Matteis Project
Nicola Matteis – over 300 years ago, he hitchhiked from Italy to London. And there he managed to captivate his audience with passionate violin playing. For us however he left behind a mystery, since he wrote down his music only in mere sketch form.
How can this mystery be unravelled?
Etienne Abelin and his colleagues from the Matteis Project have the unexpected answer: in a fusion of “reImagination”, creativity and method - the Matteis Project Method - they discover the music of Matteis afresh. The Baroque musical language is transfered and translated into other languages, other styles. And a novel mixture of pop-, jazz and Baroque emerges: Transbaroque.
This transbaroque music is now confronted by Baroque music - the semi-electric violin with the Baroque violin. The Matteis Project sets up a time-bridge spanning 300 years.
The transbaroque music you hear on this page and more music samples provide an initial aural impression of this amalgamation of old and new, of a mysterious tie between two epochs.
Baroque ReImagined
“ReImagine” means discover afresh - alter something to such an extent that it appears new. The Matteis Project is about inventing Baroque music in a new way. Instead of combining external features with one another, we look for inner reference points between Early music and contemporary styles. Rather than just “pepping up” Baroque music, or (as is so central to original historical performance) acting as restaurators, we instead translate the music and transfer it into a different style. In the process we are reaching far into the emotional core, into the most intimate part of this music: to the “Affektabläufen”, the sequences of affects. It is with the help of drawings that we manage to separate these from the whole, and now reinvigorate them in a new musical language - in a combination of empathy-laden “reImagination” and exact methodology.
Transbaroque & More
Through our process of translation, various new musical styles originate - in particular one which we call Transbaroque. Here we link up baroque gestures with pop and jazz musical structures to create a new style. Transbaroque is played on electrically amplified instruments: a five-stringed semi-acoustic violin, electric guitar, electric bass and drumset. Popbaroque is a musical form for the 21st century: dance-like, catchy, seductive. The music samples 3-7 provide examples of the Transbaroque style.
Baroque represents the idea of the restauration of an original: so too could Matteis’ music have sounded in his time. We use as a guideline the knowledge discovered through the practice of historical performance, and play with rich ornamentation on instruments built to original scale. Romantic is our Vintage-Version: this is how people in the late nineteenth century portrayed Matteis’ music. Wind Noise finally is the most multi-faceted musical style: here music is immersed in water and buffeted by the noise of the wind.
These different “reImaginings” now come together: the Suite 4TIMES1 for example, which sets up four translations of the same music opposite one another, promises a challenging, meditative listening experience. Baroque, Popbaroque, Romantic and Wind Noise allow quite different images and associations to emerge which are at the same time inwardly identical. Just as people who seem strangers to one another from different periods and cultures in fact enjoy similarity in their innermost being. The Suite 4TIMES1 can be found on music samples 8-11.
What exactly links different (music-)worlds with one another? Finding the answer to this question has become our passionate quest... With the Matteis Project we want to search for inner references, make similarities tangible and thereby continually respect the differences.