BOOK OF WOMAN, Chapter Two!

In 2025, we created the first part of this work by Riccardo Nova, inspired by certain specific scenes from the Mahabharata: those that highlight the power of women and the miracles performed by the goddesses. Nova incorporated his in-depth and practical knowledge of South Indian Carnatic music, with its isometric rhythms, refined intonation, and hypnotic atmosphere.

A large part of the ensemble was still at work. To premiere the complete work, we are partnering with the Indian Carnatic singer Varijashree Venugopal and the Icarus Ensemble. A string trio, electronic keyboard, and musical direction by Ictus, joined by nine musicians from the Icarus Ensemble.

Destructive or protecting, the feminine divine plays an important role in the Mahābhārata. This vast Sanskrit epic of almost 100,000 verses, which claims to contain everything that exists, is regarded as one of the most important sources of South Asian religious and social thought. It was composed sometime between 400 BCE and 400 CE, drawing on older oral traditions, and became a constant presence in South Asian artistic expression as the subject of dance, song, novels and tv shows. In modern India, its female characters have become popular symbols for women empowerment and focal points for feminist re-writings.

Attracted by ‘the sound of language’ in the recitation of the Mahābhārata’s Sanskrit verses, Italian composer Riccardo Nova has been bringing fragments of the epic’s labyrinthine non-linear narrative into his own cyclic, microtonal sonic world since 2014. He does so in collaboration with Varijashree Venugopal, an expert singer of Carnatic, or South Indian classical music, in which Nova has been immersing himself since the 1990s.

At the center of the Mahābhārata’s kaleidoscope of winding stories runs the tale of a violent war between two groups of cousins, the five divine Pāṇḍava brothers and the hundred demonic Kauravas. The divine brothers eventually win, but the war leaves both armies and the whole world in near destruction. Nova’s new work for Ictus, Venugopal and Irini ensemble focuses on the 11th of the epic’s 18 books, the “Book of the Women”, where sisters, wives and mothers grieve the slain warriors and criticize the war. But just as the Pāṇḍavas do in search of victory in the war, Nova begins his work by invoking warrior goddess Durga with a mantra. He chose a traditional Vedic mantra, the Ekā mantra, essentially a series of numbers representing different powers asked to the God. Recited on a few tones, the mantra’s strict metric structure will give way to fierce body percussion—making the goddess’s sonic invocation recall Pérotin’s fleshy Beata Viscera¬¬. Nova also composed a new mantra for Kunti, the mother of the Pāṇḍava brothers who grieves along with the women in the 11th book. Despite an impotent husband, she got her sons with different deities by using a powerful mantra. As with Mary’s virgin birth, here too the word became flesh. Kunti’s powerful mantra, merely described in the Mahābhārata, receives a sounding body by Nova. He will even turn the common monophonic chanting of mantric recitation into a microtonal polyphony for seven voices creating myriad complex harmonic colors: all derived from that magic sequence of numbers in the Ekā mantra.