Ensemble Terra Mater - Odýsseia (2022)

This record collects music from Odýsseia, an original performance of music, texts and images, which we presented on stage at the Ristori Theatre in Verona in December 2019. This complex and multifaceted project engaged us in the care of every detail, from music to lyrics, from set design to acting. The intent of the show was to accompany the spectator along the journey of Ulysses, a mythical figure who deeply reflects the soul of contemporary man.
A journey to discover distant and different cultures, under the sign of hospitality and listening to the other. A journey home, along which Ulysses finds himself having to question his own identity, driven by curiosity to know himself and those he meets, almost to the point of forgetting where and what home really is. Our Ensemble, since its foundation, has been studying, arranging and performing the traditional music of the Mediterranean area. Odýsseia was born from the interweaving of this repertoire with the mythical tale of the Odyssey.
This encounter between traditional and Homeric epic music has allowed us to grasp the essential similarity that brings popular music to the ancient Greek poem: works that were both born from the vitality of extemporaneous composition, improvisation, and then handed down through orality, avoiding for a long time the stiffening of the written form. Moreover, both popular music and the ancient Homeric poem radically refuse to be attributed to a single artistic genius of a romantic kind, and make us rediscover the strength of collective creation, the potential of a common, not singular song: a voice of the multitude.
The disc maintains the order of the pieces and the scanning in scenes of the show: Proemio, I Lotofagi, Il Ciclope, Circe, L’Ade, Le Sirene, Calipso. Moreover, we have decided to insert in this booklet some images and fragments of text, which allow the listener to approach the show with imagination, as it was originally thought.