negli stessi
fiumi

CONTEMPORARY MADRIGALS BETWEEN

POLYPHONY AND IMPROVISATION

Negli stessi fiumi is a musical project born from an artist residency along the Brenta

River, bringing Renaissance madrigal, contemporary composition, and improvisation

into dialogue.

The project grows out of the artistic and academic research of singer and composer

Valentina Fin, whose work explores the relationship between voice, contemporary

polyphony, and poetry, and develops through a process of co-creation with the

ensemble. The repertoire takes its starting point from madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi, Giovanni

Pierluigi da Palestrina, and Maddalena Casulana, a madrigal composer from Vicenza and

the first woman in history to publish printed music.

These materials are reinterpreted and transformed through contemporary, jazz, and

improvisational languages.

From these works emerge new contemporary madrigals, shaped by the meeting of vocal

polyphony, instruments, and original poetic texts inspired by the symbolism of water

and the landscape traced by the river. The title echoes Heraclitus’s reflection “We step

and do not step into the same rivers” and becomes a metaphor for a project in which

tradition and contemporaneity flow together, mutually transforming one another

through musical practice.

On 17 April 2026, the ensemble will release its first self-titled album on the Italian label

B-label. The project was developed during an artistic residency promoted by Associazione Bacàn, in collaboration with Veneto Barbaro and Operaestate Festival Veneto, held in Campolongo (Vicenza), along the banks of the Brenta river.

Over the course of the residency, the four artists lived and worked together, engaging in a shared process that combined musical experimentation with an embodied exploration of the surrounding landscape.

Through walks, excursions, and sustained time spent in the valley, the artists developed a close relationship with the local environment, which became an active element in the creative process. The compositions emerged through a collective practice of co-creation, shaped both by the interaction among the performers and by their ongoing dialogue with the territory itself.

In this sense, the works are not only the result of collaboration between the artists, but also of a situated engagement with the valley, whose acoustic, spatial, and symbolic dimensions informed the development of the musical material.