by Rick Moody
[borrowed from
therumpus.net]
|
Recently,
I’ve been digging again through the wilds of the CD Baby site, where
no print run is too small and no approach to music is too
individual, and in this regard I have found a lot of great work
recently, some of which I will deal with here soon, but none of it
more interesting than an Italian exponent of extended vocal
technique named Romina Daniele.
Daniele was born in Naples, but these days
lives in Milan, where, I imagine, the climate for experimental
singing is more receptive. The recording I happened on, entirely by
chance, was her first, Diffrazioni Sonore (2005), which
consists entirely of multi-tracked, and often entirely improvised
vocal music, some of it treated digitally (radical EQ, echo, and a
little reverb), but otherwise left well enough alone. Daniele’s
approach has somewhat to do with the great exemplars of this sort of
“vocality” (of whom more below), but it is also wholly singular in
that the singer has never studied composition, and seems to come
more from the wilds of literature, and particularly from the wilds
of European philosophy, than from any rigorous background in music.
Her second album, Aisthanomai, Il Dramma
Della Coscienza (2007), or The Tragedy of Consciousness,
is even more uncompromising than the first, consisting of
textual philosophizing more abundantly, and of more electronic sound
in addition to her voice. Aisthanomai also has a thoroughly
daunting booklet (available in English), that provides some
theoretical support for the formal ideas expressed within.
From the above, you might get the idea that Daniele’s work is only
complex, only demanding, only methodical, but, actually, though it
has its challenges, it is also playful, sweet, sometimes funny, and,
on occasion, rooted in an appreciation of vernacular music like
jazz, blues, and pop, though these flavors are used much more
expressionistically than we are used to. Because I liked these two
albums so well—they have surprised me as few things have surprised
me recently—I decided to try to track down Daniele and to ask her a
few questions. As befits someone for whom the work is most personal
when it is least confessional, Daniele will answer very few personal
questions, except under duress, so I warn the reader in search of a
conventional interview, that there is none of that here. This
interview is as much a position paper as it is a confessional
document. Because Daniele is a bit skeptical on the self-promotional
part of her project, I will provide a few links for those who are
curious for more. Her CD Baby page is
here.
Her MySpace page is
here. A
couple of very illuminating videos of her in her very rare
performances (she will admit to having performed only twelve times)
are available on YouTube, as in
this case.
And, for the record, this interview was conducted by e-mail in
English and Italian, and translated back into English by Giorgi
Testa, with some minor amendments by myself and Romina Daniele
herself. (Her English is very strong.)
Rick Moody: Of the two albums
available in the U.S. (on CD Baby), the first, Diffrazioni
Sonore, seems to wear its influences more on its sleeve. I
suppose, to my ears, these influences would include, most
perceptibly, Meredith Monk and Diamanda Galás, but also, to some
extent, Yoko Ono, Nina Hagen, Tim Buckley, and so on. In each case
(and I’m thinking especially about Monk and Galás), you manage to
transmute the influence by virtue of your essential Europeanness.
That is, you sing extended vocal technique in a way that recalls
some American composers, but in a way that is to me, much more
Italian, or even pan-European. Can you talk a little bit about your
vocal influences, how you came by this work, and what kind of impact
it had on you? Is there a sense for you of performing this idiom in
a way that is European?
Romina Daniele: Diffrazioni
Sonore is a result of the research I have been conducting since
2000 in a number of areas: voice, composition by electronic means,
philosophy applied to multimedia.
Studying film history and theory, art criticism
and aesthetic analysis, I approached the fields of thought that my
research is based on, which include Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and
Michel Chion’s theory applied to film, a multimedia art form. I am
referring specifically to the linguistic and morphological
foundations of my work, by virtue of the relationship between, and
coexistence among, different languages, including voice, poetry,
writing, music, electronics, art, thought, man.
I developed an interest in Meredith Monk’s music
very early on. This came about through Auli Kokko, the Swedish
vocalist of Neapolitan sax player Daniele Sepe’s popular jazz band.
