Territories in Dialogue
This concert presents works that dialogue with other areas in a variety of ways.
In 28th October 2018: a necropolitical portrait, commissioned by the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellen Frankfurt am Main, the performer is invited to update the chart of corona virus deaths in Brazil and based on the lines perform a reading of two pages from the book Authoritarian Personality by Sanford, Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Morrow. The text should be pronounced faster when the lines of the graph go up and slower when the lines go down. In the version for this concert the graph from when the score was published, at the worst moment of the pandemic, will be used.
Brian Ferneyhough’s Kurze Schatten II dialogues on the one hand with Walter Benjamin’s Denkbilder and on the other with the philosophy of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. Ferneyhough’s work is named after Benjamin’s cycle of texts and uses them not to propose a programmatic music but to transform components of the texts into structural processes of his work. The second movement, for example, is the parallel to the text Ein Wort von Casanova in which a contradiction of money is exposed, capable of buying pleasure but carrying within itself shame. Ferneyhough takes this element of contradiction and works forces of opposing vectors: the pulse decays with each group of six bars and the density of the figures progressively increases until the end of the movement.
In relation to Deleuze and Guattari Ferneyhough works his compositional technique in a rhizomatic way – a term that appears in his drafts – connecting distinct points in a way that would not be possible in more arborescent systems such as modalism, tonalism or serialism. In this way, for example, Ferneyhough works pitches from the gesture or acts informally, freely altering the very systematization conceived a priori, resulting in a music of transformations, passages, approximations, and contrasts, effected in a rhizomatic space operated by a game of differences and impermanences.
The very title of Meditação Após Uma Leitura do Tratado de Nomadologia, establishes the relationship with a chapter from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Platos. The concept of the war machine presented in the chapter influences the concept of the work. The performer interacts with the instrument while videos are projected and modified in real time. These videos are fragments of classical concert guitar masterclasses, teaching how to play the instrument in a very stratified way. In opposition to this, the hybrid performer-guitar operates a war machine, with very distinct actions, deterritorializing the usual statements of the classical concert guitar.
PROGRAM
- 28 de Outubro de 2018: Um Retrato Necropolítico – Artur Miranda Azzi
(In 28th October 2018: a necropolitical portrait)
Text: The Authoritarian Personality. Adorno, T. et. al. (1950).
- Kurze Schatten II – Brian Ferneyhough
(Short Shades)
Text: Kurze Schatten II. Benjamin, W. (1994).
- Meditação Após Uma Leitura do Tratado de Nomadologia – Artur Miranda Azzi
(Meditation after reading Treatise on Nomadology)
Text: 1227 – Tratado de Nomadologia: A Máquina de Guerra (em: Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia). Deleuze e Guattari (1980).
