| L'object
ambigu
The microfluctuations
of musical and visual matter
from ornament to text
by
Antonio De Lisa
The hall of an art-gallery. Pictures on the wall,
in an approximately intentional order. Somebody is playing something.
Someone else, after being invited, is observing, and whilst listening
to the music is wondering whatever is the music doing there, and whether
it should be relegated in the background like a tapestry or given
some greater significance. Yes, but what significance? This is the
question of that intentional observer, from whose point of view we
can look at the scene. If this is a plausible background - and this
fact is testified by this catalogue, dedicated to the dialogue and
relationship of Daniela Carati's painting and Massimiliano Messieri's
music - we want to ask a question, maybe more than one, in an attempt
to start a reflection. By asking the question, we try to extract a
symbolic suggestion from the situation, given the fact that we can
recognise several reasons for interest that can be explicated if we
renounce the attempt of being exhaustive. This starting point defines
the field and its limits and in the same time broadens it. In fact,
it' s not the type of music, or the criticism of that type of painting
which is in discussion here. It's the aesthetic situation that comes
into play and creates a historical symbolic suggestion.
In the last few years the writer has had several occasions to note
a growing interest in these problems concerning the mingling of music
and visual arts, the most recent being in the Italian seat renowned
for the high quality of the celebrated arts, that is the Biennale
of Venice (1). In this event, many interesting points
emerged that in a different context are elaborated here, and further
examined.
Colours and volumes
What happens when sound interacts
with colour or whit graphic signs? Is there an internal force that
pushes the sound towards the colour itself, or in some way to search
for an epiphenomenal acknowledgement that being colour is in itself,
without further remnants? If so, we can pose the crucial aesthetic
question of musical timbric colour-based microfluctuations passing
from the state of ornament to that of text.
In the twentieth century context we find quite an accurate history
of the relationship between the forms of colours and the forms of
music. "Vasilij Kandinskij - writes Manlio Brusatin - reflects
(…) a destiny of concords between forms of colours (1912) and musical
sounds (light blue - flute, blue - cello), summing up the theme of
the physiological colours as it is found in Goethe, in a very clear
way for the use of artists, in order to make them aware of the harmony
of sound and the parallelism with music". At the same (2)
time he makes his artistic production explicit. Furthermore from a
musical point of view, the search of the Farbklangbildt formulated
by Schoenberg as the conclusion for his Harmonielehre (1911) appeared
to have already been experimented by Webern in the exact theme of
the Klangfarbenmelodie in the six pieces for orchestra (op. 6) in
1909." Nevertheless, in order to give a precise definition to
this aesthetic displacement, we must refer to our days and particularly
to the compositions area of the so called French "Spectralists".
"The main objective of their work" - Tristan Murail wrote
with reference to Giacinto Scelsi in a transparent texture, thought
in order to weave in a net the revolutionary adventure of some great
precursors of the twentieth century together with the experience of
the "spectral music" - becomes what Scelsi calls the profondità
of sound meaning the work done on the timbre which is intended in
its widest accepted meaning: the timbre of the orchestra taken as
a whole. Consequently the attention of the composer is concentrated
on the movements and the density, the registers of internal dynamism,
the variations and the microvariations of each instrument: ways of
attack, of dialogue, spectral modification, modulation of frequency
or intensity. The strings are obviously the favourite subject of this
work, because of their great softness and the fine control of the
timbre that they allow (without causing problems of homogeneity).
Once again this obsession with sound makes Scelsi part of a great
music movement of the western culture in which the timbre, once meaningless
with respect to the text, is restored and recognised as an independent
phenomenon at first and then as a category to all intents and purposes
- ending up with submerging, or better overwhelming, the other dimension
of the musical subject: this is how the microfluctuations of sound
(glissando, vibrato, change of spectrum, tremolo …) pass from the
state of ornament to the state of text.(3)
There are many reasons why this has happened in the history of western
art, one of them is to adhere with a more intimate reason to natura
naturans as opposed to the marshes of official history: "Colour
is the only means specific to painters" wrote Mario de Micheli
referring to Cézanne. "The artist has only this mean to
accomplish the miracle of art. In reality however is not colour the
only fundamental mean for nature to express itself? Once we used to
draw a landscape likening it to its historical scene, composed from
the outside, and we didn't know that nature is in depth more than
on the surface, that we can't attain profundity without attaining
to the truth. Colours are the expression at the surface of this profundity,
they come up from the roots of the world." We have seen how nature
manifests its truth through coloured forms in the same way, a painting
must manifest its poetical substance by which it is nourished (…).
