Soaked in Music

Sponz Fest 2015 Trek Through the Countryside

Soaked in Music

Just about every place in Italy has a festival of sorts.  Many are historically based, far more are religious in nature, some spring from tradition, while others reflect more contemporary themes.  Siena has its Palio horse race twice a year, Venice celebrates Carnevale and a Regatta boat parade, while Milan understandably steps out with a Fashion Week and its own Grand Prix.  As for nearby Naples, well Naples seemingly goes overboard with something just about monthly … from the miraculous liquification of an ancient saint’s blood to theater performances and its own film festival.

In recent years, certainly since we’ve been fortunate to live there, little Calitri has developed its own annual festival.  It lasts for a week and is called Sponz Fest.  In late August it attracts thousands of visitors that swell its local ranks.  I’ve no idea of the origin of the name.  Where the latter half of the name might reasonably be associated with the word “festival”, its prefix could be a derivative of the word “spontaneous” but I’m guessing.  Recently, I’ve learned that Sponz is derived from Sponzare that stems from spugna (sponge).  It literally means “to soak”, “to get soaked”, “to become soaked”.  Local dialect also uses a derivative of the word to mean perspiration or sweat, again related to becoming wet.  When it comes to soaking in southern Italy, I’m betting nine out of ten times it would be customary to think of baccalà.  For the novitiate in Italian cuisine, consider baccalà on the order of a fish style beef jerky.  Instead of smoking meat for the purpose of preservation, codfish is salted and left to dry into rigid sheets.  To use it, it must be soaked to become edible.  They appear somewhat like the frozen clothes I recall my mother handing me as she’d remove them from a winter clothesline. This soaking process continues for many days.  Gradually the fish loses its rigidity and salinity, becomes soft and flaky and once again acceptable and of course, now fit to enjoy.  There is more here, however than a fish story.  In like vein, the idea of Sponz Fest is for its attendees “to soak, to become soaked, to get soaked” in a weeklong venue of music.  The illusion is for us, initially inflexible and salty, to become softened through a thorough drenching in music, giving ourselves an opportunity to forget about life rife with stresses and its mesh of daily norms to instead get in touch with natural rhythms.  In the process we just might discover an emotion new to us, investigate, perhaps even to be perplexed when crossing some limit that bounds us.  It’s like daring to trespass our normal limits, taking off our wingtip shoes, removing our socks, and walking, like short term nomads in grass for a change.  The atypical nature of Sponz Fest’s outside the box inspiration attempts to tap into that reality and to briefly abandon our sedentary status and take up that of a nomad.  Like the positive vibrations of a stringed instrument, it is the positive radiation we emit that matters.  Edgar Allen Poe may have put it best when he said, “The best things in life make you sweaty.”  So apropos, he’d have been a natural to appreciate the Sponz in Calitri’s Fest.

 The motive force behind this weeklong cultural creation, its creator and director, is Italian singer-songwriter, Vinicio Capossela.  He was born in Germany but as a young child his parents, having originated in Irpinia, returned.  His father, 

Capossela on Stage with His Dad

Veto, is from Calitri while his mother is from Andretta.  Vinicio is thus a son of the region, Irpinian in origin.  His parents today live in Calitri.  The festival he orchestrated seemed to appear out of the blue in 2013 but much thought lay behind its genesis.  Eight years ago, Vinicio decided to undertake that journey and set in motion a festival like no other.  Not a Woodstock, nor some concert in Central Park, it instead strives to get us in touch with nature, family and ourselves.  What better place than in Irpinia where the earth and nature take center ring, and family from birth to death binds everything together.  Instead of going all out for a stellar line-up and dozens of stages, the Italian singer planned for the perfect local journey, an utterly home-grown celebration, open to and welcoming the world.  Though it is far more cultural and far less religious in character, it nevertheless has a spiritual foundation, somewhat on the order of the spiritualism portrayed in the movie “Avatar”, for over the years its themes have focused on the earth, nature, and family. 