I studied with her for three years around 2001. During that time I
was also studying the great jazz voices. I was particularly fond of
blues and jazz-rock combinations. I was always listening to Demetrio
Stratos.
Stratos is the foundation. I have often observed
that my approach to voice stems from his boundless experience, which
is unfortunately still very little known outside Italy and Europe.
Even Diamanda Galás learned about Stratos when she came to receive
her Demetrio Stratos International Prize for experimental music in
2005. That is where I met Diamanda Galás, since I was awarded a
prize as a young talent on that occasion; I remember Meredith Monk
also winning the same prize in 2007. I met her, too, for the same
reason.
Just as Galás didn’t know Stratos, however, I
didn’t know Galás when I started out. Later on, someone told me how
much we had in common. Since then, I have been listening to her work
and I believe it is beyond compare. Our similarities should be found
in the attempt to look for an extended vocality and a voice freed
from conventions, rather than on a stylistic level. Style is at most
the way an individual artist deploys the results of his or her
research. History must also be considered, as every experience has a
historical background.
Historically,
what today may be described as “extended vocality” is a concept and
a dimension intrinsic to the “Euro-educated” development of music.
Music gradually departed from traditional language forms, from the
late nineteenth century harmonic complexity of Richard Wagner to the
electro-acoustic experiences of the
fifties.
This development includes the vast and complex experiences of
today’s history and its significant personalities. Let me mention
one case: Schönberg’s “dodecaphonny.”
Schönberg was the first artist to use the “Sprechgesang”
style, where spoken and sung language are fused, in his Pierrot
Lunaire (1899). Other similar experiences involved Schönberg’s
students Berg and Webern and other artists from all over Europe and
the world, up to today. One contemporary example: Visage by
Luciano Berio (1960), a piece for electronic sounds on a magnetic
tape, sung by Cathy Berberian. The song is based on the symbolic and
representative charge of gestures and voice inflections, “from
inarticulate sounds to syllables, from laughter to tears and
singing, from aphasia to inflection patterns from specific
languages: English and Italian, Hebrew, the Neapolitan dialect,
etc.” [1]
A central idea of this
approach is that of “material” – or “idea of constructing a timbre”
(Chion) which designates what the composer works on initially. The
term “material” appears as soon as Western music rejects classical
elements such as notes, themes, chords, arpeggi. That is what
defines “sound matter,” “voice matter,” and, therefore, “extended
vocality.”
Diamanda Galás and Meredith Monk, being great
musicians and composers, have also had to come to terms with this
“Euro-educated” development, which they used to form their personal
and unique vision of music.
Stratos, too, crossed known boundaries in working
on his voice. However, in his case voice has an even more special
role, as it is made independent of music composition. So my
experience, inspired by Stratos, has been focused on the necessary
realization of “being as voice.” Voice is recognized as a powerful
expression of self, regardless of any conventional division or role.
The idea is for voice to project toward stylistic
undifferentiatedness for artistic and exploratory purposes, by
focusing on the unconditioned, non-indifferent force of the desire
to know oneself as a “voice that gives itself voice.” In this way, I
reject practice, the idea of doctrine and indoctrination, and every
kind of style: my style is no style, as I have sometimes said
quoting Hegel. I consider indoctrination just a way for sterilized
containers to be assigned a label.
Moody: Can you talk a little
more about your education, how critical theory featured in it, and
how an interest in philosophy expresses itself in what you do?
Daniele:
The linguistic and
morphological foundations of my work and the relationship among
different languages, which I mentioned earlier, are matters that
deserve to be described as philosophical. My education was mainly
humanities-centered. Human issues are what interests me the most,
and the source of every artistic form, including my own.
Let’s start from the beginning.
The project Diffrazioni Sonore was
created as a response to a concern over the relationship between
improvisation and construction, over the “between” that
divides instantaneous perception and the conscience of perceiving,
which involves memory “as an extension of the past into the
present(Bergson),” i.e. as a constituent of individuals. On the
other hand, “between” indicates a non-place, a void, an
“undefinable idea.” This is the object of my artistic research: I
consider it the key to the creative process.
