Stoned

Di Napoli and Romano and stone

Over the weekend we attended a concert given in an old Baroque village church by a Sicilian artist, Tony di Napoli, together with singer Brigitte Romano. ‘Canti e petri blu pi scacciari i pinzeri’ brought together chants inspired by Sicilian traditional folksongs (and all sung in dialect) and lithophones. What, you ask, are lithophones? They are pieces of stone, struck or rubbed to produce musical notes. Di Napoli used rubber balls on the end of drumsticks and didn’t just strike the stones but also got a deep and melodious sound out of them by rubbing them slowly. The result was a series of wonderfully haunting melodies. How long, I wondered, before we hear them as a film score of some sort?