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6/12/2005

Camere

Sound Art Museum, Roma

Sol Lewitt, Jannis Kounellis, Franz West

In the presence of high mountaintops there are those who feel fear, huddle within their own smallness as if it could provide a shelter, a protected condition. Some are overwhelmed to the point of speechlessness, unable to utter the least comment. While there are others instead who discern in the profile of the peaks a harmonious design which soothes them, grants them that wisdom and equanimity, that tranquillity of the soul discussed in ancient times first by Democritus and later by Seneca.
More often it is dismay that prevails, nature is so ferine that even a static and silent rock, may terrify, unsettle one’s spirit. Man, in such a case, experiences a deep inadequacy, almost as if his size were an impediment to being, breathing, surviving. Subjection to what is enormous, boundless, unyielding: vassalage to the cosmos, remission of one’s will. Thus the sublime transforms itself into the terrifying.

And yet this discrepancy in magnitude may resolve itself into a state of grace allowing the individualism of a particular human being to comply with the most intimate of laws, where the meaning itself of Man’s being in this world is written: an instrument charged with the potential for expression and sense, a unique and unrepeatable feat in human evolution. A circumstance which cannot be overlooked and which, to the contrary, deserves the individual’s most complete dedication.
Thus as part of one’s personal reality one should apply to caring for and perfecting one’s own voice whose sonority is all one with its valence. To do one’s apprenticeship in solitude is not punishment. Quite the opposite: it is in solitude that one works towards a common result, for others’ happiness. To practice in secluded places and without witness is a good prelude towards a comparison promising to be much more fecund. The prodigy of good chamber music is the outcome of preliminary consolations or, if one prefers, of necessary desolation. Every one prepares his instrument within the forge of his own room and when in company greets the other instruments with the preliminary rite of tuning, like an initial and well-wishing handshake. This sets the game of roles in action, the extraordinary enthusiasm of multiplying sounds, fugues, phrasings, the common beats, the great feast of harmony, the pure pleasure of working together. An understanding that dispels the fears, the preliminary hesitations and grants a voluptuous and rousing sense of courage, such as to transform the mountain peaks in flowing river waves descending as friends down the valley, all the way to our feet.

Strings in the earth and air
Make music sweet;
Strings by the river where
The willows meet.

It is with these verses that James Joyce opens his Chamber Music, sensing the kinship between branches and strings, willows and violins and catching the languid sweetness of music in nature. Playing as a group is also trying to resemble each other, an exhausting exercise of mimesis that, on the other hand, can never heal the wounds of the original and constitutional distinctions.
Art, however, dissociates itself from mere comparisons especially as it refuses facile analogy: it aims at generating balance starting from an internal disaccord amongst the parts which by and by dissolves itself into imitative practice, true school of complaisance. This does not prevent the individual instrument from jealously preserving its uniqueness, its wild dissimilarity, which keeps the tension with the others at the highest level, as, can be perceived by the rifts, the tripping of one another, the individualism. A vicissitude with no solution as the convergence never implies placid mingling, least of all subjugation, sacrifice. If there is a temporary absence it is only to come back more bold than before, more necessary. To the contrary, it is in the fullness of the voices, in the risk of unison that one brings to the limit the impact of one’s single contribution, success of the whole and not of the individual. When the string is drawn to the breaking point, the bow exhausts the ligament, the hammer strikes furiously, when in short the forte and the tutti reach the apex, no single participant is in the shade or loses charisma. It is a prodigious choral effect that brightens everything, annuls categories and brings out indistinctly the applause of the listener.
Solo instrument and connubial orchestra: as two blades of one sword cohabiting the same kingdom. Never should one forget the stubborn activity of the first, its gestation, its quest for perfection; nor the second’s afflatus, the bliss drawn from it, the grandiosity. After all it is a competition between one’s self and the others, to arrive from an island sharp edged and contracted in a workman’s frown to a grass covered and appeasing altitude, a regal bed on which screeching sounds and angry notes find rest.

