Vivere senza paura

Scritti per Mario Bortolotto
Torino, EDT 2007
Edited by Jacopo Pellegrini and Guido Zaccagnini

Composers very often need a few fellow travellers who understand and support them, who are their defenders and, in some way, their spokesperson. Whether they need solace or encouragement, or careful consideration, they are sure to find this support at their side, near enough but at the meantime no so close as to fall into a mirror-effect which is more noxious than useful. This is what Mario Bortolotto has been and still is: we can warmly thank him for this.
Pierre Boulez

A book which is, first of all, a daring task patronized by a small group of friends and admireres ready to submit their work to Mario Bortolotto’s notoriously harsh judgement.
In this undertaking not only musicians and musical critics are involved, but also storytellers, literature and art scholars; so, alongside the brief greeting messages, pages of “beatiful prose” appear, as well as unpublished musical works and well pondered essays. From all this comes a historical and cultural survey extended from Orazio to the American minimalism, from sixteenth- and eighteenth-century Italian painting to Puškin, from Janequin to Dino Campana. A special emphasis is placet, of corse, on the great (and not-so-great also) European music of the last two centuries. Evident loves and secret passione, and in some case also subjects unrelated to the polychrome interests of the dedicatee. One cannot discard the hypothesis that under the surface of some of these works lies a kind of devilish surge of pride: challenge and emulation, as everybody knows, are always the first mainspring of every creative act. The golden saying by Adorno (Bortolotto’s ideal guide spirit) which entitles the volume points out indeed to the courage of venturing. It’ll be the readers’ and dedicatee’s duty to establish whether the authors of these writing succeded in catching on the page the outermost enigmas of knowledge.