For this reason Cézanne's painting cannot be a graphic or design
but a plastic painting of volumes".(4)
In the same way we can say that the creative thinking renounces the
classic counter pointistic linearity or the linking of the harmonic
functions in order to make volumetric music (e.g. Xenakis). This is
a very important change in paradigm, and we must dedicate the right
attention to it in the development of this discussion. From the moment
that sensibility to colours, and consequently to volume has broken
into music, things are not the same anymore. In any case music is
not painting and, besides the analogies of reference we will see how
its more peculiar elements, such as rhythm, silence, organised sound,
will change its timbric colour-based texture in a very original way.
Colour in motion
The living eye continues on its virtual
path ("virtual" because it goes beyond the immediate condition,
not however forgetting it): First of all it observes it is a matter
of art in the double form of sound and vision, not fiction. The game
of representation is banished from the canvas and in the score there
are no themes that are in themselves recognisable. Artists are playing
with the essential elements of communication, giving priority to the
linguistic texture more than the illustration of the themes. Colour
emerges in itself, together with a significant paradox which stimulates
its attention: colours of paintings tend to be subterranean movements
almost denied by the timbric colour of music. For visual art it is
like to adhere to that fluent form which is quoted by Ruggero Pierantoni
in his important book, Forma fluens, which (5) describes
the relationship of pictorial sign and movement, from its origin to
our days.
Our visual system - according to Pierantoni - in its entirety cannot
give us a similarly accurate valuation of form and movement of an
object. A sort of intermediate solution, a compromise, does exist,
so that both the characteristics, the geometrical and the dynamic
one, cannot be dealt with simultaneously with the same level of accuracy
of analysis. However, information about both conditions are given
with more or less precision, in accordance with the characteristics
of the form in motion and the kinetic conditions by which it moves.
Approximately we can say that a form which is rich in details can
be better perceived the slower its motion is, and that a motion can
be more accurately evaluated, for example in terms of its prediction,
the poorer in details and formal elements the object in motion is".
if we (6) examine works, or pieces like: Couleurs
de la citÈ celeste a Catalogue dìoiseaux of Oliver Messeaen,
Trio d'arco n. 2, n. 3 and n. 4 by Scelsi, Atmosphère e Lontano
by Ligeti, Spiegel by Cerha, Compositions n. 7, The Tortoise, His
Dreams and his journeys by La Monte Young, Stimming by Stockhausen,
Iris and Luna by, String Quartet by Frisch, Melodie e Mondias e Interludios
by Maigascha, Lonely Child and Trois airs pour un Opéra imaginaire
by Vivier, Doriud and Thirty Dreams Ago by Radulescu, Mortuos Plango
and Vivos Voco by Harvey, Io by Saariaho, L'orage by Dufourt, and
again, the operas of Murial, Grisley, Dalbavie and Hurel that, according
to the young English scholar Julian Anderson, would make the constellation
of the percursors, the travelling companions and the representatives
of the so called and cited French "Spectralists", we could
see how the "approaching of a form rich in details" has
slowed down the creative process to the point of thinking of it as
the very slow rotation of an effervescent sounding panel. In cases
like this, the problem consist in the hypostatizing of a concept without
a proper empirical check, whilst it should be advisable to be able
to make distinctions. All the above cited composers, have in common
the tension to go deep into the sound but not all of theme share the
same temporal perspective, not all of theme tend to the same condition
of stasis. This is not the proper place to operate any necessary distinction,
herein we only examine a deliberately schematic picture in not unproblematic
composition area, of the passage of the timbric colour from ornament
to text. Not unproblematic, in the sense that we stress the necessity
of making some distinctions and first of all of recalling that the
themes of motion, rhythm and temporality, with their paradoxes and
contradictions, are found throughout the timbric-colouring colour
based matter, enhancing it with new features.
The volumetric rhythm
The element we want to emphasise is
that the paradigmatic turn which has occurred in the making of the
"timbre emergency" hasn't only involved the features of
the latter but also the phenomenon of composition in itself, and consequently
also the interval system, the chord texture and the rhythmic dimension.
