AN EMERGENCY SONG

Some say it is an encouraging “Come on, Moor!”, while others translate it as “Allah, may he perish”. In fact, the most probable etymology of Aja Mola is the contraction of the Arabic expression ‘Ai ya mawla’ which simply means “Oh, my Lord”. Whatever its origin, Aja Mola has lost its original meaning over time and has become one of the most famous cialome – the songs that the Sicilian tonnaroti tuna fishermen, particularly those from the island of Favignana, sing during the ‘ritual’ of the slaughter. Strictly speaking however, it is not a ‘blood song’. When, at the beginning of the ceremony, the Rais (the head fisherman), greets the tonnara (the fishing fleet and nets), the sailors, from their nuciare (tarred boats) respond first of all with ritual prayers to the saints – the ‘Sarviriggina’ and the ‘Patrinnostru’. Only when the tuna fish begin to enter the first four ‘chambers’ in the formation of the nets, which all precede the final ‘Chamber of Death’, does the prayer of Aja Mola rise from the boats which are positioned in a square formation around the nets. An ancient Arabic song with a slow and rhythmic tempo, which prays for Jesus’ and the Virgin Mary’s protection. Only when the sailors chant the last word of the song, ‘Assumma’, the nets are hoisted, the harpooning begins, and the sea turns red. At this point, and not a moment before, the sailors begin feverishly and excitedly singing the last song of the slaughter, entitled ‘O Lina, Lina’, with its sustained rhythm.

There is a precise reason why Aja Mola plays an important role in the sonorous dramaturgy of Sangù / Sangue mio - Music for Palermo, the ‘concert of words’ that Alessandro De Lisi and Delilah Gutman have dedicated to the memory of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. It would be too simple to say the blood of the tuna catch is symbolic of the bloodshed of mafia massacres; indeed, using the term mattanza to define the murders, the attacks, and the crimes of the mafia has become, over time, a worn-out cliche. This is not the direction that this work wants to take. The relationship with the ritualistic mattanza tuna catch, which has now disappeared from Sicily, is far more subtle. It is explained by the ‘intermediary’ role of Aja Mola, a song which, as we have seen, follows the layman’s blessing of the trap by the Rais, but which comes before the actual ‘execution’ of the tuna fish trapped in the so-called Chamber of Death. This is the song that, with its powerful musical imagery, rhythmically drives the movement of the fishermen hoisting and lowering the nets stops a minute before death, encapsulating the moment just before the massacre. This is exactly what happens in the magnificent and tragic book, the Almanacco siciliano delle morti presunte (the ‘Sicilian Almanac of Presumed Deaths’) by Roberto Alajmo which recounts, in fact, the last minute of life, the “parting before the darkness”, of men and women killed by the mafia during the

second half of the last century.

In the same way, Sangù seems to want to symbolically stop time and imagination one minute before May 23, 1992, when the Capaci highway ripped in two, swallowing Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three men in their police escort, and moments before July 19 of the same year when 90 kilos of explosives in a Fiat 126 killed Paolo Borsellino and five police officers in Via D’Amelio, Palermo. Why stop the pace of the story, if only with the sound of words? Perhaps because we know everything, or nearly everything – except, often, the truth – about what happens after the death of a victim of a massacre, or an attack, or a killing. We know their life, deeds, and work – like heroes – and we then learn about the investigation, the trial, and the sentencing. We know if and when justice is or is not served. But in that private, lonely, unknowable minute just before death, we know nothing, nor will we ever. Only music, literature or theatre can probe into that hidden moment and reveal the secrets that are carried to the grave. This is exactly what Sangù gives us - not the news, not the story, not the facts or the events surrounding those deaths, but exactly what we can never know about those deaths: what happened on the threshold between life and death, along that line, that frontier, which no one can revisit, other than with poetic thought.

The tools that Sangù uses to cross this threshold and walk the line that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead are those of the great tradition of theater – on one hand, the story by Alessandro De Lisi, largely based on his novel “Sangù/Sanguemio – Palermo 1985, l’estate in cui i boss persero la partita”, in which Falcone and Borsellino speak in the first person, making their own unmistakable voices heard, and on the other hand, the music of Delilah Gutman that fits spontaneously and naturally between the written pages of the novel. The five tracks that you will hear in this ‘preview’, though already mature and complete, represent the core – a rough sketch of the theatrical work and album that will develop in the coming months. In the alternating music and narration, this partial ‘prologue’ already designs the contours of the work with precision. De Lisi’s poetic voice allows us to

encounter, in ‘sync sound’, the thoughts and conversations between Falcone and Borsellino during the crucial months they spent in Asinara in 1985, during which the premises for the maxi trial of the Cosa Nostra were born. Balancing that, the compositions by Delilah Gutman offers us the musical reflections and memories left in her imagination by those words. For example, the airy dance of the Valzer della libertà / Waltz of Freedom, to which the rubato gives a slight perception of breathlessness at times, or the absorbed meditation of Notturno d’Amore / Nocturne of love, punctuated by the obstinate toll of the piano, entwined with the undulating and dissonant improvisations of the accordion. There are the contrasts of meter, rhythm and tempo of the Tango dei Giusti / Tango of the righteous, stretched out among the quiet steps of the dance, the feverish stubbornness of a breathless run and the memories of ancient yet common motifs.

The close, organic synergy, complicit between sound and narration leaves us, perhaps involuntarily, with a question that no one has ever dared to answer: What would have happened if time, that Sangù wants to stop (which perhaps has indeed been stopped) had actually frozen one minute before the massacres of Capaci and Via D’Amelio? What scenario would have been sketched if Falcone and Borsellino had been able to continue their work? What would Cosa Nostra look like today if the investigations of the two magistrates had not been blown away by the explosion? Music - said John Cage - cannot give answers, only ask questions. Sangù parts from its listeners with this unanswered question, leaving only a trail behind it. Paul Celan said that poetry is an “emergency song of thought” and in that ‘emergency’ he brought together two different and complementary meanings: that of ‘emergence’ and that of ‘urgency’. Listening to this work is easy and spontaneous, and replaces the word poetry with the word music. Sangù is a song above all, a deep chant or melos that releases all the power of the sound, or phone, hidden in its words, or logos, as the ancient Greeks would have said. It is also the product of an idea that explicitly looks at the function of civil testimony, from which music and theater cannot escape. Finally, it also bears the stigmata of emergency – the need to bring out the undercurrents that constantly and painfully carry us from recent Italian history to the present, away from the past’s conflicts and crimes, leaving us the legacy of the ‘judicial practices’ of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. They would have continued to remind us of this every day if time had stopped one minute before their deaths.

Guido Barbieri