Vinicio Capossela’s style is nowhere near that of an Andrea Bocelli or bigger than life Freddie Mercury, but as the lyrics of a Freddie Mercury song go, “… one man, one goal, one mission…” his vision was for a cultural experience honoring tradition.  Vinicio’s art has been strongly influenced by US singer and songwriter Tom Waits, who in turn was inspired by Bob Dylan.  Dylan’s ‘60s songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" were anthems for the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam anti-war movement.  Mimicking Dylan, Vinicio’s lyrics encompass a wide range of social, philosophical, and literary influences which inspire his songs as well as from the traditions of Italian folk music, especially from the Irpinia part of Campania in addition to experimental genres.  His lyrics are highly original, free to broad interpretation. Here is an example from his 2006 album Ovunque Proteggi (Wherever You Protect):

“Wealth and fortune, in pain and in poverty

in joy and in clamor, in mourning and in pain

in the cold and in the sun, in sleep and in noise

wherever you protect the grace of my heart”

At times his words have been inspired by the universal themes of literary geniuses such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Oscar Wilde, Dante to Homer.  The power of written words trigger thoughts, which to an artist like Vinicio find emotional expression addressed as lyric parables.  Sometimes the messaging is veiled in cryptic meaning as in Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”, then again there are times when it strikes gold and can inspire a nation.

    His creativity is not limited to his poetic lyrics but extends beyond to include a fondness for quirky wardrobes. An exhibitionist deep down like many performers, his creativity extends to “performance chic” that include tasseled costumes
with clamshell epaulettes and especially to a fascination with hats.  Like us, he has a home in the borgo and when his motorhome comes to town, he often sports a western-style broad brimmed hat cocked back on his head.

Onstage, it runs the gamut from animal stylized hats, Russian Cossack headgear, wide-brimmed Jewish fedoras, the occasional pirate tricorn, a bullfighter’s montera, stovepipe top-hats, you name it.  These hats just may be his signature motif. 

More than a festival, Sponz Fest is a cultural experience, or better, an experience in traditions and a chance to discover the beauty that lies in small things.  The week-long happening, indeed a back-to-basics adventure, moves attendees to rediscover the blood and the soul of an almost forgotten territory and rapidly fading past.  For those who attend, it arouses a fundamental urge to explore the rural nature of Italy, tied as it is closely to the land.  Vinicio suggests that music is what binds us.  He once went on to say:

“It’s what relates us to our roots and memory, and what builds relationships and exchanges.  At its core lies music; music in diverse forms and shapes, but with a binding tie to Calitri’s territory.”

Proposed Area of Dump Site

Well before Sponz Fest began, his bond with the region was evident.  In 2008, concern for the planet, Irpinia, and especially the fields adjacent to his mother’s hometown Andretta, Calitri’s neighbor, saw him take up the cause of the local townspeople regarding Rome’s decision to site a landfill in this area of Campania.  During the concert he sponsored, in addition to the songs from his repertoire, he presented readings and sang folk songs from Alta Irpinia to the accompaniment of  La Banda della Posta which has since participated in follow-on Sponz Fests.  Needless to say, his efforts proved successful and planing for the Alta Irpinia Formicoso Plateau landfill was abandoned.  This concert may have been the inspiration for the series of Sponz Fests that followed. 

On its debut, Sponz Fest 2013 was accompanied by local, national and internationally renowned artists.  Setting the trend for future festivals, it unveiled the participation of musicians such as Howe Gelb, Tinariwen, Robyn Hitchcock, and others, writers such as Dan Fante and Vincenzo Cinaski, actors that included Enrico Salimbeni and Sabrina Impacciatore, and journalists like Antonello Caporale, and Enrico de Angelis.  In subsequent annual editions, many other headliners, prominent artists, actors, and directors participated in Sponz Fest.  

In addition to entertainment, there is of course food throughout the week. In fact, many a friend operate pop-up eateries and grotto bohemian style bars, some no more than a few bottles, a few chairs, and haybales for tables.  Nourishment for the body, yet the festival’s blood and soul is music, music of all sorts.  During our first Sponz Fest experience I was surprised to encounter an authentic Mariachi Band in one of our Borgo’s piazzas.  Authentic to the tee, the imported troupe of musicians wore enormous sombreros that shaded elegantly accented costumes and played oversized Mexicana guitars, smaller Vihuela guitars, violins and trumpets.  Their appearance to the local townsfolk may have approached the reaction of Roman infantrymen had when they first saw Hannibal’s elephants – they’d heard of them, but their presence was totally different.  Listening, you could have imagined yourself in Guadalajara, especially as they sang the melodic lyrics “Guadalajara, Guadalajara” only to repeat the refrain again a few notes lower.  