As far as the last aspect is concerned, for example, a complete etherophonic,
reorganisation of the musical space has been carried out. Some criticism
of some critic has written about has been made of Henry Lowell's work:
"In its overall sound the Quartet Romantic (by Henry Cowell,
N. d. A.) is quite unlike anything else in music. As with some of
Ruth Crawfords later pieces one is simply unaware of traditional values
of synchrony between parts: rather, one hears only the complete heterophony
of four independent lines co-existing in musical harmony and rhythm-this
is rather paradoxical".
(7) Perhaps the paradox consists in the will to look
for an alchemical link between harmony and rhythm. It is however quite
a productive and not in the least isolated paradox in the American
Experimental Musicî, starting with Charles Ives, throughout
the works of Charles Seeger, Carl Ruggles, Ruth Crawfords, Henry Cowell,
and its decanted echo is perceived in Elliot Carter's compositions
and of others. An obvious example of this "subtle influence"
would be Cowell's own work as a teacher and new music entrepreneur
in the 1920s and 1930s, through which two composers as different in
outlook as John J. Becker (1868-1961) and Lou Harrison (1917-) were
introduced to the disciplines of dissonant counterpoint".(8)
Someone might think that we can talk about rhythm only when we talk
about music. This is not the case: its pertinent dimension belongs
to the iconological area as well. In fact, it is a reasonable suggestion
that music can draw hints from the way rhythm has been handled in
painting. Herein the research of Pavel Florenskij can be cited "A
homogeneous time, flowing smoothly, is not able to give a rhythm.
A rhythm requires pulsation, concentration and expansion, slowing
down and speeding up, steps forward and stops. Consequently, figurative
means conveying rhythm must possess some sort of link among their
elements in order to keep the attention and the eye, whilst different
intermediate elements lead them from one element to the other. In
other words, the lines forming the basic scheme of a figurative work,
must link together in the alternating elements of rest and movement".
(9) These elements are not far from a film-like technique
which 'assemble' the dynamic scene of a certain detail of a modern
whirl. The very fact of recalling a film-like logic, suggests that
we are actually dealing with a non-metric rhythm, for a big mass to
induce to rest or leave in motion, which is to say a volumetric rhythm.
Conceptually, this intercommunicating aggregate of plain objects reorganised
on a global scale, has deeply affected both the macro and the microform.
It is not just music, no other art can do without rhythm. It is probably
in this very context that we can consider the paradox of the object
ambigu when it emits the unknown force of the underlying rhythm with
whom it is interwoven. In this framework we reverse the game of give
and take between music and visual arts. Lots of people (the writer
being amongst them) think that music is quintessence is rhythm; those
ones who believe that compositive-thinking is reaching a deadlock
very difficult to overcome, have never accounted for rhythm and its
creative potential. When the soil is ready time is ripe for a new
synthesis between the timbric and rhythmical dimensions and we'll
probably see a new creative season.
Breaking of the linear paradigm
Bending of time and space
In Western-culture, referring to arts
of continuity (like poetry and music), text is historically based
on temporality and linearity. It reflects the cultural code from where
it originated. Western culture is based on full of linearity, as Czechoslovak
philosopher Vilém Flusser reminded at the Kunstmuseum conference
of Berna in '88 "Wir sind 'westliche Menschen', weil unsere 'forma
mentiss' von der Linearitat des alphanumerischen Codes ausgebildet
wurde".(10) If it is not easy to understand
the processes, putting aside the eintentialityì of the author,
which can be graded on a awareness scale ranging from empiricism to
the most abstract rationalisation, in the same way it's not possible
to forget the specific dimension of the cultural macrotext - in this
specific case, based on the western code - within which the composer
locates its musical text. Acceptance or refusal, what comes out is
a cultural choice of the musical space that he uses. Where there is
talk of naturalness, one must always read historicity. Works of art
are results of a cultural choice, they are not products of nature.
Between the second half of the last century and the end of this century,
due to the crisis of the specific linguistic code, a different form
of the musical space, in physical terms, has dominated, thus throwing
into doubt the linearity of music in itself.
"Generally speaking, a phenomenon is called non-linear when,
altogether its effects are not proportional to its causes (…). In
the linear condition, the system is actually the pure sum of the sub-parts.
Mathematically this is known as the principle of superimposition of
effects, and makes most mathematical methods for physics successful.