The last emblematic composition in
Diffrazioni Sonore is titled Rizhome. This term was
used by Deleuze and Guattari to define “what does not begin or end,
but is always in between, among things, inter-being,
intermediate.” The tree [the hierarchical and sectoral system]
is derivation, but the rhizome
is only alliance.
Quoting my essay from Aisthànomai, Il Dramma
della Coscienza, all my work (variously textual, vocal,
musical, theatrical) does not want to be compartmentalized or
linear, but rather net-like, not a definite system but an “open
circularity continually redefinable and irreducible to a unity.”
It is a chain of postponements that presents itself through
difference: denying any all-understanding rationality.
What I call acting, working in the sterile
sores of a common language where concepts such as “centre,”
“structure,” “field” hold sway; in favor of a “non-common” activism
that tends instead to “decentering,” “proliferation,” “displacing.”
While I was doing Diffrazioni I said I
was “interested in what Deleuze calls ‘entre-deux-coups-de-dés’.”
These are the connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity principles
that coexist, in perspective, with the work inspired by them as a
“sensory resonance” (in Eisenstein’s terms), building dynamic units.
Each of these units contains the principles from previous stages.
I
was avoiding meaning as an object of recognition or deciphering.
I aimed at dispersion, at a mirror effect among significants, which
are presented over and over again, as new ones are constantly
produced by listening. Meaning should never be fixed in the
well-known structures of thought: new meanings, new forms of thought
should be sought. This idea is one of the pillars supporting my
work. A different version of it informs Aisthànomai, whose
title is etymologically linked to “aesthetics,” the science of
thought applied to art. This idea has an immediate practical
consequence: “each new problem requires making an entirely new
effort and abandoning some thinking and perception habits
(Bergson).”
Thought must be used in a different way
so that humanity can change and renew itself. Only then can (and
should) art ask questions about the possible ways of reaching that
goal. The necessary requirement is for one to give up one’s standard
way of thinking and act, thus feeding doubt and a whirlpool of
feelings. As I said, it is primarily a question of structuring
thought: a human one. It’s about how one thinks, it’s about mind.
That is where creation happens. Secondly, and consequently, it is
about the way one acts and does things. I discuss this and more,
with respect to my creation processes, in the essay Voce Sola.
I am currently working on it, and it will be out next year in Italy.
Moody: I know that Meredith
Monk thinks of some of her voices as expressing particular
characters, almost as if extended vocal technique, for her, has a
multiple personality disorder component to it. I am wondering if
your own case, especially since your voice has so many different
aspects to its multi-octave range, there is a sense of particular
sounds belonging to particular characters. And if there are
characters, is there narrative? Or is narrative too linear a way to
think about these suites of music?
Daniele: My songs never have
narrative references to characters. What I am interested in is not
narration music, but poetry. The different vocal characteristics
that I use identify with myself, or at least should be interpreted
as different sign systems, different statuses of states, connection
principles, heterogeneity, multiplicity, which I can represent with
my own strength and my work.
Let me quote from the essay I am currently
working on:
It is all about perceiving differences (here are
the “sores,” here is “indifferentiation”). The following step is
swapping among different interpretations, among individual thought
processes, “jump cuts” of consciousness. These are possible through
observation and distancing, i.e. difference. This dimension
of perception has nothing to do with reasoning, but with pure
intuition: this is what is known as cognitive synthesis. [2]
The shape of the work as we see it, its construction, amazes us even
before we read it, as an evidently ongoing process. Its tension
derives from the transformation of relationships,[3]
“the ‘sense’ of disruption within its content.”[4]
Content is not a narrated story, an interpreted text, a precise,
common, identifiable feeling. It is a phenomenon, “the distribution
of elements in the composition.” The disruption lies in the
phenomenon, as it belongs to the phenomenon: composition in
its operative stage, discourse flowing, “starting by conceiving the
object as a whole, then looking into the composition and structure
of the work, down to its smallest particles.”[5]
A piece is formed by listening. Diffrazioni is a process:
propagating intuitions that act through my perceptive and mental
processes, as well as through my work (my action).
