Calcatronica: an Electronic Music Festival in Medieval Italy
Three days of mayhem and music beneath the stars
August in Italy is a shimmering sun devil of dusty roads, ripening wheat fields, and sheets hung out to dry. It’s going into a pasticceria and pressing your hands against the glass case with the gelato inside, just to feel the cold. Everything is hot and slow to the point of feeling drugged, so when ferragosto rolls around, most Italians head for the beach.
Ferragosto is a three-day holiday in the middle of August. If, like my boyfriend John, the beach is not your friend, you end up having to make your own fun. In August of 2013, brooding about the long hot holiday, that’s exactly what he did.
John is the grandson of famous composer Hoagy Carmichael and is a lifelong jazz drummer who also composes electronic music. The idea of hosting a night of electronic music in a medieval village like Calcata, his village at the time, strongly appealed to him. It would be a juxtaposition of opposites: the most cutting-edge modern sounds backdropped against the crumbling, sepia-tinted walls of a village already famous for its artistic offerings. Equally appealing was the idea of providing entertainment for those too broke to go to the beach on ferragosto, the baristas, grocery store workers, gas station attendants. It would be a people’s event.
He called some friends together to have dinner down in the piazza—electronic music artists, a lighting designer, a local arts organizer—and Calcatronica was born.
Immediately, there was pushback from some of the older inhabitants of Calcata who feared hordes of wild-eyed young people descending from Rome, smashing windows, micturating in alleyways. These were Calcatese who still listened to Communist folk crooners from the sixties. They hated electronic music. They hated most everything, actually, and spent hours each day bitterly complaining. With admirable forbearance, John listened to their concerns. Yes, he would clean up the trash. No, he wouldn’t play music past one a.m.
On the night of the event, the village was at its charming best. A stage had been erected in the piazza next to the 18th century water pump. Candles flickered. Incense perfumed the air. And over 300 people streamed up the hill to listen to John’s moody, haunting music on an ancient rock in the middle of a valley beneath a star-swept sky. A spell was cast over viewer and performer alike. Even the complainers were silenced, for something extraordinary was happening, something they, too, sensed if not understood. Calcatronica wasn’t just an electronic music festival. It was the fulfillment of a promise made by the squatters who repopulated the dead village in the sixties. The ones who forsook heat and running water in order to live cheaply in a cave and make art.
John had expected maybe fifty people. When over 350 showed up, he knew he was onto something.
The magic of that experience lit a fire inside John’s brain. In true entrepreneurial spirit, he wanted to recreate Calcatronica the next year, only with more artists and more venues. Il Granarone was a multi-purpose artists’ space. Why not hold afternoon seminars on the history of electronic music there? The caves of sculptor Costantino Morosin could be repurposed for more intimate events, such as Angelina Yeshova’s remarkable music using a theramin, which is two metal antennae that are controlled by a musician using no physical contact. Projected against the craggy walls of the cave would be her signature video of what it might look like to hurtle through space.
With more time to publicize—including going to Rome at night and handing out fliers—even more people came to the event. Instead of one night, Calcatronica was three nights, each one featuring a lineup of different artists and seminars, all free. Since Calcata was an inhabited village, there was no way to charge for admission, and this was a problem since collateral businesses (pizzerias, bars, bakeries) were making tons of money, and yet the artists, including John, whose stress level trying to organize this event was nothing short of stratospheric, were losing money. Some businesses, but by no means all, donated to the cause, but there were still gross inequities. John intended to rectify that the following year by moving the entire event to a gorgeous public amphitheater up the hill in Calcata Nuova.
And that was when the trouble started.
The business owners wanted John to keep Calcatronica exactly where it was. Now, instead of just the usual people bitching, everyone was bitching. A bigger Calcatronica meant bringing in bigger guns who had their own ideas about how to maximize the entertainment experience. Big-name artists cost more money. Having a smooth-running event also cost money—port-a-potties, security, permits, even an environmental impact study.
Despite these obstacles, the most formidable one by far was a government agency called SIAE, the Societa Italiana degli Autori ed Editori.
They drew blood.
On paper, SIAE seems like a perfectly reasonable, even benign, enterprise. Its ostensible purpose is to make sure intellectual property is protected and remunerated.
In practice, all SIAE wanted was its slice of the pie—for doing nothing. The minute Calcatronica started selling tickets, SIAE had its hand out to the tune of 10% of the ticket price. The tickets themselves were to be printed by them and only them. No performer played covers or used other people’s music, mind you. They weren’t members of SIAE. No publishing copywrites were violated. By its very nature, electronic music is original and shares a certain kind of on-the-spot extemporaneousness with jazz. But that didn’t matter. Rules were rules. Pay up.
So in addition to the 1000+ euros just for simply existing, Calcatronica had to pay yet more money if even one person danced. 22% more, in fact.
Obviously, people danced.
Other problems arose. One of the bar owners in Calcata, angry that the event was no longer being held in the village, hired a DJ and did his own “Calcatronica.” His venue, Rock Bar, wasn’t part of the organization, but the police didn’t bother making that distinction when Rock Bar got cited for playing loud music past curfew. Calcatronica not only had to pay Rock Bar’s fines, but had to clean up Rock Bar’s trash. Five in the morning, we were out in the piazza with trash bags, throwing away food wrappers and empty beer bottles.
But the festival itself was glorious. The after-parties went on until dawn. On the final night of Calcatronica, John and I went to an after-party held in a cave overlooking the Treja Valley. When we went outside, the entire valley was blanketed by skeins of fog that were tinted pink by the sun’s first rays. It looked like an ocean of cotton candy, and I will never forget it.
It is John’s sincerest wish to recreate Calcatronica in another medieval village where, hopefully, the locals support the arts instead of trying to exploit them for personal gain. Maybe that’s a naively foolish aspiration. But I will say that dancing with 1,200 strangers in a medieval village under the vast expanse of the sky with all its glittering stars is something everyone should experience.
How about you? Been to any outdoor concerts now that the ‘rona is easing a bit? Leave your comments below.
Outdoor performances in Oregon are just beginning to ramp up, but I'm hoping to see Brandi Carlile in Bend over Labor Day (she makes me wish I was a lesbian). :-)