In non-linear condition, all this stops being true, and the system
is not the sum of the sub-parts plus their mutual interaction. Consequently
it doesn't make sense to try and distinguish elementary sub-systems,
but the crucial point is moving and to focus on the interaction of
such sub-systems. Lacking a principle of superimposition, it is no
longer possible to create general categories of solutions, starting
from solutions to single problems. Each problem, therefore, must be
solved in its individuality. (…) It has to be specified, though, that
some sort of generality is allowed from the fact that the intrinsic
characteristics of the ones, have less importance in respect to their
properties of communication. It is reasonable, therefore, to expect
that different looking systems behave in the same way, when their
interaction laws are similar. This is certainly true for example,
talking about Volterra-Lotka's "oscillation and relaxation"
cycles that are common to many totally distinct phenomenon, but interrelated
between themselves by the fact that they are all provided with retroaction".(11)
The result is that "It is possible and effective to create a
complex system, by putting together many plain objects on a large
scale". (12) Furthermore ìthis aggregate
of plain objects, provided with local non-linear laws, is able to
show phenomena of self organisation on a global scale".
(13) These plain objects in mathematical modelling are called
"cellular automations".
In art however, we often find the phenomenon of the concealed historical
correlative in the appearance of revolutionary breakthroughs. It can
actually be easily maintained that this fragmentation of the experience
is an analogue of the mathematics orientated view of the Renaissance
artist. Erwin Panofsky writes "The Renaissance precise perspective
construction not only radically abstracts its results from the structure
of the psycho-physiological space, but even its aim is to realise
the homogeneity and affinity in the representation of space that is
ignored by the immediate Erlebnis of space and to transform the psycho-physiological
space in a mathematical space. Therefore it denies the difference
between front and back, right and left, body and element in-between
('empty space'), in order to solve all the parts and contents of space
in one 'quantum continuum', it doesn't consider the fact that we don't
see things with a fixed eye, but with two eyes which constantly move,
giving our field of vision a 'spherical form' ". (14)
This game of cross-references to help us realise that, whatever direction
we take the result is that in the conceptual horizon of the object
ambigu, colour and geometry often change places. In other words, right
when the colouristic themes seem to dissolve into complete indefiniteness,
at that precise moment, we realise that Cezanneìs cones and
cylinders are appearing again. The common concept is the bending of
space and it is on this base that the Western culture has repeatedly
brought the "alphanumerically code" on which its way of
thinking was based, to a crisis.
Light and Colour
If it is generally true that the relationships
between sounds and colours share an interactive space where movement
is possible, it's not the same when we talk about the relationships
between light, (or shade) and sound, as it doesn't seem to find any
connection or parallelism within its universe. This is perhaps the
most intriguing aspect. It has been pointed out rightly by the already
mentioned Brusatin: "If we could guess a connection between sound
and colour, the alphabet of sounds and the harmony of colours, in
which time is timbre, brightness is highness, saturation is intensity,
the unfathomable original theme of colour remained blank not finding
any correspondence in sound: the shade, if not in a long silent pause".
(15) It's an exciting subject, and would be well
worth making a detailed study, surely it would hold lots of surprises
in store and it would be very interesting from an aesthetic viewpoint.
Where colour becomes something else, turning to light, there sound
seems to be unable to keep pace. It seems so, but if we examine it
carefully, we see that music has different means to express this phenomenon.
In the actual fact, we must admit that beyond the convergence's, there
are lots of divergence's that the common themes of matter cannot conceal.
Art has got this ability to veil, to hide a symbolic element by a
gesture: painting leads it through a game of light and shade - When
following patterns, like Skrjabin's Prometeo (1908), with his "clavier
à luniére" music turns out almost naïve in
its vagueness in fact the symbolic element refers to a colours, not
luminosity correspondence, red with C, violet with D flat - C sharp,
yellow with D and so on. In painting it is light which translates
matter into symbol. With reference to Vermeers exhibition, writes
Emilio Tadini: "What is it in Vermeer's painting that gives value
to everything, people and objects, outside and inside spaces? It is
light. A sort of secular consecration - pure, simple. This is not
Caravaggio's tragic light, that light which seems to come from the
spaces of spirit - from the spaces of some modern spirit of anxiety.
It's not even the magic adventurous light that acts in the confusion
of Rembrandt's mysterious nights. Vermeer's light shows itself and
appears as a product of a mechanics of illumination, a phenomenon
of elementary physics. It comes from the window. It's the day-light.
The secular day-light. No manifested tragedy of course in Vermeers
painting. However his world gives space to shadows, gives space to
the Stranger and yet, in his houses, similar to peaceful fortresses
standing against violence, the figure of some melancholy lives".
