On Monday 11th of November from 11:30 to 13:00 I gave a Workshop for about fifty students of the Hegau-Bodensee-Seminar and the Alexander-von-Humboldt Gymnasium of Konstanz.
The Workshop, titled “Coordinates of Listening”, had the main objective to give the students some basic notions of the phenomenological principles that rule (in different ways) the diverse aesthetics present in the broad artistic spectrum of so-called New Music.
In order to do so, the starting point of the Workshop was given by the observation of a brief scene of the 1980 movie “The Shining” by Stanley Kubrick: the scene shows Wendy, the female protagonist of the film being insistently followed and inquired by the male protagonist, Jack, in a stressing and frightening situation that is fittingly accompanied by the “Canon for string orchestra and two tapes”, a musical composition created in 1962 by the polish composer Krzystof Penderecki.
The general sensation of fear and distress produced in large part through the music was inquired as a peculiar situation that consciously takes advantage of the intuitive emotional response triggered in our minds when faced against phenomena whose evolution in time cannot be predicted, therefore unconsciously being interpreted as a possible “threat”. At this point, I explained to the students that this has to do with one of the main evolutionary characteristics that gave the human species a large survival advantage in comparison to other animals: the human ability to anticipate and predict phenomena in time, and that therefore when a human feels that such an anticipation of possible situations is impossible, an atavistic sense of distress is triggered.
From this very important base, I then followed explaining to the students that the “weird” or “scary” associations that are so often made when approaching New Music, are actually linked to the aforementioned intuitive response to unpredictable phenomena, and that this unpredictability of New Music had to do mainly with our difficulty to establish criteria that can guide our perception.
After this association was made, I pinpointed the three elementary principles that rule not only New Music but in general all music creation: Repetition, Variation and Creation. I explained in simple terms these three principles, both conceptually and concretely, demonstrating them through specific music examples, using my own voice but also “body percussion”, alluding to well-known songs from the world of Pop and Rock music, in order to give the students a concrete reference.
These three principles where linked to the three “dimensions” of physical existence (up/down, left/right, front/back), explaining the students that all music genres or compositions exhibit the aforementioned principles to different degrees, always mixing them in order to create “beauty”, just as we inhabit geographical space in all of its dimensions.
Followingly, after a helpful short intervention of the music teacher Wolfgang Feucht, I guided the students through a short observation of how Repetition, Variation and Creation were present not only in the music they are used to listening everyday (Pop, Rock, Hip-hop, etc.) but also on the musical styles they had been studying at their music lessons at the Gymnasium, such as Dodecaphony, Minimalism and Aleatoric music. This survey was made through the observations and comments of some of the students, who were positively able to individuate the aforementioned principles in the musical styles they had already approached.
On the final part of the workshop, I presented the students a composition by the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, titled “Lo spazio inverso”: after listening to a complete performance of the piece, where the students listened quite respectfully and in silence, I guided them through the general structure of the composition, showing how the three mentioned principles where present. As a final statement, I reiterated the fact that the apparently disorienting and “frightening” quality of such music had to do with its apparent unpredictability if compared to mainstream music genres, inviting the students to be aware of such unconscious reaction, and to try to “deactivate” it in order to reach a fulfilling aesthetic experience that allows a real contact with contemporary artistic creations.
Mateo Servián Sforza
