Karim Al-Zand: Music: Tarantella

Tarantella

for piano

Calogero Di Liberto commissioned this short piece as part of a recital program and CD project entitled Canzon y Danza. My piece borrows a dance character from Calogero’s native Italy, the tarantella. The tarantella has a long and mysterious history. In popular folklore, it is a dance precipitated by the bite of the tarantula spider. The frenetic and maniacal dancing which followed was regarded as a symptom of (or possibly the only cure for) the spider’s poisonous bite—the conclusion of which left the dancer exhausted to the point of expiring.

[The tarantula’s] bite rarely kills a man, but certainly makes him half-senseless, and variously afflicts him with something the common folk call tarantula. Certain people are so excited by hearing a song, or music, that full of joy and always laughing, they leap in dance—nor do they stop until exhausted and half-dead.
—Nicholas Perotti, Cornucopiæ latinæ linguæ, 1536

SCORE + RECORDING VIDEO