For me, the idea of diffraction lay in the
intuition of the process. This is what I wanted to stress,
admittedly not very clearly, when I remarked as follows during the
recording of some of the tracks: “With diffractions inside and
outside my work and myself, I am different.”
I was thinking in terms of perception, rather than “inside” and
“outside” as opposites, i.e., content and form, according to the old
“aesthetic tradition” which I consider delusive and therefore
particularly questionable. I was thinking of my voice as a
pyschophysical entity and my work, i.e., the performance of
my thought and its creation. (It should not be forgotten that
thought is creation of language.) On the other hand, I was and am
alien to the idea of “difference” as a social component (difference
is a consequence, not a motive of my actions). There are
diffractions in different relationships: between me as a
psychophysical entity and my thought (diffractions inside myself);
between me, including my relationship with my thought, and the
outside world (diffractions outside me); between the different
elements and levels of my discourse-work (diffractions inside my
work); finally, between my work, including the relationship between
the different elements and levels, and the outside world
(diffractions outside my work). With these diffractions, I am
different, as I am a source of propagating intuitions which act
through my perceptive and mental processes, and consequently through
my work. Diffrazioni was already inspired by the issue of
consciousness.
[6]
Moody:
How much vocal training have you done in the past? Did you
take conventional voice lessons? Music theory? And to what extent
does the Italian tradition of operatic singing exert an influence on
what you do?
Daniele: I didn’t study singing
or composition at a conservatory, because I am not interested in an
educated voice or an educated mind composing according to the rules.
I am deeply convinced that art and academe follow divergent paths,
in every field. In the past, however, I did study music theory.
Right now I am taking a diploma course in sound technology and
electronic music at Milan’s conservatory. I want to learn more about
these subjects, which are distinct from singing and form a very
important part of my work. Thanks to my studies, I became one of the
eight finalists for the National Award of Arts, held in Benevento
last 31 March, in the Electronic Music section.
The Italian operatic tradition has no influence
on my work. Experimental theater, like Antonin Artaud’s or Stratos’s
does, of course
For me, studying is an extremely intimate
process, as it has to do with awareness, consciousness and knowledge
issues. I have been studying my own voice for years, just as I have
been studying myself and human consciousness.
Moody: I’m interested in your
coming originally from Napoli and having moved, in your adulthood to
Milano? Does this have anything to do with Milano’s receptiveness to
the arts? Was Napoli a dead end for the kind of work you are doing,
such that it is easier to find an audience in the North? Or were
there other reasons to make the move?
Daniele: Italy has a deep link
with its history and traditions. Each form of thought and art
looking at a broader vision inevitably risks being described as
abstract and detached from reality as it is immediately perceived.
This has nothing to do with the intellectualist “weight of history,”
because it consists of a social rather than sociological dimension.
This collective feeling is definitely stronger and more vivid in
Naples, as a consequence of its traditions and customs.
The issue of reality occupies a big part
of my mind: I really think that individuals – human beings from any
place in the world – don’t have eyes to comprehend their own
reality, as they are confused by society and wrongly convinced that
this is all possible reality. Society is just another form of
reality, but man cannot know any others as it ignores himself in the
first place.
In this sense, in the consideration of some of
the most insightful reflections on reality, I can say I share
Pasolini’s view. Although he analyzed situations that were extremely
close to his culture and were the most conspicuous of social issues
(in his novels and early films), his private thoughts were occupied
by philosophy and linguistics. His reflections as a social man are
just a way of applying those thoughts. Human thought and the issue
of its relationship with awareness and knowledge is the basis of
every problem, history, tradition, local characteristic.
The reality I see and have always seen is man’s
unawareness of man, in a philosophical and existential perspective.
Finally, this should be considered with respect to my idea of art as
a network that creates a deep link among thought, language,
expression and existence.
