Kum!

Tabula Rasa Ensemble
Music By Stefano Battaglia
Recording October 2020
Mixing / Mastering July 2022 Studio Artesuono – Cavalicco (Udine)
Sound Engineer Stefano Amerio
Artistic Production Stefano Battaglia, Tabula Rasa
Executive Production Accademia Musicale Chigiana
Co-production Siena Jazz –  Accademia Nazionale del Jazz
Cover Astra Limen Artwork
Graphics Elisa Caldana

Available on

KUM! 3 CD BOX SET available on

It is a record inspired by the miracle in its etymological sense: miraculum, a wondrous event beyond the laws of nature, something that exceeds the limits of normal predictability and reaches beyond human capability. Those who love music know that music itself is the privileged place for encountering miracles, and that sound is the key capable of opening the doors of wonder, of the unexpected, of the unheard.

This mystery—the miracle of sound—is the irresistible core of musical improvisation. Creativity, and therefore creation, inherently produce wonder; yet the sum of individual awareness and skill is never enough to fully predict or control the musical outcome. Hence the enchantment of encountering sound as matter, the revelation it brings.
This emotion must be protected, not rationalized. In my case, the very purpose is to create the mystery—not to solve it, and certainly not to explain it. What I have never seen and do not understand compels me to return to that place and explore it again.

Sound guides us toward a practice and a form of knowledge that is both esoteric and initiatory. Esoteric because it feeds on its own mystery; initiatory because it is born, reveals itself, and at the same time fosters the individual and collective revelation of its performers-creators through the path, the journey—often troubled—that the mystery invites us to undertake, or in some cases forces us to face.

Kum! is the root of many words that carry the same meaning: to rise, but also to rise again, to stand, to remain upright and steadfast.
To rise again from a kind of death understood as a passage, a crossing, a painful experience or illness. A meaning enriched by the concepts of being, existing, taking one’s place, but also of (re)ascending, (re)setting out on the path, and (re)starting.

It is the work that translates into music the global pandemic experience lived between 2020 and 2022.

GLOSSARY

Like the concluding piece Lucem, this work narrates the experience of transcendence through the renunciation of the self—which, in music, becomes the renunciation of idiomatic language and phrasing in favor of a universal purity achieved through a complete deconstruction of action.
Sound exists by itself, in itself and for itself, and the stretching of rhythms and values becomes the key to this slow vertical process, a manifestation of ascetic ascent.

The written material is nothing more than a simple ascending chromatic scale, yet individual discipline in deconstructing it performs the magic: isolated tones, deprived of attack, enter into osmosis with one another and generate an ethereal sensation of loss, of separation from the body.

This piece tells the story of Isaah, the poor hemorrhaging woman—an emblem of simplicity, faith, and discernment. Her illness, besides rendering her legally impure at the time, was humiliating and deprived her of the possibility of having children.
When, amid the crowd, Isaah manages to touch the cloak of Jesus, she immediately feels the flow of blood stop.

Rise!
The compositional principle connecting Kum!, Qawm, and Goum is that of transformation and variation. A single melody is thus manipulated and subjected to different harmonic variations, creating a powerful—yet not overly explicit—thematic thread linking the three albums.

Kum! represents the relationship between the sacred and the magical dimensions of the miracle. Musically, in the solo piano version, this is expressed through the interplay between the perfect triads of the orchestrations—an archetypal symbol of the sacred—and the whole-tone scale of the chant, devoid of polarity, evoking the magical element.

Stones.
After the dramatic encounter with evil culminating in the exorcism of the possessed man of Gerasa, Jesus once again crosses to the other side of the Lake of Tiberias (also known as the Sea of Galilee or Lake Gennesaret), arriving in Galilee on its stony shore.

There is a powerful dialogue between the two sides of the lake: storm and peace, water and stone, the sublime and the earthly, solitude and the crowd, good and evil.

It is important to extract from the symbolic, evangelical narrative of the Bible those elements that are historically concrete, material, and tied to the landscape—elements that remind us of the sun and nights of the Middle East, of its people and bread, its fishermen and fish, its stones and figs, its blood and olive trees.

It is a magic formula, an incantation. A form without form, created to evoke the magic of the miracle and the miracle of magic through the crowd’s incredulous astonishment in the face of the Master’s esoteric and virtuosic gestures—gestures that I imagine embodied by the flute.

When evening came, Jesus said to them: “Let us cross over to the other side.” Evening marks the end of the “didactic” day of teaching in parables and the beginning of a series of boat journeys undertaken by Jesus, back and forth between the Jewish western shore and the eastern shore of the lake.

This account is the first in a sequence of miracles performed outside the boundaries of Galilee, in pagan territory. Darkness and wind advance, and the storm makes the crossing terrifying. Jesus appears in perfect control of the unleashed forces of nature, and his composure prompts the disciples to question the identity of the Master: Who then is this man?

His commands, which restore calm to the waters, are themselves a miracle and represent the first “public” revelation of Jesus—the one who holds authority over the storm, the wind, and the sea.

A temptation I could not resist: to draw on the semantic possibilities of a traditional piano trio (here oboe, cello, and piano) and use counterpoint as a technique to evoke the inlay of events mysteriously interwoven and unfolding simultaneously upon Jesus’ arrival in Galilee—the healing of Isaah and the resurrection of the young girl.
Simultaneous dialogues: those with the crowd, and those with Jairus.

For its plaintive sound, the tibia (plural tibiae) accompanied lamenting song during funeral rites, as the poet Horace recounts. Its name naturally derives from being made from an animal’s shinbone, usually that of a sheep or a donkey.

The flute is a symbolic, universal instrument—one that has always existed: hollow bones, bamboo reeds, the talus bone of archetypal folktales, all the way to the great traditions of modern music, from Debussy to Boulez, passing through Messiaen’s Le Merle Noir.

After the human voice, it is the instrument that most profoundly represents atemporality, bridging antiquity and modernity, the primitive and the sophisticated, the divine and the earthly, the sacred and the profane, spirit and senses—the asceticism of its silvery register and the sensuality of the body and its breath.

Jesus reached the shore, and amid the confusion of the great crowd, the sound of a flute and bagpipes was heard.

Complementary and specular to the opening Elevatio, the album closes with another transfiguration: light.
The marvel of light is an allusion to life, (re)birth, resurrection, and elevation. Here, deconstruction explores the brightest and most luminous registers of the instruments, contrasted with the strings of harp and piano.

Initiatory and womb-like light, like the one we experience at birth; blinding like the Mediterranean sun; faint like candlelight; incandescent like lava—the blood of the earth. Sound and light are the sources of timbre and color, the identifying and identity-shaping marks of every musician and painter.

Finally, the hope of an ascent, the consolation of becoming light.
A transparent luminous trail.

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