Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

Widespread in Southern Italy during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, the psychological disease is popularly thought to be caused by the bite the wolf spider, Lycosa tarantula (distinct from the broader class of spiders also known as Tarantulas). However, the bite of the Lycosa tarantula does not cause significant ill-effects. Due to its inability to elicit such dramatic behaviour, a better cause of this sickness is the Latrodectus tredecimguttatus, commonly known as the Mediterranean black widow.

Francesco Cancellieri, in his exhaustive treatise on Tarantism, makes semi-scientific observations, as well as discussing popular and historic mentions of the disease, as prominent in Abruzzo, Puglia, and Calabria, Itally:

When one is in the hold of this ill-wished beast, one has a hundred different feelings at a time. One cries, dances, vomits, trembles, laugh, pales, cries, faints, and one will suffer great pain, and finally after a few days, if unaided, you die. Sweat and antidotes relieve the sick, but the sovereign and the only remedy is Music.

Cancellieri (1817)

[New Latin tarantismus, from Taranto, the ancient seaport in Southern Italy, -ism]

Work Details

Year: 2016

Instrumentation: Guitar.

Duration: 13 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

Commission note: Commissioned by Benjamin Ellerby

First performance: by Benjamin Ellerby — 7 May 16. Argo: Flow, Spring Hill Reservoir, Brisbane