ARES (Ancient Rhythms in Electric Skin)

ARES (Ancient Rhythms in Electric Skin)

Abstract

Driven by the need to rediscover my roots, this project explores the South Italian traditional music genre Pizzica, in which chants have been passed down orally for millennia across different cultures, from Greek to Turkish to Spanish. My motivation is to heal the historical trauma of this tarantella (an Italian musical form inspired by the myth of the spider bite), transforming a rhythm born from patriarchal oppression and Dionysian rites into a tool for modern artistic expression. Stories, legends, recordings, ethnomusicological and anthropological studies, and interviews with musicians who today keep this tradition alive have been the core of this research to explore the technical elements (groove, chord progressions, modes, instruments, ...) and to understand the emotion and soul within. I composed several songs, and I selected three to be analyzed in this paper, all influenced by different modern music genres, such as Jazz, Rock, Electronic, and Contemporary Classical. The outcome is not just the reflection of my current artistic identity, but also the album that includes those songs and the other project I developed starting from the Pizzica. I hope that through my learning I can inspire people to recover, respect and appreciate ancient rhythms while embodying the sounds and traditions of the past.

Publication Date

7-1-2026

Campus

Valencia (Spain) Campus

Keywords

Italian folk music; creative project; composition; practice-based research

ARES (Ancient Rhythms in Electric Skin)

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