Article by Enrico Pieranunzi and Bruno Tommaso published in the newspaper Avanti! (June 10, 1979) concerning the Popular School of Music of Testaccio a Roma.
Founded towards the end of 1975, the Testaccio Popular School of Music involves artists and cultural personalities from heterogeneous contexts: Bruno Tommaso, Enrico Pieranunzi, Maurizio Giammarco, Tommaso Vittorini, Martin Joseph, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Michele Jannaccone, Eugenio Colombo, Roberto Gatto, Giovanna Marini (songwriter and ethnomusical researcher of the Italian popular tradition), Massimo Bartoletti (graduated in trumpet at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Roma), Paolo Damiani, Lisi and Silvana Natoli and the members of the Spazio Zero Theater Cooperative (experimental theater located in a traveling “tent” in the Testaccio district).
In those years, the school represented a meeting point where transversal teachings found space alongside the study of traditional instruments, jazz and experimental music laboratories and the study of ethnomusicology. The goal of the founders of the SPMT was to freely bring together cultural physiognomies that were difficult to assimilate into the institutional concept of the time.
by double bass player Bruno Tommaso