(16)
Colour in space
(Figurative space, musical space)
after the composition experiences
of Boulez or Berio, it's no longer possible to deny music a spatial
dimension. In cases like this the volumetric sensitiveness - originating
from a sharp feeling for timbre and colours - becomes architecture
of musical space. The complexity of this would lead to a long discussion,
we must however leave this for another occasion. At present we only
want to illustrate the peculiarity of the relationship between colour
and spatial values, a hint of which has given us by art criticism,
with the clue of a question which directly refers to music. Let's
listen to Pierre Francastel: "we know now that a colour must
not only be handled according to the complementary law (accepted for
centuries), but also taking into account the fact that it possesses
an absolute, spatial significance in itself. Blue move things away
and yellow pulls things nearer. This discovery has revolutionised
the technique, definitely breaking with the traditional relationships
between drawing and colour. The latter doesn't need to be defined
or completed by lines, it bears its own special significance. It is
possible to create a complex space by simply juxtaposing spots of
colours. It is no longer necessary to cover with small touches a linear
pattern, even a schematic one a the impressionists used to do".(17)
Is it possible, one may wonder, to state something similar for
frequency links? Maybe it is, as it has been observed by philosopher
Ernst ach: the note connections outline a space. These problems are
raised in order to stress that the compared analysis of visibility
and audibility might help not only to evidence big thematic fields
(the macroscopic dimension) but also for the sharpening of detailed
analysis (the microscopic dimension). A reflection, willing to go
further, might lead to recognise some great retrospective interesting
subject. From the perspective of contemporary art analysis, we might
go back to Flemish music: the former give us the instruments to understand
the latter better. The theme of space is repeated: how did the Flemish
define musical space? It must he said that the comparison between
music and visual arts is helpful because it brings the musicologist
in touch with the great critical literature about visual arts where
these subjects have been deeply discussed.
The eye and the ear on reality
The figure and the mirror
Aldo Taglaipietra writes: "In
the introduction of his study on that 'scientific legend' told by
Lo Specchio, Jurgis Baltrusaitris noted that 'allegory of the real
vision, the mirror is also allegory of profound thinking and of that
work of the spirit when it is carefully examining a problem. 'Reflectere'
(in latin) in fact, means to 'send back to mirror', and to reflect-meditate.'
"The mental process of sending back in order to reconsider, is
described in terms of optics" (…) Reflection and speculation
are 'names given to the thought', in which, especially since the modern
age, an old 'sleeping metaphor' has been hidden, the metaphor of the
mirror which has been delivered as a whole to the complex strategies
of the subject by the wave of pre-classical knowledge organisation".
(18) That's a fact. From a certain point of view,
the thought has been described as a faithful mirror of Nature. It's
a thought articulated in words and images, with an exact code, whose
faithfulness and Cartesian clearness are seen as a guarantee of reflection.
Now, let us consider the consequences occurring when the code is made
crinkled by the emerging matter of its constitution. It will no longer
reflect an outside world, but will bend towards its inside world:
here come the sparkles of ambiguity, spotting the reflecting speculum,
making it opaque and unreliable. Painting no longer reflects objectives
reality in a mimetic way, music resigns its metaphor of harmony of
the universe. They bend one over the other. They discover the artifice
of something which is beyond the mirror, the texture of something
elusive. Modern art lives beyond the mirror. The chained objectivity
of logic connection fell into pieces and music had nothing to say
any more about the syntactic axis; after a short while it would stop
functioning as a language; having been left with the axis of paradigm,
it would start functioning as timbre. Matter took its revenge on language.
What is this if not a chapter of the great mannerism in western art?
