Fausto Sebastiani’s musical writing can be characterized by a particular attention to timbre. More recently his works have begun to breathe new life to different aspects of other sound worlds. In some cases, references are explicit, but more often they are like distant ghosts hidden in a melodic fragments, in embellishments, or in musical gestures. Such aspects emerge distinctly in the work Il Paese degli uomini integri (“The land of incorruptible people”). Here one perceives another recognizable trait of Sebastiani’s writing, namely the need to identify in each composition a coherence to the overall project, which driving his creative work in the conception, in the conduction of the musical subject, and in the clarity of the formal construction. The work is a tale set to music, based on a text by Sandro Cappelletto, dedicated to the political history of the last decades of Burkina Faso. It draws inspiration from the story of Captain Thomas Sankara, elected Prime Minister of the former French colony of Alto Volta in January 1983, later to be called Burkina-Faso, or “The land of incorruptible people”. Sebastiani’s vision brings into play different aspects of “composing”, such as predicting the slightest variations in musical figures, interweaving relationships and associations of ideas, recalling music from other times or places (for example African or jazz styles), drawing inspiration from other art forms, often literary or poetic, to place the work at the center of a dialogue with current social or political problems (for example migration from disadvantaged countries). This is music, as the composer points out, “that can hint at our hidden and tormented interiority, in which more questions are asked than answers given; it is a musical and artistic study in contrasts, that will reveal possibilities that will exist only if we take the time to listen.”
