Gianni Possio or "The sound there isn't"


During the present time we live in an overdoing, overstepping state, with ostentation or no, chase to normal fellows (those who tell something speaking, those who lead to honesty also with themselves, those who risk and pay on their own account, those who write music just as they want) is a reserved, out-of-date and counterproductive pastime; an affront regarding a more and more falling kind. Gianni Possio (Turin, 1953) represents, in the gloomy and inactive panorama of Italian contemporary composers, a really particular one: his professional imposing air, for instance, is so minimal, to make us believe that this musician isn't almost of the same band of the "young composers"; his human carefulness to make life and calling, moreover, make the musical "society" (but not the public) running the risk of continuous misunderstandings and produce dismay even in Possio. But he is a professional one and by handfuls!
Gianni Possio, atones for his normality long ago with a number of ample successes but never so smashing to bring him to the honors of the chronicles and of the media; he looks exempt of polemic's virus, not of intelligence one, so his profession, since more or less fifteen years, continues out of the rules of communicative rhetoric, out of talk-show, out of newspaper or television abuses and with a consequent limited clamor about Possio as personage or composer. In this sense he lives between the latitude of wisdom and a labyrinth of cunnings, he experiments every day the instability of luck and fame; such as plots, doubts, slanders, sometimes requested, sometimes - more rarely - put on him by a cultural and artistic assembly that is the kingdom of perceive brokers, those who have persisted in mistaking, more or less forcibly, and privilege ideas as post-modern; this idea is however wanting in referring a philosophical and essential meaning to normal change of likings.
During this time that's no more strange or unexplainable, complicated of dreadful that any "contemporariness", we lose a privileged relation with arts and, through them, with knowledge; we restrain ourselves to "perceiving". However it's an infected perceiving, we delegate to others, regarding its definition of places and limits of action. We are passive subjects, we survive (and we forget that we need art, music, for living, for giving meaning to our life, not for surviving), we don't give a hint of a possible mind impulse: we accept and over and above into the bargain we justify the reality imposed from the outside and we take but notice of it, so there is the propensity for removing any critical asperity and for dissolving culture in description.
Nevertheless Possio takes another way, putting on the wrong one the exegetes and the detractors who, during these years, made him enrolled, separated like in pigeon-holes, explained and therefore owned, overcome; he seeks the specific against growing up pain through his musical production, that's his own way of being and telling himself (according however with Gianfranco Zàccaro, the one quick understanding in Italian musicology), but he doesn't believe, under trust influence at least, that the growing up must be extant. Nay he doubts this trust and, consequently, he calls into question the self-logic of the specific.
Therefore Gianni Possio lives and writes music, reads, breathes, feels, listens to, sees and carries on his profession with the same freedom, the same ideological discontinuance, the same care and with the same nonchalance he faces life.
Stefano Leoni