I moved to Milan as I saw Naples as a dead
end for the kind of work I was doing. I did move, but I haven’t
left Italy. At least so far.
Moody:
Tragedy of Consciousness (if I may use the English
translation of the title of your second album) seems to feature more
digital processing and non-vocal instrumentation in the work. And
yet it still feels, to these ears, as though the whole is a solo
work, one that is unaffected by particular collaborative energies at
all. Are you conscious of yourself as a solo artist? And what
accounts for the increased use of processing on some of these
tracks? Do you find yourself influenced by digital art being made by
others in Europe? Or is it a natural outgrowth by virtue of working
on the computer?
Daniele: I am a solo artist in
that I write my own work. In this sense, a composer, a writer and a
painter are the same. That is why since the mid-20th
century works of art of every kind have been considered as “texts,”
with reference to the important developments of linguistics toward
philosophy, for example the formation of thoughts. In music, this is
especially true for electronic music, as the question of playing is
solved preliminarily, and making music means expressing oneself
directly from oneself using a machine. I wouldn’t describe this as
“cold” or “static” just because there is no-one playing the
instruments; I would call this “my direct will,” as the machine
reproduces exactly what I have been working on for months or years.
When I work on electronic sounds I impart to them
my will. In that sense I am the author of those sounds, and I am not
delegating the responsibility of creating or altering the sound
substance.
Furthermore, no instrument can replace computers
in sound production. With computers, you can penetrate sound down to
its most intimate vibrations and connect it as creative units
through mixing. And I am not interested in organic or traditional
instruments.
Secondly, my interest in the relationship between
electronic methods and “making poetry” was what led me to extend my
production to electronic sounds. In Diffrazioni, I already
used technology along with my voice, as I processed and manipulated
sound by digital means. In Aisthànomai, I’m using voice,
technology, and electronics.
The essay included in Aisthànomai is
mainly about this. I can say that I am fascinated by multimedia, as
the interconnection among many different media, and the relationship
between the spiritual and physical world, between technologies and
instinct, among different media and languages. In particular, the
stratification of levels corresponds to the following sets:
Voice-matter-nature. Electronics-sound-technique.
Language-text-concept.
The universe of electronics should be seen in a
conceptual and factual connection with the universe of sound and
technique (in the sense of technology). Similarly, the universe of
voice should be seen in connection with that of matter and nature;
the universe of language with that of text and concept.
I wouldn’t say I was influenced by any specific
European artists. I am interested in linguistic interconnections as
I just described them, in every form of art dealing with that issue,
and I am always fascinated by some approaches to electro-acoustic
and vocal music, such as Luciano Berio’s Visage.
Moody:
Both albums have introductions, and Tragedy of Consciousness,
both in its title and its particular song titles, seems to list in
the direction of an operatic work, or, at least, a chamber opera of
a sort. And what about the popular song? Did it have any impact on
you as a young person, or as you work now?
Daniele:
As I am interested in
the stratification of levels, the word “opera” does not correspond
to its traditional meaning, i.e. a theater and music performance
which is sung and acted. What it means is the product of an
intellectual and artistic activity, as in “opera d’arte”, work of
art: a form which is as emblematic and evocative as it is real and
tangible. In this perspective, my work is halfway between
electronics and “making poetry.”
As I was saying, I am also fond of blues and
jazz, in that I love everything genuine and profound; in particular,
I love Billie Holiday’s later work in terms of vocality, and Miles
Davis for composition.
There’s this text I wrote for one of Odetta’s
concerts in Milan. It’s called “la mia anima blues (My Blues Soul),”
and it is about the reception of blues by the Italian audience, and
my own relationship with blues. I wrote that an audience that enjoys
cover bands playing blues is not ready for an intensely emotional
experience like Odetta’s performance in Milan. The force of singing
and the meanings of vocal expression, in my experience, cannot but
depend on these considerations. Today, classical music only exists
as a hybrid, as a consequence of a historical process that began
with the critics’ codification of blues and jazz.