Cretan Master Psarantonis

A few streets away and I came upon music from a world away.  It was the earthy voice of Cretan master, Psarantonis.  His exotic vocals as his bow sawed across the strings of his violin-like lyre balanced vertically on his leg, evoked a special timbre that to me was mindful of the guttural voice of a fictional Klingon of Star Trek fame.  Here was an instance where I was the Roman soldier, the Calitrane neighbor, struck dumbfounded by what I observed.  On one turn, Mexican troubadours in full regalia and at the next, an encounter with the ancient rhythms of Crete.

Sponz Fest 2019 will see participation from American singer-songwriter and guitarist Micah P. Hinson to Neapolitan legends Almamegretta and Southern Italian folk musicians Ars Nova Napoli.  It will also showcase rebetiko rock tradition bearers Dimitris Mystakidis and Manolis Pappos (to sample a classic Rebetiko Rock piece right-click here).  Greek classical rebetiko is reflective of the harsher realities of marginalized subculture lifestyles.  Like the earlier music of Psarantonis I so enjoyed, if I get to hear anything of this year’s festival, I’ll try my best to hear Mystakidis and Pappos perform.

The theme of this, the 2019 seventh edition of Sponz Fest, is Sottoterra (Underground) where roots (natural and cultural) dig in and spread.  As performers aim to create a bond with the Sottaterra, I find the festival taking on a more bizarre nature, something the likes of a Greek tragedy, absent so far as I know, the spectacle of a Greek chorus to comment on the action.  As for spreading roots, this edition will not reside exclusively in Calitri but branches out to nearby towns and villages.  More widespread, this edition will also see events in neighboring Cairano, Lacedonia, Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, Senerchia, and Villamaina.  The idea being to scatter the sounds, stories, and dances, so everyone might benefit from, share and contribute.  In Calitri it kicks off at 0500.  You have it right, five o’clock in the morning and exactly outside our windows with an ascent to Monte Calvario, a hilltop opposite us, to the accompaniment of Bassa Processionale.  Needless to say, a procession accompanied by a brass band should get our attention.  Just last night, we were awakened at 3am to the drumming 50 dB blast of disco music and Sponz Fest hadn’t even begun.  Someone down the hillside decided to get a jump on things.  In retribution, I should be outside their place right now with a boombox as they undoubtedly try to sleep.  During the religious time of Lent, the custom is to sacrifice and temporarily give up something, sweets for instance.  Three in the morning last night, followed by 5am tomorrow?  Apparently, for Sponz Fest the sacrifice is sleep, for ostensibly as Luciano Pavarotti put it, "nessun dorma" (no one sleeps).

… Moving Forward a Week …

Looking back on it, for me the 2019 edition of Sponz Fest debuted at 4:30am on a day in August.  When I awoke, I hesitated for a moment to reassess my intentions.  Did I really want to do this?  Get up to climb a mountain in the dark?  I hadn’t climbed Monte Calvario (Mount Calvary) in years.  When I thought about it, knowing my aversion to gravity, I’d maintained a perfect record and avoided climbing any mountains for a long, long time.  My bravado to participate only hours before was in serious jeopardy.  Minutes later, however, with the help of sounds outside our balcony, the temptation to remain put aside, my curiosity won out.  I was soon upright looking down across the Borgo, down across the cleft in the terrain and up once again to where Mount Calvary crested.  Overnight, the church at the top of the mountain had been transformed.  It was shrouded in a bright, rose petal red light.  Due to the filtering effect of intervening trees, it took on the shape of a gigantic flag.  Seeing people were already gathered at the base of the mountain gave me the impetus to get moving.  I was late to the climb. 

Arrived, I was one of hundreds that had risen.  The trail that traces its way up the mountain to the church is seldom used these days.  An Easter procession of the faithful made the trek annually.  Undoubtedly, here was a tradition that was being tapped.  Easter processions saw men carrying a cross up the mountain.  Thankfully, mine was a much lighter load, just a camera.  Before the curious, like myself, began the ascent, a performer read something from a script.  Although I was not able to absorb its meaning, rolling laughter made the rounds of those around me.  A small brass band then played and soon we were off.  Dark as it still was, this would not be a walk in the park.
 

