reviews / 2021

NICOLA MANZAN - La città del disordine

Name: NICOLA MANZAN – La città del disordine
Item: La città del disordine
Rating: 7
Author: Cristiano Orlando

2021 (Overdrive / dischi bervisti)

ambient, neo-classical

by Cristiano Orlando

It's an ambitious project, the one that Nicola Manzan – a multi-instrumentalist already founder of the project “Bologna Violenta” and esteemed collaborator, among others, of Ligabue, Baustelle, Paolo Benvegnù e Teatro degli Orrori – conceived for the Museum of the History of Psychiatry in Reggio Emilia.

“La città del disordine – Storie di vita dal Manicomio San Lazzaro” is not just a musical work, but a fascinating exploratory journey created to sketch portraits of lives lived on the margins, and above all to present fragility as a constitutive element of human worth. An original project built, as the title indicates, around the transposition into music of the medical records of patients admitted to the Emilian asylum. The archival documents made available to the Treviso-born artist concern cases dating between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An extraordinary experience centered on diversity, distress, and its possible overcoming.

Of all the case files he examined, Manzan selected eight, judging them to be, among all, the most significant in terms of psychic condition, the story they told, the age of the patients, or simply because they testified to how much the approach to mental disorders has changed over the last century. The instrumental pieces he composed encode the character, personality and various states of mind of the different subjects, leaving aside the more terrible aspects of hospitalization and the treatments to which they were subjected.

The result is tracks in which electric piano themes blend with organ chords, in which strings converse with synthesizers, with solutions that are often bold, sometimes far more classical and melodic. A personal interpretation of lives marked by difficult, often unresolved moments, of women and men who often saw their days end within the walls of a place that had become their home.

Following the notes set out in the indispensable listening guide curated by Chiara Bombardieri, one delves into great stories, such as that of “Isabella Z. M.”, a thirty-one-year-old woman described by doctors as irritable, with persecution manias, whose mental health worsens when she begins to claim a supposed love affair with a doctor who had secretly become her husband; the anxious harmonic ups and downs capture the protagonist's nature with precision, aptly enhanced by fitting inserts (Wagner's wedding march).

How can one not mention the dreamlike textures that depict the troubles of little “Adele B.” and her religiously-tinged vision, which later led to her hospitalization, or the hypnotic melodies that move in jolts and sorrows of classical and electronic music centered on the story of “Carolina D.”, an unfortunate forty-three-year-old, described in the records as an educated woman, but also flighty, restless and suspicious, already driven to attempt suicide and so afraid of being killed that she refused food for fear of poisoning.

The sacredness of the organ that structures “Arcangelo L.” paints the portrait of a hat seller gripped by brutal crises that push him from the most violent blasphemy to opposite displays of bigotry, contrasts that Manzan develops skilfully through a precise translation into dissonant chords.

“La città del disordine” shows how music can be an absolutely adaptable device for inexhaustible contexts. Nicola Manzan has entered the lived experience of these eight people with great respect and empathy, creating a document that goes beyond mere artistic fruition, rightfully placing itself within a multidisciplinary social sphere.

Venturing into the circumstances that marked the lives of those who were admitted to an asylum, while at the same time letting oneself be guided by carefully shaped contemporary sounds, offers an unusual experience that joins curiosity, reality and deep reflection.

Ride the wave of great music

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14/05/2021

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Cristiano Orlando, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition