3 - Forgetting music: notes

“There are a thousand ways of forgetting music, and I [Bério] am mostly interested in the active ways of forgetting rather than the passive and unconscious ways”.

“Today, the listener has a tendency to make use of the whole of past music as if it were a consumer commodity. This makes sense because for the listener the past is the most available resource of musical knowledge, although this tendency often carries the signs of an unconscious ideological frustration, since it is rooted not in plausible code of musical values but in the way we are conditioned by the market.” p. 61



“The conservation of the past makes sense because even the most unprepared listener is aware that music cannot be hung on the wall. Music is performed, is constantly in motion, forever ‘in progress’, especially since there is nothing really permanent to guarantee continuity between the mind of a composer and the hands of a performer, between the musical structure and the levels of articulation, as they are heard.

But conservation of the past also makes sense in a negative way, becoming a way of forgetting music. It provides listeners with an illusion of continuity; it gives them the illusion of being free to select what appears to confirm that continuity, as well as the illusion of being free to censure everything that appears to upset it. This is why musical performance often seems to have autonomous life: it becomes a sort of merchandise, indifferent to the music it is supposed to be serving.” p. 62



“The first public concert halls, built in Europe and England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, served as a confirmation of the astonishing fact that music was democratically available to everybody, but also that it had become a consumer good, available to anyone who could afford its price. The concert hall was already a museum: it allowed the accumulation of musical properties and catered to the desire for memory and immortality.” p. 63



“Today we live with calendars at hand but, at the same time we live with the feeling that everything is history occurs without particular regard for its chronology, and that even music is a sort of warehouse of samples, whose shelf life - whose relative permanence or oblivion, whose chronological placement - is ultimately irrelevant because, when we get down to it, it can be pushed around according to our inner needs and desires as listeners, performers, and composers.”

“My point is not to celebrate the relevance of Putarch’s valves to the musical scene of our time, but to stress the fact that in order to get a true sense of musical evolution, we must detach ourselves from a linear and irreversible view of historical time. It is precisely this detachment that allow us, on occasion, to forget or to attribute different and even conflicting valves to musical works that detach themselves from passing time. The history of vocal music and music-theatre of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after all, can be written without tacking account of Monteverdi, but that of the twentieth century cannot. The history of late eighteenths century music  can be written without mentioning Bach, but that to the last two centuries cannot. The deep meaning of Mahler’s music became evident only fifty years after his death.” p. 64-65



(…)

However, it is also in that light that the virtuoso performer becomes more aware of the past as something to be exported, and becomes more forgetful of the fact that the only form of virtuosity worthy of the name is virtuosity of intelligence, capable of penetrating and rendering different musical worlds. We all know by now that a pianist who claims to be a ‘specialist’ in Classical or Romantic repertory, and who is playing Beethoven or Chopin without having had the need of experiencing the music of the twentieth century, is just as shallow as a pianist who claims to be a ‘specialist’ in contemporary music but whose hands and mind have never been traversed, on a profound level, by Beethoven or Chopin." p. 65/66



“The increasing diversity of the forms of musical consumption, the evolution of techniques and audiences, and the consequent instability of possible points of reference are the product, to a certain extent, of the available means of recording, reproducing, and conserving music. Such is the quantity of noise - actual and virtual - around us, that it cannot be made the object of a methodological analysis. It is not so much a musical phenomenon as a phenomenon of acoustic amnesia that has nothing to do with any musically valuable territory we are interested in exploring.” p. 66



“Already in the 1950s Karlheinz Stockhausen, with Zeitmasse, Gruppen, Kontake …was looking for an extreme, and often paradoxical, conceptual homogeneity among qualitative and quantitative sound dimensions, among time proportions, frequency, and timbre, among micro- and macro phenomena and forms, in the attempt to reach a quasi-natural, quasi-divine, total fusion of all possible qualitative and quantitative parameters.” p. 66/67



