Walter Marchetti
La Caccia

Marchetti Walter, veteran of the Italian avant-garde scene, has always been overlooked by the "Luminaries of Contemporary Music" perhaps because he used to frequent Spanish cities like Madrid, Barcelona, and San Sebastián de los Reyes for the ZAJ Festivals. In fact, he remains the first in Italy to create electronic music outside of the RAI's Phonology Center, the very first to use a synthesizer in Italy, well before Frederick Rzewski and his collective Musica Elettronica Viva.

In 1964, he was in Rome and, collaborating with Paul Ketoff, the two built the first true synthesizer "made in Italy", the GRS Synket controlled by a two-octave keyboard, beating Robert Moog by a year (the prototype is still preserved in working condition at the Synthorama Museum in Switzerland). With that machine, he created two suites of pure noise: "Osmanthus Fragrans" and "Adversus" (the author is unable to provide the performer of these compositions with any indication or suggestion for their realization). With the aforementioned pieces, Marchetti created the archetype of what is today called "drone music", published on vinyl (In Terram Utopicam - Lavorare in silenzio, chiacchierando si produce poco e male) only in 1977 thanks to the interest of the visionary Gianni Sassi, already a producer of Area and various other poly-stylistic realities of the Italian underground. But Marchetti remained entirely an acoustic avant-gardist, distant from the Dadaist ideals of the Cologne Studio, and increasingly drawn to the American school and John Cage. He was with the maestro at the Lirico in Milan that sad evening of December 2nd, '77, in charge of the projector that reflected one after another the beautiful drawings of Thoreau which were destroyed. Both Marchetti and Cage risked their lives that night, but as Roberto Calasso aptly pointed out in "Il piacere del vuoto", those young people, intellectuals only in words, did not even realize that by using the black blindfold they were repeating an ancient gesture, that with which the musician was elected "pharmakon", as narrated by Plato in the Republic.

To talk about the album La Caccia (1974), which contains the studio version of his most brilliant, as well as original, composition, one must necessarily go back to December of 1965 when the first two performances of the eponymous work took place; "version for an enclosed space" (December 11) and "open-air version" (December 15). The performing quartet is equipped with four different alphanumeric tables, which represent the "score"; the instruments provided are solely artificial bird calls that hunters typically use and that perfectly imitate the songs of birds and the ungulate of their young. Each performer plays only the calls by mouth, hand, etc., following a precise order of letters from the alphabet, with each letter representing a different call, and each number a certain number of steps in a chosen direction. The result is a continuous, multifaceted, and exasperating mass of animal natural sounds circulating 360 degrees around the present listener. The version on record seems like a real concert performed by a multitude of animals including Wagtail, Wigeon, Eagle, Woodcock, Partridge, Woodpecker, Lark, Duck, Tawny Owl, Heron, Quail, Kingfisher, Teal, Partridge, Jay, Capercaillie, Cuckoo, Wood Pigeon, Pheasant, and more, that more than an experienced hunter, an ornithologist would be needed to identify all the characters performing in this long "song" of forty and more minutes. Despite the impeccable recording made in one of the best recording studios in Rome, the live version gains that spatiality that the simple stereo effect could not recreate.

Even if the law were only minimally true according to which a work of human ingenuity in the artistic field, of any value or disdain, never before conceived by anyone else, is to be considered more than a masterpiece, a work of genius, it is presumed that for originality "La Caccia" by Walter Marchetti can quietly be ranked among the 100 most important works of 20th Century Contemporary Music.