The one who is looking for freedom at any rate will soon be wanting
the utmost freedom - wrote Gustav R. Hocke, a distinguished historian
of mannerism - but, bit by bit, the more his libertarian imagination
breaks lose, he will wear himself out, in order to find the enchantment
of the most rigorous, almost superhuman, inhuman orders. This mixture
of impetuous excess and cold reduction, is a fundamental law of mannerist
music (…). When dealing with mannerist music we can approach the centre
of the labyrinth, its creator, the first inventor, the ingénieur
damné, Daedalus". (19)
Variation
The experimental dimension of aesthetic
histography and theory, applied to contemporary works, is justified
by the fact that it deals with very rapidly changing phenomena; they
are not fixed, stable, sacred. Some critics may claim that they are
too changeable, up to the point of losing the meaning of what they
are or would like to be. Changeable like an atmospheric tourbillon
- a recurrent metaphor in composer Xenakis' score. Temporality, far
from being a mere accident of something which persists, assumes the
weight and the function of variation. Variations can also transform
entities to the point of making them unrecognisable; their own ontology
remains as the only link between the transfigured entities and their
origin. What does this impalpable exchange between persistence, temporality,
variation, suggest? The anatomy of principle! "Antinomy applies
to the principle of variation, in the sense that it doesn't simply
imply a change, but it also involves a kind of stable or well know
'substance', which sometimes is a theme, in whose respect a change
takes place. It must be said however, that this 'theme' is only the
occasion, the material base of more or less substantial variations,
but it cannot account for the intimate necessity of the variation
principle. This necessity cannot originate from the limitations of
the theme or the monotony of its repetitions: one of the aims of the
variation could be to avoid all that but it cannot be obtained by
a pure necessity of variety because variation must take its origin
from a technique of its own and, further back, from a positive aesthetic
of variation. The impression that a theme is limited, creates hope
to overcome this limit, and also for finding the way: the variation
offers a coherent way and permits a phenomenon only apparently limited
and finished in itself, to show its possibility of being something
different, even by exclusively using its inner forms, arranged and
interpreted in a different way. (Incidentally the same technique is
used by imitative polyphony). If we consider it like this, variation
is something profoundly different from the way the bourgeois sensationalism
tends to explain it, as a superficial variation whose task is only
to adorn a substance, which is almost worn out and boring for nay
mature audience. The concept of variation, implies the same level
of importance and necessity of the two contradictory principles, one
tending to the wholeness, the other to variety: this, by Sachs, is
called the 'two-sidedness' of variation 'spiritually similar members
which are in fact quite dissimilar'. (20)
We don't want to make the common mistake typical of this fin de siEcle,
of identifying the revolution in composition with the frequency and
amplitude modulations which have emerged from cold mathematical procedures
and sophisticated machines in appropriate research institutes equipped
with modern computers. Different tensions do exist, different modulations
that cannot be framed and reabsorbed in the vertical spectrum of sound.
A musical horizontalness does also exist, producing the Schoenberg-like
question, recalled by Massimo Cacciari in a conversation with Luigi
Nono in which Leibniz' question resounds as well (why something is
given rather than nothing?): why another sound after a sound? Therefore
it can be said that the problem from which a new musical situation
springs, appears just to have this form: why another sound after a
sound? This 'why' has the power to doubt to their roots all the traditional
"why?" that usually find their answers in programmatic definitions
or statements. On the contrary, this question remains, since every
sound goes back to it, like a completed cell coming out from silence
and going back to silence again…Webern for me, is this constant possibility
that everything is given at every point, but for the same reason,
that everything can really end at any point. Far from those purely
technical-serial interpretations about Webern…! Every sound is changed
with the responsibility of immediately preceding the nothing; and
every new sound is charged with the wonder of the first one, and is
astonished like the first one… In the third act of Tristano we hear
a "listen", free from any restrictive indication relative
to 'what' "(21). The depth of sound, evokes
a depth of music like a question without an answer, like experience
of listening without what listening to, experience of going "right
or left" backwards and forwards, above and underneath".
"One must go on without asking what is in front or behind"
as Gabriele at the beginning of the Scala di Giacobbe said when citing
the Talmud.
Multimediality of the object ambigu
A burning question today is the relationship
between contemporary and historical twentieth-century musical phenomenology,
and the 'common sense' of listening. In physics as well, the results
of the research moves further away from the standards of perception
and "common sense". "Ingenious physics" as it
was called by psychologist Paolo Bozzi (22), contradicts
Galileoìs motion laws. Is it useful to produce some sort of
judgement? Surely not about physics. And what about music? It is certainly
a much debated controversial question.
All post tonal music seems to be fighting with the common sense, culminating
with the most extreme experimental results. However these experimental
outcomes sometimes reveal productive contradictions for those who
are not satisfied with a quiet life within their own specific code.
Contemporary music in its different aspects, has released several
thinking processes from old prejudices and the new questions and experiences
are evidence of the permanent vitality of music itself. Talking about
vitality of music might sound rather pretentious, in front statements
of crisis and dissolution. It must be 'interpreted' by outlining a
conceptual horizon which doesn't want to transcend from the empiricism
of its own developing, from the contingency of it being here and now,
and within which it can assume some significance, according to the
evolution of creative thinking. It is necessary to be positively inclined
towards a process which, in a certain way, lacks speculative excitement.
