The Partnership with SOUNDTRACK Records
2023 was a significant year for Tony: after many years as an independent producer of his records and leading numerous initiatives to support emerging artists, including the remarkable talent pool of musicians nurtured through the music development Laboratories he has conducted since 2000, the first of two albums resulting from his collaboration with the newly established SOUNDTRACK Records was released.
It marked the beginning of a journey that involved a lengthy phase of discussion and planning with Massimo Pontoriero, “un amico di vecchia data” Tony recounts, “with whom there has always been a harmony, a shared understanding regarding various aspects of the difficult profession of being a musician, but also the importance of making music that can exist beyond mere market interests, striving to protect new generations of musicians, perhaps by offering them support for more courageous and sincere original projects.”.
He adds: “Massimo and I have always understood each other. So, at a certain point, it was natural to think of working together on record projects and contributing to this wonderful SOUNDTRACK Records project” ”.
“We created SOUNDTRACK Records,” says Massimo, “to give independent artists administrative, legal, organizational, and marketing support while ensuring fairness and transparency…
In such a complicated world, we want to prevent artists from wasting their time on bureaucracy, neglecting their true nature: making music, making art.
Our idea is to support projects of authenticity: if an artist proposes sincere works to us, whatever the genre, we are interested.
We started with Tony Carnevale because our meeting was ideal:
- first of all, his music. Beyond being ‘authentic,’ it is the closest I could find to my passions: symphonic roots, rock, and especially progressive music, which we understand as a vision open to any influence and evolution.
- Then I found a person. Scrupulous, honest, and deeply dedicated to the artistic mission. I share with him the attention to detail, from the philosophical to the managerial aspects, passing through every production refinement.
- Finally, there is the philosophy that unites us, a vision that embraces an absolute but widespread commitment and an aspiration directed at expressive essence rather than form for its own sake.
All of this is also found in the spirit of Tu Che Mi Puoi Capire, a work that, in my opinion, sublimates the artist’s history. Like in a space-time portal, Tony gathers and encloses his roots behind him to open up to a new future…
It is necessarily a solo work to prepare for new encounters.
First and foremost, the encounter with his faithful listeners, those who, like me, can understand.”
16/04/2023 – Tu Che Mi Puoi Capire
“Tony Carnevale opened the way: the path, still uncertain and very difficult, of the search for a “third way” between rock and symphonic music has been traced; the challenge is open.”
(Roberto Biasco – Left, luglio 2023)
“Je me dis qu’il est peut être temps que le monde du rock progressif se rende enfin compte de ce que cet immense musicien italien apporte discrètement à ce courant musical depuis maintenant plus de trente ans.”
(Louis de Ny – Le petit monde du Rock Progresif Italien, maggio 2023)
On 21 April 2023, the album “Tu Che Mi Puoi Capire – Immagini Per Pianoforte e Orchestra“ (SDK-TC1-2022-001), was released, Tony Carnevale’s ninth original work, on vinyl with an included bonus CD.
“This is a special album where the underlying expressive movement is linked to separations, whether from ‘dissonant’ relationships or natural events, and the subsequent memories that settle deeply due to such separations. It is an album with many dedications written on the back cover, some to people who are no longer with us, others to people from whom one has separated but whose affectionate and indelible memory remains. It is, therefore, also a work of recreating such memories; hence, the choice of vinyl to recreate, precisely, those magical moments when, as teenagers in the 1970s, we would queue outside record shops because a new album had just been released. Then perhaps we would buy just one and run to the person’s home with the ‘best stereo’ to listen together. ”
(Tony Carnevale)
It was precisely this “listening together,” which was one of the author’s formative elements and even led him to build, upon this collective listening experience, one of the cornerstones of the Original Music Development Laboratoires – which boast the prestigious sponsorship of SIAE and the support of IMAIE – that he has directed from 2000. This inspired us to present Tony’s new work on 16 April 2023, with a special collective listening event at the Teatro Basilica in Rome: an incredibly intense emotional experience, a resonance of emotions, the warmth of encounters that will long remain in the hearts of all those present in the packed hall.
“This approach to music, more related to listening, represents a sharper and more courageous vision, at a time in history when vision tends to prevail, due to the priority that performance activity has gained at the expense of the deeper sense of sounds: too often people go to “see” a concert, rather than to “hear,” in the deepest sense of the word.
Perhaps this is precisely the moment to propose a reconquest of listening together, of experiencing a collective exchange of emotional reactions, a ‘live’ exchange of sensations, of shared affective experiences.”
Perhaps having the author tell us the meaning of the work, his personal and emotional experience, the memories, the anecdotes, and the truth about the sounds he chose to establish an emotional relationship with other human beings.
“Listening together”.
(Tony Carnevale)
(Tony Carnevale)
Born of emotional experience, serving as a watershed between the roots of the artist’s musical history and the path that will lead him toward future goals, is a tribute to Francesco Di Giacomo and Rodolfo Maltese of Banco: a symphonic version of the well-known song La vita che grida, originally published on the eponymous album in 1995.