“We can refuse history, but we cannot forget about it, even with the new technologies, when we deal with sound ‘molecules’, even when we digitally design new sounds or when we synthesise or hybridise familiar sounds that do not carry with them traces of musical usage. Music can explore, meaningfully, new and uncharted territories when it acts like a movie camera - focusing, analysing the sound subject - and when the composer, like a movie director, decides the angles, the speed, the closed-ups, the zooms, the blows-ups, the editing, and the silences. And this can be done without computer, especially when the sound subject us the human voice, which, by its very nature, is overloaded with traces of musical and non-musical experiences and lived-in associations.” p. 67/68



“Musically, a voice is not only a novel instrument; it is also the sum of all its aspects and behaviours, from the most respectable to the most trivial, and the most estranged from music.” p. 68



“Let us imagine a sequence - a loop - of continuously changing basic vocal gestures (laughter, sobbing, crying, coughing, and so forth) - vocal stereotypes that are not normally associated with musical experiences. They can be made to interact by the use of combinatorial criteria involving gestures and techniques, as well as positioning of vocal resonance, speed and nature of the articulations, and so forth. A woman laughing, for example, can have something in common with the performance of a coloratura soprano. The vocal events on this loop have different degrees of association, and laughter, for instance, can become the main generating factor in a discontinuous vocal landscape which, however, still lacks the most challenging and intense gesture: words. Therefore, let us also imagine an elementary text composed of short modular sentences, of recurring interchangeable flashes of meaning, evocative of a potential narrative that unfolds with various degrees of discontinuity. The text loop and the loop of vocal gestures have different lengths, and turn like two circles of different diameters which revolve at different speeds and never meet twice at the same point. This is what happens in my Sequenza III for solo voice.

To control and convey musical coherence to such a vast set of vocal behaviours, it is necessary to apply to the text combinatorial criteria that are analogous to those applied to the vocal gestures: it is necessary to break up the text, to demolish it (at least apparently), to scatter the fragments on different levels so that they can be reassembled and recomposed in a musical, rather that a discursive or narrative, perspective. Thus segmented, broken up, and permitted, the text will never be perceived in its entirety. The vocal gesture, which can capture attention as a coded and iconic form of communication, loaded with associations, is contradicted by the relative indifference of the next and by its contiguity with other equally indifferent gestures. The text is in turn ‘disturbed’ by gestures and by mode of delivery that can only simulate an interpretation of the text in a sort of conflictual relationship. This multiple and somehow alienated relationship between text and vocal gesture (which continually destroy and reconstruct each other), and the interpreter’s desperate attempt to tackle the intrusive and unarrestable vocal kaleidoscope of associations, can confer a tragicomic slant on the performance, as if it were at the same time the parody and the translation of something elusive, something absent.” p. 69/70



“Something meaningless doesn’t make any sense, but something that doesn’t make any sense can be meaningful; without this basic awareness, there would be little point in developing, extracting and investing musical experiences from the total face (to use Jakobson’s image) of a vocal sound body.” p. 71


“A musical work is never alone - it always has a big family to cope with, and it must be capable of living many lives; it can be left to its own past, and it must be capable of living in the present in a variety of ways, at times forgetful of its originals.” p. 71



"… that failure to understand the present has its roots in ignorance of the past, and that it is useless to struggle to understand the past without an adequate knowledge of the present.” p. 72



“Stravinsky’s often deprecated neoclassical experience can be seen, obviously, as a selective journey through fragments of history.” p. 74



“No; it is a separation of process. In Agon Stravinsky does not submit himself to history, but he retells it in various different ways.” p. 77



“Why then forget music? Because there are a thousand ways to forget and to betray its history. Because creation always implies a certain level of destruction and infidelity. Because we must become able to call up the memory of that which is useful and then to forget it with a spontaneity that is paradoxically rigorous. Because, in any case, as Heraclitus said, ‘it is not possible to go into the same river twice.’ Because the awareness of the past is never passivem and we do not want to be the obliging accomplices of a past that is always with us, that we nourish, and that never ends.” p. 78