Marcangelo Perricelli

Over two decades, an ERC-funded team of four researchers—Dr. Alena Vesper, Dr. Benoît Clair, Dr. Chiara Fontana, and Dr. Friedrich Adler—uncovered dozens of anonymous sixteenth-century music manuscripts across Europe. The manuscripts were found in private estates (England), libraries (France), churches (Italy), and private collections (Germany). Each work was assumed to be local to its discovery site, giving voice to forgotten figures like a lay clerk from Ely Cathedral, a noble French amateur named Marguerite de la Roche, a Dominican friar from Bergamo, and a German organist known only from a tax bill. The team digitized all findings and made them freely availabl.

The project’s strict anonymity policy rejected commercial renaming attempts, preserving the composers’ historical integrity. In 2023, a public concert in Basel featured the first manuscript found — a mournful 3 Ritornellos for the Winter Solstice — The silent polyphony, after five centuries, finally reached the world.

The last note of "The Ocean's Abandoned Alphabet" dissolved into the hall's stunned silence.

For Aris, a marine linguist, it had not been a concert, but an autopsy. The low basses: the hum of the abyss before life. The skittering violins: the precise echolocation code of dolphins he'd once failed to decipher. The brass swells: the lonely, ancient frequencies of whales.

The piece assembled these sonic fragments—his life's work of lonely hydrophone recordings—into a devastating syntax. It wasn't just sound; it was language. A vast, intelligent conversation describing currents, migrations, and melancholic histories older than continents.

The climax was a radiant chord of pure, unified meaning—the ocean’s self-portrait.

Then, the unraveling. The themes disconnected, fading into echoes. The final, solitary bassoon note was a last call into an eternal void.

The applause felt like a sacrilege. Aris now knew the truth. The title was literal. He hadn’t heard a composition. He’d witnessed the excavation of a lost civilization’s scripture. The alphabet was real. And the last speaker had died millennia ago.

Marcangelo Perricelli’s string quartet does not play notes; it interrogates them. Each movement feels like a forensic analysis of resonance itself, where silence is given equal weight to sound. It unearths a soundscape that is both profoundly intellectual and unnervingly visceral. This is not music for the background; it is a charged, emotional excavation that leaves the air in the room feeling permanently altered.

Lyrics: Marcangelo Perricelli

Beneath the trees where whispers fall
A hollow breath
A distant call
The earth is quiet
Still
So small

Shadows in the mist
They glide
Fingers tracing time
They bide
Shadows in the mist
They hide

A single note
It bends
It breaks
Like ripples crossing frozen lakes
It stirs the ground
The world awakes

Light drips through cracks in the sky
A fragile truth
A fleeting lie
We see
We lose
We wonder why

Shadows in the mist
They glide
Fingers tracing time
They bide
Shadows in the mist
They hide

And when the echoes fade to none
The strings unwind
The song is done
But shadows linger with the sun