Here, the form of a mini-suite for solo cello, piano, orchestra, and band provides the opportunity to build a tribute to friends, to the “myths” of the past, as well illustrated by the video made for the piece:
THE LYRICS:
Sbatte nei perché questa vita che grida – e un colpo è una ferita
Spalle contro il muro guarda dritto a te – non perdere la sfida
Quanto durerà quella linea infinita – che ti confonde il volo
Segui quella scia di un airone che migra
Che cerca quello che non ha
la terra che non ha
racconterà di sè a un cielo che già sa
che un altro giorno verrà.
Portala con te questa vita che grida – che cerca un’altra riva
Che non cede mai a una notte sbagliata – ma ha il sole tra le dita
Sole che verrà a incendiarti la vita – con tutto il suo calore
Donna che sarà un vita che grida
E come un’onda crescerà
e mare si farà
racconterà di te
di un uomo che già sa
che un altro giorno verrà
che un altro giorno verrà
in questa vita che grida, che grida, che grida..
Portala con te questa vita che grida.
”Tutta la musica di Tony Carnevale è metafora della vita. Tutto è “vita che grida” attorno a Tony, come una sorta di animismo, accomunando spiritualità e realtà, non in maniera trascendente ma attraverso l’identificazione tra spirito e materia.”
(Pas Pas Scarpato – Prog e dintorni, giugno 2023)
“The subtitle of Tu Che Mi Puoi Capire is linked to a whole personal research that seeks to propose music as a ‘psychic experience,’ ‘sound’ as a psychic image: when we dream, and images form from our unconscious, we ‘hear’ sounds without there being any physical perception. This means that ‘sound,’ on a mental level, is an image. And then there is ‘resonance,’ the creative reaction of the listener, who creates a new ‘image’ within themselves, a psychic experience stimulated by the sounds, by another human creativity.”
Tu Che Mi Puoi Capire, …ascolta”.
(Tony Carnevale)
III Movimento - Extended Version
On 2 January 2023 “III Movimento – A Dance Opera For Symphonic-Rock Orchestra – Extended Version“ (SDK-TC1-2022-002), was released. This is a new edition of Tony Carnevale’s third album from 1999, extended and analogically remastered.
“Recreate.
This seems to be the most suitable word to describe this new edition of III Movimento.
It is like bringing the memory of those creative moments and relationships into the present.
The first edition, published in 1999, was born from the need to complete a journey that began with Risonanze and continued with “La Vita Che Grida”; those early works were later enriched by new experiences, particularly the exhilarating relationship with the musicians who participated in the TC Open Project, with whom we performed several concerts.
Then came the meeting with choreographer Elisabetta Melchiorri, who inspired me to explore the relationship between the invisible movement of sounds and the visible movement of bodies, both driven by the invisible movement of human creative thought. This led me to work on a project in which music and dance merge into a new expressive image, neither being a support for the other; still, both aiming to express together the fruit of that meeting and fusion: III Movimento, indeed, a Dance Opera for Symphonic-Rock Orchestra.
The old edition was released in a triple box set containing the first two CDs, as many of the pieces used for the choreographic opera had already been published in those works; Il Cammino and Incompiuta I° Parte, however, had never been completed as productions: they were therefore “demos,” published precisely because the choreographic work had been developed on them, to the point that they could no longer be imagined in any other form.
From a music critic’s perspective, the work was positioned in the realm of Modern Symphonism and Symphonic Rock. However, considering it with today’s awareness, it perhaps already represented a crossover between the progressive sense of certain music and the sounds of the symphony orchestra, so much so that it could be defined as Cross Prog.
The meaning of this discussion is even more evident in the reworking of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, already reinterpreted by Ravel in an orchestral version and by ELP in a Prog version. The version proposed in this CD is different, as it uses the original piano material to construct different flows and rhythmic-symphonic sounds, recomposing what the Russian musician created into a new form and structure. The poetic intent is to make it clear that music is music, that is, an expressive language representing the human being This non-rational language goes beyond any genre and era: what changes are only the representative forms, the linguistic codes.
The choreographic work was later performed internationally (including at the Cairo Opera House and the Teatro Olimpico in Rome). Dr. Daniela Cerrone conducted a university study on it: she investigated the peculiar relationship between musician and choreographer in which the masculine and feminine create particular stimuli and merge into an otherwise unimaginable expressive synergy.
The diversity that produces uniqueness.
So, recreating those moments by giving autonomy to this CD by adding the second part of Incompiuta, which completes the meaning of this work. The sounds of that time have seen the possibility of “rebirth” to new life thanks to analogical remastering: perhaps in this, there is the metaphor of returning to being a musician after a long hiatus, during which I focused on training other artists and trainers. All this was also made possible thanks to a new relationship that I started with Massimo Pontoriero of SOUNDTRACK Records, which gave me new stimuli to create and realize using the language that has always fascinated me more than any other: the invisible sounds from the depths of the human being, those sounds that, when they find concreteness and substance in material sounds, we can call music. ”
(Tony Carnevale)
