writing

My Pastoral Romance

| Forgotten Fields

A Field of Yellow Flowers - Matteo Silvestri

Home

One autumn evening, I drove from the city to the countryside to visit my parents. I stopped beside the familiar road, got out the car and stood in the darkness—listening… It was quiet all about except for the gentle bleating of sheep in the distance. I could see every star in the Milky Way and the air was cool and clear. A wave of longing swept over me. I had been weary of living in the city and I knew the time had come to move back home.

Inspiration

Nearly a decade later, I have not once regretted that decision. The countryside is my home, the rural landscape an extension of my being. It is the setting in which I write my poetry and compose my music and it profoundly influences what I want to create, namely a combination of poetic and musical works that reflect my love for the bucolic. I am a Romanticist, compelled to extol the beauty of the pastoral and (by extension of that movement) the virtues of emotion and imagination.

Muse

My recent works for Forgotten Fields express this fascination and weave into it the melancholy and nostalgia that inevitably emerge in my compositions. They describe simple moments of rural beauty I wish to preserve, translating them into a poem or a piece of music in order to extend and sustain them. I am attempting to create a container for the heart and mind in which poetic metaphors and ambient soundscapes capture emotion, memory and time.

Theme

The collaboration with Krzyzis will be the first release dedicated to this subject, conceived as an ode to a windy summer’s day. It will be followed by a track inspired by the winter rain, composed for the upcoming Astoria Sound collaborative project. I am also working on the new Forgotten Fields album, which will be the fullest expression of these ideas in poetry and music.

Image by Silvestri Matteo

Less is more

| Forgotten Fields
A closed laptop with a mouse and spectacles on a wooden table
Image by https://unsplash.com/@craiggarner

A simple idea

Sometimes, one is so caught up in a project that one forgets to keep things simple. For days, I’ve been agonising over the Airship album Bandcamp page. I had planned to write an overview of the album concept, as well as track-by-track expositions, walking the listener through the music.

Becomes complicated

But, I kept hitting a wall. No matter how many times I rewrote the paragraphs, they sounded ridiculous. The album descriptions read like a bad press release—”Sail on the airs of dark melodic soundscapes…”—and the track explanations were like excerpts from a pretentious review—”Strings ease the tension and gently reassure…”—it was beyond embarrassing. (There is a screenshot of my cringeworthy writing below.)

And is made simple again

Today, I came to my senses. There is no need to spoon-feed anyone, everyone can interpret the music as they see fit. And what better album description than the lyrics for “The View From Above”? It felt appropriate, simple and succinct. I breathed a sigh of relief.

FORGOTTEN FIELDS

A screenshot of album and track description notes
A screenshot of my notes