My work, which has gained recognition through the
Demetrio Stratos Prize, has its roots in everything that is
acknowledged as real, regardless of all conceptuality. I could not
study Stratos’s work if I didn’t feel that force within me, nor
could I offer any approach to unconditioned vocality if I didn’t
identify with what can be described as “being-giving voice.”
Demetrio Stratos was himself primarily a blues
singer, and the singer of the famous popular music ensemble Area.
Aisthànomai also includes a tribute to
Miles Davis’ “Nuit sur les Champs-Élysées,” takes I and II, from the
soundtrack of the French film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud
(1958) by Louis Malle. The relationship between music and images in
that film was the topic of my Master’s dissertation, which I wrote
between 2006 and 2008, while I was producing Aisthànomai.
This is therefore a very important text. It will be published in
Italian by RDM in the near future.
Moody:
Much contemporary work in
extended vocal technique avoids lyrics, as if lyrics will give away
too much, and I find, since my Italian is meager, that I treat your
work in the same way, because I can’t speak the language. All of
which means that for this American listener, I have no idea about
the lyrics. Can you give American listeners some hint about where
the lyrics go? Is there a lyrical subject or a lyrical trajectory in
your work that we should know about?
Daniele:
The use of language,
too, is included in the idea of “opera” as described earlier, in a
stratification of different levels: Voice-matter-nature.
Electronics-sound-technique. Language-text-concept.
The original purpose of my work is not being
identified as an “extended vocal” technique, although I like the
expression. I am against definitions, even for known techniques,
because they are barriers that do not help one develop one’s
individual creative energy and one’s thought and personal technique.
Each technique must be used within the limits of
one’s expressive needs, to create a piece; but no technique
determines my work. In other words, I come first, with my thought
and creative energy; then come the techniques (those I have learned
and a few I have invented), which I use as a means. My energy flows
through the techniques and uses them, not the other way around. This
topic is also discussed in the essay I mentioned earlier, which I
invite you to read. So, “extended vocality” is a technique which I
deploy naturally, according to my expressive needs; the same happens
with my use of language. Each sector in the cultural system tends to
prevail by establishing its own independence and difference from
other sectors. Writing, for example, is only true writing if it
remains on a printed page; its value changes or decreases if it is
made into a screenplay. Music is true if it is recorded or played at
a concert; its value changes or decreases if it is used as a movie
or installation soundtrack. Similarly, voice as an instrument
defines itself as independent from music and language, by becoming
“extended vocality.” What I’m most interested in, though, is
interconnections. I consider culture a network and identify
categorization as the black hole in the development of human mind.
Italian is the language I use most often since it
is my mother tongue, and it cannot be replaced by any other
language. However, I also use passages in English and French.
Sometimes I even write in English, as in “Fallacità, Take II,” a
couple of unpublished pieces and some things I am currently working
on. I also provide an English translation of all my lyrics.
Aisthànomai comes with a 36-page booklet, as the poetry and
texts used are an important element of my work. Many of my texts are
poetical as well as musical, and they may be performed live in a
different language (for instance, “Poesis I and II”). I have played
in English abroad, so that I could get my message across to more
people. This, however, is impossible for the songs whose text is
originally in Italian (such as “Echo” or “Fallacità”). Occasionally
I have improvised English versions of some of my pieces. “Matter,” a
particularly felicitous English version of “Materia,” was included
in a video shot in Slovakia. I will soon record that version to
include it on my new release.
Moody:
I was interested to read that a lot of this work is
improvised. Do you improvise in the recording studio? Or do you work
out a rough outline, maybe in performance, and then come into the
studio with some idea of the shape of a given piece? Or do you
really just make each piece up as you go along? And in the case of
multi-track recordings, do you go back and layer over an
improvisation, or is it all done in the moment with a looping
program or device?
Daniele:
Diffrazioni Sonore
originated from the recording of a three-hour studio improvised
session. I worked on it and reached the final version of the record.
