My violin and I: how attracted to a challenge are you?

An intimate and delicate subject: every musician narrates their life through relationship with their instrument, so I want to reveal to you all some “behind the scenes” and a little of my personal life.

I don’t come from a family of musicians, but from music lovers nonetheless. At the age of five, I attended a music education course, an opportunity that should be given to all children: a large room, no different from a kindergarten classroom, and lots of musical instruments available for the kids to play with.

After a few months I chose the violin, probably because of its difficulty, and because I immediately understood that keeping up with it would have meant evolving and improving.

Years passed, and those who studied violin as children know very well what the hours and hours of screeching, unpleasant sounds and cats meowing at home mean 😉

Thanks to Monica, my first teacher, those hours, days, years of constant practice led me to be first in the ranking for the conservatory entrance exam while still in 5th grade. I was certainly not an “enfant prodige”, but I was doing really well.

From that moment I had a decline in motivation: classical music didn’t ravish me, my relationship with that genre was too mental and all the training was based exclusively on that; pop and rock songs were at the centre of my interest and I spent hours singing and playing them on the piano. 

I held on for a while, but after years of exams and anguish, at the age of 15 I put my violin back in its case and continued to sing and play any song written in the past 50 years on the piano; I didn’t realise this at the time, but I had already absorbed so much of what I would later rework throughout my career.

At the age of 19, when I finished school…the revelation: the umpteenth CD I bought was by Jean-Luc Ponty, French violinist and pioneer in the use of the electric violin in fusion. I ran to buy an electric violin from Carlo Cantini, another great violinist from Mantua – Italy, who had made it his mission to create fantastic electric violins.

THE ELECTRIC VIOLIN

That’s when the great challenge began: looking for my way of inserting the electric violin into pop, rock and dance. I had already started touring the clubs in those years, with a musical base, keyboards and vocals, first in bars with my friends, then in the first clubs. Occasionally, and very timidly, I would bring along my violin and “hint” at a solo.

I then arrived in Rome, where another important phase in my life began, namely the lessons I took with Marcello Sirignano, great jazz violinist and arranger, alongside my first television experiences.

Nothing has been easy: it has taken all these years to develop a confident, understandable and transversal style amongst the different genres.

My research isn’t finished yet: the challenge between my violin and I is destined to last a lifetime.