Inspired by poet Alda Merini, the Italian violinist and vocalist composes a nuanced investigation of the divine feminine, illuminating complex emotional specifics of motherhood and life.
For those less inclined toward astrology, celebrity birthdays can be a shortcut to understanding one’s arrival on the cosmic scene. It’s an amusing, low-stakes thought exercise: What traits do you share with a more minor kind of star? The free-improvising violinist Silvia Tarozzi found such a kinship with a fellow Italian, celebrated Milanese poet Alda Merini, who shares a March 21 birthday with the Bologna musician. Over the course of a decade, Tarozzi used the natural rhythms of Merini’s poetry as scaffolding for her works-in-progress, and those pieces became her new album, Mi specchio e rifletto (I mirror and reflect). Her careful assemblage is a nuanced investigation of the divine feminine, refracting the quotidian weight of womanhood through an improvisor’s prism.
The album’s coruscating title track builds a clever infinite-mirror illusion, scalloping Tarozzi’s voice as she names the facial features in her reflection. Her overlapping vocal rounds deliver the upside-down feeling of trying to square one’s own self-perception with that of the outside world. And in vocalizing what she sees in the mirror, Tarozzi makes herself more visible. The theme carries throughout the record as she shifts between diaphanous contemporary-classical flutters and murky synth gnarls, illuminating the complex emotional specifics of motherhood and life as a working musician.
Tarozzi deploys familiar gestures of femininity and gradually peels them apart to reveal internal tumult. Though she counts Deep Listening oracle Pauline Oliveros as one of her most influential mentors, her own approach prioritizes a busier array of textures applied across shorter, self-contained compositions. She begins the album with “Al cancello,” a brisk instrumental that she leads with cheerful violin as flute and piccolo sparkle around slow, curving cello parts. On “La forza del canto,” a plucked violin over downcast strings introduces a sense of anxiety, and “La sostanza dell’affetto” dives in deeper, sliding away on a tail of elastic guitars that melt over one another like popsicles in summer heat. “Domina” introduces more tension, building friction between multiple layers of synths and processed vocals as Tarozzi repeatedly warns, “Smettila di ascoltarli/Ti sfrutteranno”: “Stop listening to them/They will exploit you.”
Nodding to their shared birthday, “La forza del canto” is Tarozzi’s most direct tribute to Merini, and she presses her voice upward on the song’s wide-open refrain. It’s wind in sails; it sounds like trying, a daring tribute to women who choose a public life. Merini, who died in 2009, was lauded in her home country for her insight on love, religion, heartbreak, eroticism, and suffering. She spent much of her adult life institutionalized and separated from her children, an experience she detailed in her 1989 memoir A Rage of Love. The sweeping romantic ache of her work—little of which has received English translation—echoes out of the chasm between her full, deep sense of self and others’ refusal to acknowledge it.
Tarozzi built her compositions around the rhythmic structure of Merini’s verse, but copyright issues meant that she eventually had to complete the pieces with her own lyrics. Her words explore specific minutiae that bring her fulfillment: a gentle light splashing over violets, a spider’s taut silk, the generous sense of wonder in the eyes of a loved one. On 2015’s Apocalypse, girl, Jenny Hval asked, “What is it to take care of yourself? What are we taking care of?” With Mi specchio e rifletto, Tarozzi addresses the subtleties of those questions. She writes in her liner notes that her compositions were influenced by “the psychedelic experience of pregnancy,” which manifests in the offset saxophone flares of “Sembra neve” and the synthetic mechanical fizz of “...e non volevi le ali.” Joni Mitchell once said she used suspended chords to express unresolved questions about the outcome of her own life, and Tarozzi’s wavering loose ends on “Domina” and “Hai nella bocca un silenzio” relay a similar overwhelmed uncertainty.
With the album’s closing number, “xxx Anna,” Tarozzi offers a touching, if unorthodox, love note to her grandmother. By resurrecting and collaging fragments from earlier in the album, she seeks to approximate the internal state of her grandmother’s mind as she grappled with dementia. After familiar excerpts meet a chaotic crescendo, the piece concludes with a warm sense of calm. Like “Al balcone,” which nods to a tradition of elderly Italians holding court on their balconies, “xxx Anna” is an empathetic appreciation of her foremothers. By connecting her own ancestry with Merini’s influence, Tarozzi speaks to a larger, often invisible web of women and the shared experiences of their private lives.
The date that first bound Tarozzi to Merini traditionally falls around the vernal equinox, the annual starting pistol for renewed growth and abundance. Though the women were separated by time, Mi specchio e rifletto is the bountiful garden of their meeting. Like Merini and so many others, Silvia Tarozzi wants to be seen as her full self. She paints private worlds, illustrating labyrinthine feelings in new colors. And by rendering her own reflection more brilliant, Tarozzi makes it easier for others to see themselves, too.
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