Francesco Lotoro presents his "Manifesto for Musical Humanism" in Molfetta.

Locandina dell'evento

On February 21st , at 7:00 pm , in Molfetta (Bari) , at the IL GHIGNO – UN MARE DI STORIE bookshop (via G. Salepico 47, free admission), Maestro Francesco Lotoro, pianist and piano teacher at the Niccolò Piccinni Conservatory of Bari, will present his new book, “Manifesto per un Umanesimo Musicale” (ILMC Edizioni). The author, a musician from Barletta who has been involved for over 35 years in researching musical production in concentration and extermination camps and other places of civil and military captivity during the Second World War, wanted to offer with this book a profoundly alternative reading of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century, less political and more historical-humanistic, showing us the Ghettos, Lagers and Gulags as great powerhouses of intellect and heart, laboratories of a new Vitruvian Man, despite their extreme drama. The book, which features a prestigious preface by Ugo Volli (former professor of Text Semiotics at the University of Turin), is a work on concentration camp music—that is, music created in conditions of deprivation of fundamental human rights from the opening of the Dachau concentration camp to the death of Stalin—but it is also an invitation to rethink a strongly anthropocentric Europe in which Culture and Art in general are drivers of social well-being and the economy.

Lotoro's new book is the result of research conducted with the financial support of the Puglia Region, the Claims Conference, the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, and the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah. In the book's preface, Volli writes that "Stories, music, and thoughts were created in ghettos, concentration camps, and gulags [...] Francesco Lotoro's reconstruction efforts went beyond the conventional sense of the term to encompass all situations in which music is produced in conditions of confinement: Soviet gulags, prisons, mental institutions [...] This is the profoundly artistic and human theme that Lotoro invites us to consider: the emancipatory role of musical creation in captivity and deportation."

Thousands of works have come down to us from ghettos, concentration camps, and gulags. More material has been lost and rediscovered than we dared imagine, but there are still many scores and phonographic sources to be recovered. These men were repairing a broken world, and if the Earth has not yet disintegrated and if art still has a profound social meaning, it is thanks to them.

The author writes: "The most effective response to war may not be peace but a more sophisticated war: opening theaters and libraries, founding orchestras and performing concerts everywhere, inaugurating academic courses dedicated to music written in civilian and military captivity. We are not excavating the ruins of Pompeii; we are literally rebuilding it brick by brick. This music has not endured decades of oblivion only to stop at its final steps, nor has it emerged from the freezer of history to rot, unperformed and unpublished, on the shelves of modern archives and museums."

The "Manifesto for a Musical Humanism," within the limitations but also the many possibilities of a book, aims to spur us to rethink concepts and ideas about music in light of the immense task of recovering all the music written in ghettos, concentration camps, and gulags. This musical literature is revealing more to us than we dared imagine. From 1933 to 1953, these musicians wrote the music of our day, and on this principle, a new humanism can be founded.