Stone risers with treads made of packed dirt marked the path.  Nothing was uniform.  The risers resembled teeth of different sizes.  Many of them were of a long, canine-tooth variety that in some places were missing entirely.  Pressure from those behind made hesitating difficult.  Thankfully, there were a few saving graces that came to my rescue.  First off, the band leading the ascent would stop occasionally to play, which offered a chance to catch your breath or snap a picture.  There were also techno-savvy young people everywhere who used their cell phone lights to help brighten the way.  Best of all was the rustic alpine railing made from small trees and arranged in a lattice fashion that bordered the left side of the stairs all the way to the top.  Its presence offered stability and made the climb bearable.  I had a grip on it when a more aggressive group pushed through uttering many a mi scusi (excuse me’s).  Low and behold, there was Vinicio Capossela, accompanied by his entourage, snaking their way past me.  Like a horse against the rail on the last furlong of a race, I yielded and let them pass.  As Mel Brooks so adroitly put it in his film History of the World, Part I, “It’s good to be the King”.

The sky was beginning to brighten but hadn’t yet thinned the darkness when I made it to the top.  Looking across the valley, I could make out our rooftop terrace, empty at the moment.  From there I could triangulate to where my side of the bed lay empty while Maria Elena, I was sure dormiva ancora (still slept).  One side of the church had been reserved for refreshments, while on the other, a small stage had been erected.  After my fellow climbers had settled in on the ground, before the stage, there were some preliminary readings.  Then a group of women dressed in black formed a long line.  In dramatic fashion, each in turn began to tear a piece of cloth from the long sheet of white cloth they supported as though it was hanging on a clothesline.  All along they chanted, “Nero, Nero, Nero”.  I missed their symbolic meaning, but it may have been related to death, maybe the black death plague, what with the rending of the shroud and the chanting.  Sottoterra was underway.  The heads of the crowd soon turned back to the stage as Manolis Pappos and Dimitri Mistakidis took up the underground theme and began to play a haunting “under music” requiem.  As though Manolis was at prayer, he held his eyes tightly shut as he stroked the strings of his mandolin while his partner, Dimitri, accompanied him on a guitar and sang a lament that, as with the rising sun, came from the East.  It was a soulful tune.  We’d had the symbolic gnashing and tearing, all that was missing was the ritual weeping.  By this hour, with the sun cresting the horizon, their Greek refrains were to the staccato accompaniment of the dawning cries of a morning rooster far down the mountainside.

The 'E Zezi Gruppo Operaio Performers

The next evening, we attended “Death of Carnival” in the piazza outside of the Immaculate Conception Church.  Again, a death theme.  I was beginning to form an impression that in this edition of Sponz Fest, death was being overemphasized.  The title, however, was deceiving.  Yes, there was a coffin set out before the entertainers and eventually, a procession took place around the piazza, but it was all in fun.  With so much merrymaking, it was on the scale of a classic Irish funeral.  Here a group of men with exaggerated facial makeup were comically dressed in drag.  They were the performing group 'E Zezi Gruppo Operaio of Pomigliano, outside of Naples.  There was a mayor with her official banner of office draped across her chest and a Barney Fife sort of policeman with a cap and whistle that proclaimed him more than official.  Although Naples was only hours away, portions of their dialog were foreign to many an ear, certainly ours.  The group bantered back and forth in their Neapolitan dialect to the approval of their audience.  After their frivolities and antics, their music, especially their singing, was amazing.  They also danced, sometimes with willing participants from the audience.  One traditional dance had them bobbing and circling each other.  We’d seen this before in Saviano, outside of Naples, years earlier.  They’d flail their arms around their partner while they yo-yoed up and down and moved around each other to an intoxicating, wild, rhythmic beat.  The clackety-clack of wooden castanets only added to the spectacle.  It looked like great fun.  If only I were more coordinated.  

