Two new pieces highlighting the incredible voice of Amelia Cuni (1958-2024), the great Italian singer, based in Berlin in later life, whose mastery of the classical Indian dhrupad developed in parallel with a commitment to contemporary experimental approaches.
After two stunning archival releases documenting traditional dhrupad performances in India in the 1990s (
Parampara Festival 13.3.1992 and
Mumbai 04.02.1996), the two side-long pieces here embody the freedom with which Cuni explored new contexts and settings for her singing.
Both make use of a long recording of Cuni singing the pentatonic Raag Bhoop (or Bhopali) made in 2012 by her partner
Werner Durand in Berlin. 'Melopea' began from Cuni and Durand's superimposition of this recording with violinist Silvia Tarozzi and cellist Deborah Walker's performance of
Éliane Radigue's 'Occam River II'. Inspired by the beauty of this chance encounter (and other experiments with non-synchronous collaboration during the pandemic years), Tarozzi and Walker recorded independently, without hearing Cuni's voice but 'having her present in memory'. Tarozzi and Walker's bowed strings places Cuni's magisterial performance in a new context, emphasising, as Radigue commented upon hearing the initial layering of her piece with Cuni's voice, a shared 'searching toward the partials, overtones, these natural constituents of acoustical sounds in their richness'. Beginning with whispered bowed harmonics, the violin and cello swap the stability of dhrupad's traditional tanpura drone for a slowly evolving, uneasy web of harmonic interactions recalling some of Harley Gaber's work, sometimes sitting on dissonances for long periods or allowing changing interference patterns to come to the fore. Primarily focusing on her lower register, Cuni's performance demonstrates her mastery of microtonal pitch subtleties, elegant sweeping glissandi and meditatively unhurried pacing.
The continuation of the same recording by Cuni forms the foundation of 'Bhoop-Murchana', with Anthea Caddy on cello and Werner Durand on soprano saxophone. In contrast to the randomised layering of the first piece, here Durand and Caddy have carefully selected pitches based on the raag Cuni sings, using the 'Murchana' form, which uses the constituent notes of the raag as tonics of new raags, retaining the same interval structure. Both players who have developed tones of striking depth and harmonic purity on their instruments, Caddy and Durand's patient long tones are simultaneously rigorously grounded in the physical properties of sound and possessed of an immaterial, floating quality. Combined with Cuni's voice and, near the piece's end, her contributions on hammered and plucked tanpura, the effect borders on miraculous. To surrender to this music is like slipping into an onsen pool, feeling the instantaneous release of every tension. Accompanied by liner notes from Durand, Tarozzi and Walker, Melopea is both a moving tribute to the profound art of Amelia Cuni and, for the uninitiated, a perfect introduction to it.
Amelia Cuni (1958-2024) was a vocalist, composer, writer and teacher, and is most well-known as one of the greatest contemporary Western proponents of dhrupad singing, having studied in
India for fifteen years with renowned masters such as R. Fahimuddin Dagar, Pandit Bidur Mallik and Pandit Dilip Chandra Vedi. During her time in India she was also learning kathak dance from Smt. Manjushri Chatterjee and pakhawaj drumming from Raja Chattrapati Singh, developing significant mastery of both practices alongside her singing. Her work includes contemporary music and multimedia collaborations with several artists of international repute (she interpretated—with her life partner and long-term collaborator
Werner Durand—the
18 Microtonal Ragas: Solo 58 by
John Cage, a cycle of 18-scale patterns from the collection
Song Books, 1970). She was engaged in the transmission of the knowledge she has acquired from her gurus and she has taught Indian singing at the Vicenza Conservatory in Italy.
