Tagetes and Rainbow Land is a musical fairytale using many of the creative and anthropological processes of my current studies. Psychology places our archetypes in mythology, especially in fairytales. This is where I started. If music is itself a powerful means of rousing our archetypes, the idea of projecting myself into the world of fairytales sounded like a very convincing basis for composing a strongly communicative work; it would add an “extra-artistic” dimension to the music – what I often call “anthropological”.
The story is original, involving two archetypical characters from mythology. There is Tagetes, a boylike Etruscan divinity with elderly features that make him young and old at the same time. He has created Rainbow Land – he is albino. Then there is the god Pan, a fundamental archetype in classical culture, who governs our unconscious mind (panic), but also the Earth’s energy: his pantheism alarmed Christianity so he was often depicted as the Devil. These two divinities are complementary, mirroring each other – they are the yin and yang of the imaginary world of this work.
The rest of the “cast” are families in the seven colours of the rainbow, guardians of human values, who set the wandering story in motion when they realize they are starting to “fade” and go to ask the two divinities for advice. The seven families live on seven hills from which seven coloured streams run down into the great river Chrome; its iridescent waters flow to the city of Policromandia and assuage its citizens’ thirst with virtues of different colours. The fading colours are a clear sign of interior decadence, which can only be stopped by “labours”.
Each colour is represented by a note. F is green, C yellow, D orange, G red, A blue, B purple, and E flat violet. Pan is represented by five notes: F sharp, C sharp, A sharp, G sharp and E and these “panic” notes contaminate the colour theme. The chromatic value does not follow any post-avant-garde serial process. Then there is the number 7 which, like in all my work in these years, balances the proportions of the whole composition.

Andrea Portera