So as not to suffer disconcert for one’s limits, rely on dialogue, interweaving, and concert. This way one will not lose the unity that contributes to the amalgam, to the jubilation of sounds. It is now the turn of the highest pitched of instruments, which delights in being picked rather than in vibrating; willingly it welcomes the trill among its diabolic devices, it twists, and shrieks to the extreme limit. Tartini and Paganini used its power for the virtuoso as for the criminal, if one may consider these two terms homologous. And the romantics assigned it the most expressive role, capable of rending song.
It is the modern soul that tears itself apart, its Sehnsucht; the space of resonance becomes small, it becomes Hausmusik, agony and ecstasy for a salon. With Schubert the domus lights up again the sacred flame of the Lares and the worship of one’s affections. The artistic experience is not reproducible, it cannot be told: it is addressed to those present and to them only. One must draw close to beauty to enjoy it, everyone huddling closely together. To find delight is a private event.
It is thus that a sense of peace and harmony is produced canceling the harshness of selfishness. May time allow it to last and not to end. Of course it is necessary to get involved so that the tension of aggregation may not be lost, it is necessary to renew one’s commitment to the world, not to abstain, nor to avoid. One will need heroes, perhaps, in order to discourage a decline or even a melancholy conclusion. But there still seem to be some: lets beseech them to take action, to gather together generously, as in the trio that today is playing its music.
Daniele Pieroni
English traslation by
Francesca R. Gleason

Kammerspiel

An open space, first and foremost. Room: space/room. Empty but available - well-disposed, actually. A space inviting you to mobilize, to pass into and through it. In short, a space to move about in. And one that allows movement; that is enough anyway - enough room to move. Inevitably one recalls certain rooms of Beckett’s - the square space traversed by unremitting motion, which scrupulously avoids the centre however - a periphery of bare human motion. The goal seems to be to use up the space, to exhaust its possibilities: therein one obtains, exhausted, utter depletion, even of oneself…

A space to move about in, but also one to move - a space waiting for a move, the next move, like in games played out on the square, constrained field of a chessboard: your move! Confrontational field, dialectical field, battlefield, governed by rules of commitment, by rules of engagement: a military camp where troops are quartered. Strategic space.

The tactical use of space and its uncertain boundaries has been consistent historically with the conceptual changeability of sound. In this sense, it is no coincidence that so much music, including the music of our times, dwells on the idea of space/room, especially the music issuing from the invisible linea nigra that began with Satie (music d’ameublement, which hovers in certain places but “need not be listened to") and follows through to the ambient music of today, by way of John Cage on to Harold Budd… The Room… A Room… Sound and place music.

So, an open space - but one which, under certain circumstances, can easily transform into a closed-up room, an apparatus for capture. Yet here too it seems virtually designed for sound, which chamberizes, imprisoning itself in the anechoic room or resonating in a chamber echo, an “echo room". The mechanisms governing this implosive reduction inevitably have a jail-like quality: compression, the “fervent, funereal" room of sound…

And finally, an analogous capture is instigated and executed by cinema - that moving prophecy of photography. The camera lucida, created to “make the point", the punctum, manages to articulate its truth - twenty-four times a second - by seizing motion with an alchemical, vectorial act of fragmentation - that same fragmentation which Robert Bresson insisted was necessary for cinema and which ends up being “the first step in the de-potentialization of space", activated in a defined space. Here then sound serves its provisional but necessary residence: suffering the effect of the being in the wings, expression of the theatricality of contemporary cinema in which sound powder proliferates throughout the space in a circular, all-absorbing manner, while the listening space takes on a new profile.

And yet, sound - that spiritus loci captured, pulverized and finally expelled - inevitably re-appropriates the proscribed place, through the air, immaterially. It returns to its room, and the room is thereby transformed into the space in which this unexpected return is consummated: calm revenge - a dish traditionally served cold, but which sound, in its anarchic grace, prefers at room temperature.
Chambre'e, that is….

Riccardo Giagni

Opening: on Wednesday, December 7, 2005, at 7 p.m., in the premises of RAM, RadioArteMobile

During the opening, from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m., a live radio broadcast (on the website www.radioartemobile.it selecting RAM Live) presented by Riccardo Giagni and Daniele Pieroni will take place. It gives voice to all the artists participating in the exposition as well as to Corrado Bologna, Franco Fabbri, Cesare Pietroiusti and Emanuele Trevi.

Sound Art Museum
Via Conte Verde n.15/ 4a, - Rome

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