LIRICA

EBBREZZA

 

“…the Greeks will continue remain, as before,

entirely unknown and unknowable as long

as we have no answer to the question:

“What is Dionysian?”

Friedrich W. Nietzsche

 

Finding the way to accommodate into this frames and contents of research Nietzsche´s stances, it demands to take some steps back, to clear the elements of dealing and define a minimal, yet efficient assessment of coordinates for their interplay. In alert state, walking towards him by minimal distances, before the earthquake can shake the ground.

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If the lyrics just exposed are that there where Monteverdi and Orpheus meet, where is it?

Natural question towards more insight in this direction is, why do we call them lyrics?

At largest, in our context: why do we say Opera lirica?

The etymology talks for lyre, the music instrument made of string, archetype for harp and guitar.

Behind this symbolization and use of language, the relation between words and music is set, as if there would be no word that could be uttered if not accompanied by the lyre. The moment this tight relation is taken in consideration, it is possible to talk about poetry, according to its more original sense. At our time, the question, if and how the musical element is literally walking on the side of words, could be splintered in many manifestations. Staying with the archaic meaning at the origins of Tragedy and Opera, the relation of co-participation is set.

The poetical ground as just technically described by the forms that are giving it life, is that where, upon which no distinctions can be made between Monteverdi and Orpheus.

Less technically, what do words and music stand for?

 

If by Mythos we mean word, we can firstly understand it as an attempt to put order, simply taken in its meaning, as words do with letters and intend to do with meanings they are accompanied with. A sense of order in terms of wordily narrated is generated, so that the relation between humans and universe, in which they find themselves as existing, is based on the tell of a story.

 

Basing our actual investigation on previous ones, it is now possible to bring more air in between these lines. Words as ordered constructs, carrying meaning. As architectures and as images laid upon these structures, so that the story telling is taking shape now cinematographically as a story board. Before any words is finding its manifestation in the verbal or written form, a precedent state along its becoming is to associate to it, defined as a figurative moment.

This is what Nietzsche calls the principle of Apollonian. It is for him an instinct of nature, embodied as the dreaming faculty of humans. The ability of projecting in form of inner visions the forces which are coming at play and crossing human existences. The god Apollos is also to be recognized on archaeological founds as vases, represented while holding a bow in his hands, build by a wooden flexible arch, tighten to a string. Personally, interpreted as the most primitive lyre, or the paradigmatic and symbolic origination of this musical instruments. Pulling the string and creating a tension on the architecture of the bow, ex-tending the body and mean for understanding for a further, wider perspective to be enfolded, as the one the arrow is pointing at.

A possible further step to continue this path, in complementary sense, is to ask if there is a non-figurative moment? And if there is, what is it? This is what I would call the more speculative way to go. A step more based on phenomena and experience, would be to acknowledge that mixture of beauty and brutality which nature infiltrates in the most instinctual appearances.

If nature is to be understood, on its most essential threads, as generation and dissolution, including all the possible facets and strategies that occurs in life in order for these contrasting processes of becoming to continuously be, beauty and brutality are the affected ways of humans to behold them. The violent and attractive transformative force, the whirling ecstatic effect caused by this mixture, is the Dionysian of Nietzsche, which is now also making sense in relation to the Apollonian as the non-figurative, because intended as a principle that generates and destructs, without having any material consistence, besides the one, contradictive figuratively described, of a perpetual and corrupting wind stream, flowing impactfully between and through any form materials of existence accomplish to reach along their ride on these blowing waves.

Under the light of Nietzsche´s gaze, words and music appear as Apollonian and Dionysian.

Dreams, as images. Beauty and brutality, as forces.

From only the Apollonian instinct, humans are taken to compose myths, where any non-visible element of experience becomes visible and hearable in words, projected in the coordinates of gods, which are invested by the role of being mirrors for humans self-reflection and bases for their existence justifying positions.

From only the Dionysian instinct, humans are taken to a state of complete unification with nature and therefore with each other; any kind of self-perception falls into the oblivion, driven by the inebriating mixture. No reflections are needed, the non-visible is experienced.

