Teoremi is a multi-disciplinary project that brings together music and performed lecture around a quartet of oboe, guitar, violin, double bass and a spoken voice.

The reflection undertaken by Ensemble Vide at the Swiss Institute in Rome concerns the possible blending of speech and music, and has led to the imagining of a journey where Pasolini meets Bach, Descartes, young contemporary composers and a portrait of a countess.

With no boundaries between centuries, the aim here is to combine musical expression with reflection on truth, goodness and their existential fulfillment, derived from the texts performed. A journey of the body and mind that questions certainties and doubts, and proposes a musical abandon that doesn’t clash with Cartesian rigor. A questioning of the idea of right and wrong, of what should or shouldn’t be done.

The program is based on several sources, including Italian composer Daniele Bravi’s recent piece Meditazione Quarta - Del vero e del falso, itself generated by a reading of one of Descartes’ Méditations métaphysiques entitled “Du vrai et du faux”. Added to this are dialogue excerpts from Pasolini’s film Teorema, whose meaning is revealed (once again) in the bourgeois reality of the Swiss Institute in Rome, and more generally in today’s ethno-centric European world. Added to this are compositions by Denis Schuler, Ada Gentile and Salvatore Sciarrino, each of which, in their own way, explores stable yet elusive terrain. This is not a musical explanation, or an explanation in music, but a proposal of an unknown path, generating new questions.