I have always firmly believed that the greatest of the many privileges that being a musician gives you is the opportunity to be able to shape your life with your own hands. However, it had never occurred to
me that the instrument that allows a musician to do this is in turn the product of other hands, hands that are just as competent and just as thrilled and that are responsible to a great extent for what is basically the secret heart of music and the work of a musician: the transformation of the raw material, the pieces of wood or metal, into sound that is impalpably sensual, tangibly volatile, close to the human voice and magical. This music is dedicated to ebony, that incredible wood, hard as a stone, which neither burns nor floats as its peers normally do. But this music is also above all an affectionate way of saying thanks to all the hands that together with my own allow the wood to carry out its “wizardry”.
When I saw the black planks of wood that had just arrived from Africa in the workshop of F.lli Patricola, when I saw how, together with their grandchildren, they season it and work it in a process
that lasts almost fifteen years and consists of moments of enthusiasm and cursing, scientific study and the craftman’s pragmatism, emotion and effort, I understood how closely our respective professions resemble each other in their essence, and once again I received the confirmation that when we
manage to do something that makes us really proud, we never do it truly on our own.
Gabriele Mirabassi
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