The recording is a result of the study of voice I did years ago. I
looked into the “liberation/discovery” of voice beyond
limits/techniques: it was an extremely intimate experience and I
recommend it to anyone who wants to become aware of their being
through the vibration of vocal chords (connected to the laryngeal
muscles), in a unique and undefinable union between body and spirit.
At the same time, each track with superimposed voices is the result
of intense computer-assisted composition work (processing, modeling,
etc.). In the inside cover text, I explicitly mention the “mixing,
which I consider work,” in the concrete sense of the word.
In Aisthànomai, the spoken parts and the
vocalised verses are always improvised in studio, because
improvisation is all about instinct and expressiveness, both of
which are absolutely needed in my poetical compositions in music.
The superimposed voices, in this case, were recorded after the main
voice; there were several recording sessions over the course of two
years. A number of compositions or pieces formed during their very
performance; others were created on the basis of an ongoing
organization.
Moody:
How much performing are
you doing regularly in Europe? And can we expect to hear you play in
New York City ever? And what are you working on now? Do you have
other projects you are working on besides music?
Daniele:
As I have said, I
performed twelve times in three years, then paused for a year. On 20th
March I was in Milan to present part of the new album I’m working
on. I’ve had no offers from the States yet. We haven’t looked for
opportunities there either, but we soon will. America is the place
where we sell the most.
I am currently working on the project
Spannung. Quoting from the official presentation, this is the
term Heidegger uses to indicate the opening, the sense of space, the
tension (and torment) of being in a dimension of authentic
existence. This dimension has never been adequately discussed and
requires intimate and new forms each time, far from the clichés of
intellect and composition rules. In the concrete and time-bound
human condition, a struggling being is itself strength: “tension of
strength itself (Derrida).” This is true at each level of my work as
work of art: at a concept and thought level and at an artistic,
literary and poetical, musical, compositional, vocal, aesthetic
level: it’s not about an accomplishment, but an opening, not a
system or its negation, which is system itself, but a tension, which
is always action, operating force.
I am also working on a collection of essays, as I
said before, which will include my thoughts on “vocal discourse,”
and a thorough discussion of my production method.
Both works will be published by RDM Records
Edizioni discografiche e letterarie, which I founded earlier
this year with Lorenzo Marranini, a fellow musician; his first
record is in preparation, and I will be collaborating on a few
pieces.
Aside from publishing our own work, we declare
our support to: every movement and activity aimed at researching and
experimenting new forms of expression; products of thought and
action as such, whose creation establishes itself as a reality,
energy in the form of being; human production in general, as we
believe that there are few real creators today, and few real
publishers as well – what few publishers there are, are more or less
interested in the profit of their company and support talentless
skill, brainless packaging, the poor taste of people lacking
specific interests.
***
[1] Program notes by Berio for
Visage, published on www.temporeale.it, the website of the
center founded by Luciano Berio in 1987.
[2] “Here ‘synthesis’ does not
mean a binding and linking together of representation, a
manipulation of psychical occurrences where the ‘problem’ arises of
how these bindings, as something inside, agree with something
physical outside. [...] has a purely apophantical signification and
means letting something be seen in its togetherness with
something – letting it be seen as something.” M. Heidegger,
Seit und Zeit, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1928 [English
translation Being and Time, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 1962, p.
56]
[3] But amazement, if it is an
end in itself, coincides with the “realization” of the “boundary”
(form of definition, misleading judgment).
[4] S. M. Eisenstein,
Izbrannye proizvedenija v šesti tomach, (vol. II), Moscow,
Iskusstvo, 1963-1970. 66. ]
[5] See Ibidem, p. 64.
[6] “Consciousness: from the
Latin “to be aware”: in the sense of self-awareness and awareness of
the external world in as far as both are psychic functions in which
every conscious experience of the subject is summed up. Therefore:
to be aware or rather to act and to know with regards to oneself and
the world.» R. Daniele, Il dramma della Coscienza, essay,
booklet of the cd Aisthànomai, il dramma della Coscienza.
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