Music, music!
In a famous aphorism, Friedrich Nietzsche states that “without music, life would be an error”. I truly believe that.
Like the folk tale on the children of Hamelin, which tells of a pied piper leading the children away from the town. They followed him enchanted by the music and never returned. So do I. I have never resisted to the magnetism of music, mostly of the live music. I remember, many years ago, in the centre of the old town of Angers, France, when I followed hand in hand with my twins a band of street artists. A band like those ones performing in the streets of Puglia, the region where I was born, the Italian opera so that the old people can know it by hearth.
Even if I work with images, my Stendhal syndrome deals with the music. Aside from literature, other forms of art speak to me but they cannot touch me deeply inside.
I do not want to talk about the Phono-suitcases and tape recorders I had when I was younger and a baby-boomer too. In one of my articles on Music Machines, I have already written about my choice of giving up my first car for a pair of Dahlquist DQ10.
High-fidelity, as we once used to call it, was very important for the young people of my generation. Maybe more than mobiles for our children today. Technology brings that: the generation before ours got crazy for the electric shavers. I found out what the high fidelity could do for music, not only as a status symbol, in an afternoon of thirty-five years ago.
Bruno Martino, a singer unknown to me since I used to listen to another kind of music (from Carmen by Bizet, to Santana, and mostly Soft Machine and Terje Rypdal), stroke me by singing Estate through the unforgettable JBL Paragon. I did not still know the versions of João Gilberto, Chet Baker, Michel Petrucciani or Jon Hassel’s in Fascinoma (buy it quickly). For me Bruno Martino could be, at that time, “only” a club performer and, therefore, someone to despise. Many singers were damaging their reputation for less, for the so called commercial music.
But, thanks to the Paragon system, I got in touch with what Bruno Martino was in reality: a Musician. A spine-chiller. Hats off!
It happened to me at least a couple of time. With Pavarotti, in what I felt an unlikely duet with Celine Dion. The situation where you ask yourself in horror: “who has brought this record?”. The second time, very recently, with Roberto Rocchi and his Stratospheric System (it is not a musical group, Ed.), while listening to Renzo Arbore and the Orchestra Italiana, a Japanese vinyl by Fonè.
Because Renzo Arbore is certainly a great anchorman and comic, but from that evening is most of all, for me, a Musician. Hats off again! Thanks to his ability of keeping us in touch with another world: better the world of someone else.
My father's family was a musical family. I have never met my granddaddy, Angelo Recchia Luciani – I have his name – who did two jobs. He was a civil servant dealing with veteran and ex-servicemen and he was, mainly, the organist of the Altamura cathedral, near Bari.
We have never talked of him, just once with my grandmother. I have never thought about him, at least not before I had been stroke by the Passacaglia BWV 582 /1. Karl Richter playing Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685-1750, and I was asking to myself what kind of man had been my grandfather, the organist of a cathedral. I have never talked to him, but I know something about him because I can recognise it in me.
Music has never been mine. I have always felt it deep inside, but I have never been able to play it, notwithstanding four years of piano lessons!
This is why I have forced my daughters with the Suzuki method at the age of three and a half. While I am writing, they are sixteen and still studying.
This Magnificent Obsession has generated my system and that of my partners: completely, stubbornly, proudly thought and even if a DIY, it is a system that does not follow the DIY psychology (for this reason currently beyond description, Ed.).
Also the late Jim Thiel told in an interview that he had made his first system by himself because he could not buy the system of his dreams. No one doubts that Jim Thiel has left his mark on the world by making it different.
This outcome enables somebody to become a manufacturer, maybe of just one piece, just one device. Not a manufacturer of clones lile somebody who tries to remake, by copying the others’ work. I do not mean to offend the DIY work, because by copying you can learn, modify, change, and grasp the meaning of what some men do. Like the first astronaut, if someone can do things by himself, it can also reach places still unknown to the others.
With some friend, I have been dedicating for a couple years my time and energies to realize this dream: because the musical playback, heritage of the humankind from only few generations, makes the music and the musicians being immortals. Of what we have made together, you will be informed, count on it!
I am a doctor specialized in neurology and diagnostic radiology. For fifteen years, I used to run the neuroimages department of a big private hospital in Bari. I habe been teaching Bio-medical fundaments of handicap typologies at the University of Basilicata and Anatomy, physiology and neurologic clinic in the Musicoterapy specialistic course of the E. R. Duni Conservatory in Matera.
I have written more than sixty scientific publications in neuroradiology, computer medical, psychotherapy and biosemeiotics.
I am in love with Antonella, my wife, and our twins Giulia and Sara.
Besides my family, my passions are music and biology of consciousness.
