschetto — despite the obvious differences — manages to make us understand just how strong the similarities and common ground are between cultures and religions considered entirely different from one another. Not Eastern culture (Middle Eastern atmospheres, the Arbëreshë language), Western culture (a skillful blend of electronics and acoustic instrumentation), African culture (percussion, ethnic music) or Latin culture (bossa nova rhythms), but "human" culture in the broadest possible sense.

The point of contact Fuschetto finds is "Sun Na", a term drawn from the Yoruba language (a dialect derived from Greek, spoken in parts of Africa such as regions of Nigeria, Benin and Togo). Sun Na means to sleep, to dream, and indeed — as the composer himself suggests — try saying it in a southern Italian dialect, and you'll see just how close the idea of "human" culture comes to the truth. Because it's absolutely true that the dream, understood as hope, as aspiration — perhaps even illusory — is a need that transcends race, religion or culture.

The dream continues in the most varied ways, from the echoes of Schubert's cello works (just listen to the soundtrack of "Barry Lyndon" to grasp the reference) on "Return To A", joined by viola, oboe, flute, sax and horn, to the bossa nova rhythm of "Paisagem Di Rio", which fades, in its final few seconds, into brief piano notes accompanied by distant horns that alone are worth the price of the CD.

"Oniric States of Mind", dreamlike from the title onward, reaffirms the idea of contamination with lyrics that are partly in English, partly in Arbëreshë. Antonella Pelilli's crystalline voice is here joined by that of Irvin Vairetti (son of Lino of Osanna). The track dissolves into "Secret Shadows", a brief instrumental for piano and electric guitar with intricate harmonic solutions, where Capobianco's guitar seems to sit somewhere between ambient and psychedelia.

"Vibrazioni Liquide", with its opening drone, introduces touches of the avant-garde, as does the small instrumental gem "Samaher", a continuation of "In Preghiera" but with pronounced Arabic sonorities. Anyone who gets excited by this kind of cross-pollination and prefers not to be boxed into rigid "genre" categories can only appreciate it.

In 2018 Fuschetto radically changed course with a new work very different from its predecessors. Mother Moonlight — conceived for solo piano — is essentially an exercise in rigorous reduction compared to the richness of his earlier compositions, a paring-down of all that poetic complexity once built from oboe, sax, guitar, clarinet, strings, flute and percussion. The reduction is so marked that Max Fuschetto limits his own presence to composing the pieces, leaving the performance to pianist Enzo Oliva, placing himself entirely at his disposal. The initial idea of a purely pianistic work is then enriched by minimal touches of electronics, strings, guitar and dilruba (an Indian instrument similar to the sitar), in a continuous polyphonic dialogue between right and left hand, where differing melodies and textures interweave in a constant layering that makes reduction its very strength. Between nods to Bela Bartok (the repeated piano notes of "Ting Tang") and to John Lennon (the "un"-melody, Beatles-esque, of "Occhi di conchiglia", with the sound of the dilruba), Fuschetto's path winds between echoes of sub-Saharan African music and a constant effort to position himself in that narrow space between popular and classical music — an idea that generations of classical musicians have pursued before him.

With Rhythmic Non-Rhythmic (2022), Fuschetto continues the process of sonic rarefaction begun with "Mother Moonlight", once again leaving Enzo Oliva's piano at the centre of the sonic narrative. "Ritmico Non Ritmico" is more than an oxymoron — it's an emotional-creative state corresponding to a new evolutionary stage for the Campanian artist, increasingly drawn to other noble art forms such as painting: the cover and the title are an explicit reference to Paul Klee.

The nine tracks are nine moving paintings, built around deliberately static sonic elements, around which Fuschetto traces signals, digressions, ornaments that are not necessarily contextual but are nonetheless coherent, distortions of style and language that never disturb the project's core ethic but instead feed that motility and variability which lets the album float like an impressionist painting. The ethic of this new project is contained in "Vortex, A Jackson Pollock": seemingly random elements create a rough, grating texture that caresses contemporary experimental music, while the musician's pictorial power captures the disquiet hidden behind the aesthetics of classical music, opening onto new forms of composition. The opening triptych ("Number 1", "Number 3", "Number 5") is a concentrate of purity and beauty, crepuscular tones, piano reverberations, sound fragments alternating to create an imaginary canvas. Pulled out of the drawer, the elegant piece for strings and French horn "Midsommar Choral", the leaden "Trame" and the powerful melody of "Midsommar" nonetheless prove functional to the rest of the work.

The artist entrusts the album's closing statement to the symbolic tribute titled "A Lucio B.", reaffirming his longstanding interest in the interaction between art music and popular music, with results that go well beyond the conventional. It's likely no coincidence that the artist chose the figure of Lucio Battisti to bring this journey to a close, a choice that confirms Fuschetto's courage and originality.

After contributing a few tracks to other films, Max Fuschetto took on the task of scoring the documentary Sniper Alley – To My Brother (2025), centered on the work of the photojournalists who documented the siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996. The film by Cristiana Lucia Grilli and Francesco Toscani follows Džemil Hodžić and his brother Amel, a story of shattered dreams - those of sixteen-year-old Amel, who wanted to become an artist, cut short by a sniper's bullet.

Just twenty-eight minutes, split into nine compositions where the most intimate and spiritual sense of pain forcefully emerges, music that slips into the sacred ("No Man Is An Island") and the profane ("L'escalier De Drake (A Nick Drake)") with equal rigor and harmonic flair. Each track corresponds to an almost pictorial image of sound, from glockenspiel brushstrokes that bring light to sinuous movements of strings and keyboards ("Opalescent Pendulum"), to evocative melodies rooted in the best tradition of film music (the title track).

Max Fuschetto brings to bear on the album the entire musical heritage he has absorbed and reworked over the years, moving nimbly between popular and avant-garde theatrical music ("Come Rain Come"), a deep knowledge of the more refined soul of folk tradition ("Durme Durme"), as well as the many opportunities offered by new creative frontiers ("Bosnina Nursery Rhyme"), and the reinvention of old languages (the a cappella choir of "The Good Morrow" and the already time-honored realm of jazz in "Oboe Sommerso").

Contributions by Gianfranco Marmoro ("Rhythmic Non-Rhythmic", "Sniper Alley – To My Brother")

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