ABSTRACT
While celebrating the music of Luigi Boccherini, a famous Italian composer and performer (1743 Lucca–1805 Madrid), Giovanni Sollima dramatises his life and work by relocating them from eighteenth-century Lucca to twentieth-century New York. Crossing temporal and geographical borders through artistic imagination Sollima presents Boccherini as a visionary traveller now seen as one of today’s runners in Central Park. A north-American city recognised as a multi-ethnic experiment leads Sollima to identify both artistic creation and music as sites of contamination, possibly borderscapes, as distinct from the tangible borders that regulate human daily life. Sollima’s composition We Were Trees. L. B. files, for cello and ensemble strikingly explores the dismantling and reassembling of musical and cultural themes (Sollima, 2008). File n. 5, titled ‘Boccherineo’, adds music to the voice of Senegalese griot Gilbert Diop Abdourahmane, furnishing fascinating nuances to the central theme of reactivating Boccherini’s music for today through a visionary movement crossing cultures, life styles and art forms such as music, singing, poetry, storytelling and performance.