Poetry is, according to Nietzsche, the pledge between these diverging principles.

Critical is to announce that, they not only stand together or parallely as in a continuous confrontation, but the moment when the Apollonian uncovers the Dionysian in itself, is the event that lets poetry arise and emerge as pledge, momentary convergence of indomitable intents.

Monteverdi is letting Orpheus being so intimately attracted by the Dionysian and letting him stand, in words, figurative wise, on point shoes before he dares to falls his emotions into any visible shape, but according to his more inner motions, already drunk by the poisoning mixture, that makes him become one with the universe and one with Eurydice.

 

Had I as many hearts as eternal heaven has eyes,

or these pleasant hills this verdant May has leaves,

all would be full and overflowing with that joy which today delights me.

 

Joyous indeed was the day, my dearest, when I first saw you.

And more joyous still the hour when I sighed for you, since you sighed at my sighing.

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REVERSE

STILL OPERA

 

The co-participation of words and music, as elements for poetry to manifest is bent in Nietzsche´s perspective towards the primordial and overall embracing manifestation of music.

There is nothing in nature that cannot appear as in the forms of music. The representation in words makes only sense as imitation and extraction from the music limitless capabilities of being nature. Music inspires words. Words are effects, fragmentations, human articulations originated by the sounds of music.

This understanding is set in complete opposition to the starting points of Camerata de Bardi's proposition, where words and the sounds produced by their articulation inspired the music.

First glimpse of a crack is to be seen between the alignment taken by Vincenzo Galileo with his fellow collaborators and the Nietzschean perspective upon Tragedy.

This is a shake to the writer´s enfoldments along the passeggiata that takes Opera in its origin close to the Greek Tragedy. Definitely a shake in terms of forms; essentially what Opera comes to serve is tightly bound to the ground from where Tragedy originated, as view and re-action to a sense of existence. If in forms these opposite representations are diverging, in the message contained in its core, under the view and re-discover made through more personal experiences, converging and unchanged. 

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Three players and one observer are involved in the game.

The philosophical circle in Firenze, Monteverdi, Nietzsche and the eye of a researcher irremovably attracted by a yet not completely uncovered understanding for Opera, but still concretely immersed in the warmth that standing close to Opera can reveal.

How to display this game?

The insight Camerata de' Bardi could have on Greek culture, could not reach yet the peak Nietzsche arrived to, almost three hundred years later. Both standing points are based on archaeological founds, in form of writing, paintings, and idealization of a world that offers of itself uncountable shining elements, therefore it brought later critical studies to a more facilitated celebration of its greatness ; and both views are driven by a determinate will of identification with the Greek civilization, or at least by the common intention of creating a window for this past to be relevant in their presents.

Both had no reference to how music sounded in the Greek ears. Maybe the most relevant and yet limited aspect of their investigations, upon which only silence and constructive assumptions can be made, but nothing can be revealed.

Camerata members and Nietzsche were not musicians, intended as Monteverdi could represent this form of art, also and firstly as a craftsmanship. One thing is to think and write how music should sound and one thing is to make music sound as we intend it to be.

Of Monteverdi we gave only the historical coordinate of being a contemporary of Camerata.

The rest of his description was given by more contemporary views to the time this Lab research is taking place and that could consider the transformations Monteverdi´s figure and music could sustain and embrace along centuries. Then his lyrics of a very specific moment in the Orpheus’s Opera. All of this to say, that there is no word from Monteverdi upon his music and his way to understand music composition we intend to take in consideration, for the sake of letting him stand first and only in the position of an artist that only talk through his art making.

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What to gain from it?

A contrast between the players of this game, towards an understanding of music.

The possible awakening of the question: where to lay our ears and eyes, as Opera infatigable guardians? Where to position ourselves in this careful and martial role in the game, as the mediaeval figure of Trovatore so accordingly und irresistibly embodies it, the singer-knight on his adventurous quest, fighting with his sword and his voice, for justice and love?

