Colpa di Fulmine

Colpa di Fulmine is a artistic work that uses text and music to create an aural depiction of the struggle to determine what is true when even one’s own ability to discern between truth and falsehood is subject to doubt. When the surrounding society is as polarized as it is politicized, standing in the “middle ground” in respect to a divisive topic (such as the “identity politics” regarding sexuality and gender, or the nature and degree of the authority of religious doctrine) is tantamount to standing against both sides of the contention. Although the work cannot truly recreate the experience that it depicts, it endeavors to give the listener a maximally true-to-life glimpse of how it is to live life while seeing the world through the particular lens that the speaker has developed as a result of their life experiences. The text —a multilingual patchwork comprised of the composer’s own prose and poetry, excerpts from instant-messaging conversations, passages from the Bible, and the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic —is accompanied by an original musical score that invokes quotations from pre-existing works as well as original themes. The textual sources interact with and even reframe one another throughout the piece, and their interconnections convey the psychological and philosophical intricacies of the speaker’s experiential reality. Likewise, motivic repetition and permutation in the score augment and provide insight into the message of the text to which it is intimately and multiply joined. Together, the two elements (text and music) form a portrait of a quest to find oneself when “identity” might be a mark of deception; of a battle between the rational mind and the apparently irrational parts of reality; and, ultimately, of hope that is held even when no hope seems to withstand scrutiny.