The following night, again in the shadow of Immaculate Conception Church, we attended another concert.  Before the entertainment began, however, the mobile catering trailer of the local La

Sponz Coins

Gatta Cenerentola (The Cinderella Cat) restaurant served a meal featuring baccalà.  Here is that fish story I’d put off earlier.  For eight euros they provided a sort of stew, though there wasn’t much of a broth.  It consisted of chunks of cod, quartered potatoes, and a slice of crusty bread.  The only option was in your choice of potato.  It came plain or piccante with a hint of peperoncino.  I didn’t hesitate and opted for the spicy version.  Maria Elena, who is not big on potatoes or baccalà for that matter, passed on the offer.  Interestingly, you paid in Sponz-coins.  Nothing like a Florin, these instead were like terra cotta Scrabble sized tokens with the letters replaced with what looked like an “S” for Sponz. Like a carnival operation back home, you purchased them at a kiosk that controlled all cash transactions.  Overall, I’d rate it as OK.  I’m no expert when it comes to baccalà, but they seemed to have failed on the sponz or soaking part of the preparation.  We’d been soaked in music for a few days by then,

In Line for Baccalà

but the fish hadn’t gotten its share of soaking. My expectation of baccalà is that it not be salty when eaten.  This was salty.  If I wanted it salty, I’d add salt myself.  Maybe they didn’t change the water enough, let it soak long enough, or just maybe I’m all wrong.  Thankfully there was a beer tap run by Double Jack that for only four Sponz-coins miraculously washed the salt away. Who knows, it may have been planned that way!

The foodie preliminaries concluded, next a young man with a perfectly crafted handlebar mustache performed on a 12 string Spanish guitar.  His accompanying backdrop was a film projected across the piazza onto a large screen at the rear of the stage.  It was an old film, not a documentary per say, more on the order of a sociological study that had captured the culture of daily peasant life long ago.  This 1958 film was entitled “Magia Lucana”.  It was a black and white film by Luigi di Gianni that presented a bleak fresco of miserable peasant life in a remote part of neighboring Basilicata.  The terrain depicted was reminiscent of what we had seen when we visited tiny Pietrapertosa clinging to a stony promontory in the Lucanian Dolomites.  Much like prehistoric Matera located in another part of Basilicata, this open-air cinema offered a glimpse at the poverty-driven existence of the people living there at the time.  Absent words, the guitarist instead used the closely spaced nylon strings of his guitar to tell the story.  With the sound of the strings and projections, he portrayed the hard life of these rural Italians who survived on what they could scrape from a mountainous land of unbridled stone.  Its footage presented people at work in the fields, some behind plows pulled by mules.  Some were seen sitting before their fires while street-side seniors seemed to stare off into oblivion, seemingly hypnotized by their drab existence with little hope for change.  At one point the videographer caught a child at play in the streets with rudimentary toys, one I believe just a stone.  Another scene, inside a grotto this time, captured a baby suspended in a makeshift swing being rocked by its mother who every so often hesitated between stitches of her embroidered handiwork to give a gentle push.  It made a profound statement about the harsh conditions many of the viewer's ancestors had experienced - a life without luxury, tied ever so closely to the earth, even the stone.  It portrayed an awkward world, difficult for us separated by generations to imagine today - a mix of pagan, ancient ritual, magic, keening funeral lamentations, vapid existence, and endless physical drudgery. 

A few days later, Calitri became the European “Capital of Culture” for a day as part of yearlong “Matera 2019” events.  With much ceremony and speeches, she officially became queen for a day.  This year, she had again succeeded in creating a broad regional festival encompassing music, food, dances, photographs, oral and visual stories and in this way enhanced, rediscovered and possibly for many discovered for the first time the particulars of their cultural heritage.  It was far from a traditional festival.  No, not when events started before dawn and ended well after sunset in the hours before a new dawn.  Nights of serenades, rock bands, tables in the streets, big stage performances, minstrels perched in windows, and that mix of primal Greek rhythms that the Irpinia people have had in their blood since the migrations of the ancient Greek Diaspora and the emergence of what the Romans called Magna Graecia (Greater Greece) beginning in the 8th century BC.  Swept up in the buzz of a week of extreme festivity, I wondered what the ancients would have made of it.  Their imaginings like mine of their world would be too big, too extreme for words to possibly express.

Written on the Road

From That Rogue Tourist

Paolo