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DISSONANZE

SELVATICHE

 

For Camerata the main position is: if it is impossible to know how music was played and composed in the ancient Greek time, and more relevantly, how it sounded in the audience´s ears, better to focus the attention and the work we intend to embark on the written words of the lyrics. How they are sung is inspired by the way they are written and they would naturally be spoken. So that what they mean is more accessible to the audience and therefore become the instruments for the intelligence to be shared. The music played, accompanies the singing to announce it and describes from it more shades of the spectrum of intelligence.

Camerata spoke of canto ad una sola voce, aiming as described to the more intelligibility of words if sung by one voice only. Nietzsche firmly spots as the primary element of Tragedy to the constitution of chorus. Maybe a second glimpse of a crack arises?

A crack in forms, in functions, in intentions?

That evidently the forms don´t correspond in these perspectives, should not be taken as a significant proof that this glimpse is revealing a fracture.

If the hint of the Opera is to direct the eyes towards the absence the Tragedy revealed, forms serve determinate intents and are not to be considered independently from them.

How to see a correspondence between the singing by one voice only and a chorus?

Nietzsche is starting to define is position, setting the chorus in relation to the audience and depicting it as an ideal wall that encircles the happening on stage and annihilates any other reality carried and, in any fashion, projected by the audience´s eyes. If Tragedy is not beheld and accommodated on an ideal ground, where only forces are interacting, undressed by any common, usual, ordinary affection, Tragedy is not be accessed. Yet, Tragedy lives on the fictitious, as a manufactory, forgery, in a tumultuous and tormented sense, from the material which is usually set and experienced off stage. This manipulation and elevation towards ideal is suddenly recognized as the real, the moment, music in its demolishing effects of individualization, overflows audience´s ears and establish a sense of unification with the nature of the performed happening. Any kind of scenario, solved by the distinction on-off stage, in its becoming, reveals signs of corruption, which apparently take it away from an ideal ground, but at any stage of its materialization, simulacra from a more nonfactual nature, are holding and tensing their gazes and threads through any adulterated articulations. Nietzsche points with this sense of leverage and anchor to the figures of satyrs, from which the chorus is composed by, half of human shapes, half beasties, on the vanished edge between natural and manufactured, instinctual and envisioned, ideal and mundane. Indissoluble are these presences, in spite of any mutation of phenomena, reminders, at a very immediate enclosure, that what is represented as belonging to higher spheres, evolutions of existence, is as much of an alive matter than the disruptive or fertile and generative instincts which are so beautifully and brutally ruling nature.

No importance if the steps lead more in the direction of Tragedy and its more distinctive Greek forms, or more on the path towards Opera as described from its origins during Renaissance and it might developed and experienced at our day; if the trajectory of beholding and performing finds its coordinates in the sense of absence and absurdity, all and only what can pervade embodied senses is the relief of still partaking aliveness.

 

If, either with the Opera or with the Tragedy, the intelligence to access is designed by these principles, may each time find its own means to announce it. If Tragedy, so as Nietzsche presents it also in its forms, the more the less injected by personal widely projecting coordinates, is the origin and encompassing dimension in which any artefacts might find its roots, Opera, from the contextualized moment of music found itself at the end of the 15th century, is an acute and deeply penetrating stance for Tragedy to reveal itself more closely.

If, by the traces at hand and by the means constructed, defined and bounded by historical contexts, yet intended and stretched so beyond limits, Tragedy is configurated as Opera, in the terms delineated so far, a treasurable instance is captured. If a stand comes with a set of measurement, the distance towards the eventual formation of this ultimate envision, appears of an unproportioned length. According to this landscape and widely tracked distance, where do Opera stand at present days? 

 

When it comes to sound as medium for expression, the entalgment between music and spoken words, appears less tighten the moment music is accounted as the most abstract way and comprehensive way of speaking sounds. Where does it lay this so appearently immense potentiality? How the Dyonisian instinct chooses the ways to manifest? Where does it find its roots this eradicating and sprouting force?