It is interesting to study arts in the same view of the problems to
which music is trying to give an answer, phenomenologically starting
from "zu den Sachen selbst", things starting from themselves.
We certainly cannot pretend exhaustiveness when we refer to a century
still in course, but perhaps it is advisable to accurately examine
the reasons of contemporary music, in all its components; to define
the "structure that connects" the many experiences and sensitiveness
in a wide choice of possibility: to understand how listening itself
has come out transformed by the cyclic waves that originates within
a global change of paradigm.
Let us return to the art gallery where the event takes place. This
event recalls other events, perhaps with a different sign. Somehow
the paintings on the wall don't allow themselves to be like appointed
places of art. For sure, music listening doesn't call for priority
and consequently it develops itself more likely the soundtrack of
a clip then the centre of the representation, to which it would naturally
aspire in a concert hall. There is no need to be scandalised, or better,
one could be scandalised if the whole operation wasn't marked by definite
experimental character, aiming to conquer a new audience, more than
to congratulate itself. Remo Bosei writes "Among the effects
of propagation of beauty in everyday life, we must account for a reduction
of its traditional ambition to last, to represent something 'more
everlasting than brass'. This is why we see works of art that are
openly ephemeral, even given their deliberately perishable or unstable
material support, like in certain sculpture made of foam and soap
or sand exposed to the wind. It is of no use to despise such tendencies
which, by the way, stress some characteristics aspects of contemporary
sensitiveness, which tend to emphasise the of object ambigu aspect
of the work of art in a world in which the experience becomes a serial
one, or is rapidly rewritten, being often centred on separate discontinuous
events which are virtually deprived of their historical weight, and
undergo an infinite number of transformations, similar to all the
possible elaborations of a computerised text". (23)
We must not neglect the central importance of the "machine experience"
in milestone moments of the late twentieth century, starting from
Schaffer's "musique concrete" to "Elektroniische Musik"
of the Cologne studio, up to the Ircam's research of musique-acoustique.
Born out of the big American universities, tyoday a new phenomenon
stands out, music produced by "virtual instruments". Some
experiences of Tod Machover are explanatory in such sense. His research
must be followed with great attention, being likely to open new possibility
within the human-machine relationship.
However, we must indicate a very relevant paradox. From the moment
when the machine enabled us to take the place of nature, we start
again to imitate it. In front of a computer machine we put our eyes
down again, after having looked up to the Nothing for a while, putting
our eyes in line with an aesthetically certainly pleasant ornamentality,
but not variegated by the questions that nourish it.
Nevertheless from this extreme contamination, sometimes the gorgonic
face of art shows up again, even among a thousand contradictions.
We hope we have been clear enough in developing this discussion and
to be even clearer in the conclusion. Contemporary art lives by digging
in the contradictions of its own age even in those cases when it seems
to be assimilated or about to be. A work of art is not television
"let us consider any of its news programmes" Giulio Ferroni
had the chance to observe "what do we see? A fast uninterrupted
sequence of images, all very different from one another, chasing themselves
and overlapping: lots of windows open on the senselessness of the
world. What are those images looking for? A continuous shocking effect.
Everything is concentrated in order to shock us. Just like an advert
spot. This is how, thanks television, also reality has become unreal".
(24) Unreal and chaotic. Lets follow the opinion
of an art critic: the standardisation of lifestyle, together with
the dizzy circulation of images (…) in the last few years has enormously
increased the number and the flow speed of visual stimuli with a consequent
overload (next to saturation?) of the presence expectation system
and an obvious and evident wear and tear of the receivers capacity
of attention (…). It is as if the crowd of signals would build up
a wall and any component in our mass society would not be able to
distinguish the single stones of it. This is how it is possible to
explain the trend of contemporary artists towards large dimensions,
but it is also possible to explain the advertising experts "research
of colours and shapes to provoke or even break into the retina".
(25) This is the crucial point. Here is the knot
of all the possible contradictions. The most self-consciously critical
art - far from working like advertisements - is trying to change the
marks of these unreal chaotic shock. There, where it looks more degraded,
it keeps its wrinkled face. The problem is how to amplify its signal,
how to live and think about it in a creative way. Is there anybody
who can do it? Is there anybody who can do it? Is there anybody who
can see beyond the world of ads?
Antonio De Lisa
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