To imagine the segment of a piano keyboard icluding seven white consecutive keys from Do to Si note, is a way to represent music possibilities in a basic form. Yet, this fragment includes five black keys, set in between the white ones. Almost every step from white to white as a inbetween coordinate of a black colour. The possibilities to extract from this enlarged range arise. To make sense to the ears, the combinations selected have been filtered by rules, configured in structures, as known ports, from where to the depart the composition.

If the navigations taken in form of displayment of notes, are in any fashion referable to the coordinates of the port, the ears will find their pleasure also in the most freathening assemble of sounds. When along the route, more incongruent steps are taken, the anchor to the port loses part of its consistence. The set of measurement is put in doubt. Not that this is the point of the intrepide step, but based on the fact that the concretness of the land becomes this way more allusive, the navigation might touch more undifened locations and create the sense of malleable emotions emerging while listening.

The ports were originally seven, given from the seven white keys and two discontinuity points along their allignment. When Opera entered the stage of music scenario, only two of these structures were still in use. So it is for contemporarity. Before the opportunity of walking incongruent steps was considered, an immense repertoire of compositions took shape along centuries. The variety was given by the two models and their application to the different tones, so that the innumerable possibile scenarios in which the composition could take place was determinated more by the colour of each tone, than by the structures applied to them. Yet the diversity of tones included the black keys, supplying to the restricted accesibility to the ports a more defined resolution of the colours. It is import to remind that ports and shades of waves are of very distinguished natures, but both impact the landscape from the beholder point of view.

Using this wide angle, all kind of music known till Wagner and Puccini is to be counted.

With them, specifically in their works Tristan und Isolde, Turandot more undetected spots on the painting and play between structures and colours were brought to the surface of the canvas and started to more illusively stand in front of the eyes of the viewer. It is the beginnig of a break through in terms of articulation of sounds and their references to the perspectives of listening. The so called dissonances entered the frame.

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Was it a way to come closer to the mixture of beauty and bestiality Nietzsche was refering with Dyonisian? This more wider contemplation upon the colours of music was a step towards more impactfull and destabilizing musical expression?

Soon after, Arnold Schönberg based its manifesto for the natural path music schould follow towards its widest manifestation, not only on the spectrum just began to unfold in the Opera context, but also sistemtically on the structures that held this scope of together, so that from seven, then two and finally it arrived to none port from where to depart and come back to, together with the condition to not let any port, not for a moment, to be spoted from far.

Dodecafony and serialism are the bases for a new era in the work of architechting music.

This even deepr operation on the generating rules that determinate music, is an encounter of more approximation towards the Dyonisian represented?

Or are the demons, living this space of erupting energy, more to be found in the moments where the music is expressend by several indipendent voices, yet so tightly bounded together, as in the duetts, terzets, quartets…of the previous era where Verdi and Mozart declinated, still according to more restrictive rules of operating, their vividly lacerating insights on human phenomenas?

The investingation was so far related to way the musical language was articulated in order for these intricated inner motions became hearable.

What happens if the vision of how music should sound is first manipulated with the intention of giving shape to how the composer takes the beholder closer to the enflammmed moment? If the way the towards the material would have a sound and be hearable, before the sound of the inherent matter of the story told in music?

 

When cinema was not existing yet, music could already speak the cinematographical language.

Not at all in the sense that the music composed by Puccini or Wagner could inspire faboulose and suggestive images, or that they gave sound to personal inner visions, reflected and echoed by the collective imaginary. They gave sound to the operations are taking place while we are watching a movie and the most technical aspects it is represented by, which are there to announce more accurately the possible meanings to be extracted from the images, by defining, frame by frame, from where and if still or in motion, the audience should look at the happening.

As if, and it does, this would influence the beholding and insight upon the material of the dramaturgical actions.

It is the spectacle of announcing the audience its significant role in the manifestation of the drama, for how it is and how it is perceived as defining experience upon it.

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