80s 70s 60s::imaginary event invitations
This week we're talking events in Poetry, Philosophy, Art, and nature. Music, too. And we start acknowledging some Byzantine influences.
In Context::on Grete Tartler Reading Octavian Nemescu
In 1984 (times of poverty and starvation for the majority of the Romanian population), the editor, poet, translator, and later ambassador, Grete Tartler coins “melopoetics” as the analysis of compositional similarities between poetry and music. Both these arts, she stresses in the preface to the book Melopoetica [i], express “Being” and are held together by rhythm, ”as an expression of freedom” and a manner of “altering the habitual passage of time”, attaining incantation and aiming for the “infinite” in finite form, as well as harmony between sounds and words, something akin to the harmony of the spheres...
Modernism [ii], in spite of being forward-looking, did not break away with these metaphysical bases. Features such as rhythmic patterns and polyphony were reshaped towards the ideal end of a supposed primal language, a universal, archetypal mode of expression, albeit a longing expressed in a myriad of new codes – requiring new grammars for composers and poets to theorize, and for readers and listeners to assimilate. As the author admits, they require resources of time and patience, soon to become scarce for more and more people in contemporary capitalism.
Arrived at the point of high postmodernism, like in Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game, there was an increased appetite for knowledge and modes of expressions converging into a sophisticated unification, of which Tartler’s approach also would seem to testify. Yet not only does Tartler cite Werner Heisenberg (p. 33), who believes that the language of art may hold more importance than science in suggesting “the unity behind the multiplicity of phenomena”; the aim of her readings is precisely querying “whether there is or not a spiritual movement beyond invention, individual styles” (p. 12). Which are the causes of this preoccupation with the spiritual and the metaphysical?
To get to the answer, it should also be mentioned here that, especially prior to the 1960s, the Communist regime in Romania imposed a rigid notion of materialism and an atypically (even compared to most other Central and East European regimes) narrow-minded artistic dogma. Even most artists who ascribed to them, in many cases out of petty opportunism, sought to escape those rigors while under the fire of criticism for deviating a single inch. They took advantage of the cultural “thaw” as soon as or even slightly ahead Ceaușescu’s agenda reform in the mid-‘60s, alongside the younger generation.
From the vantage point of our post-Communist times, it seems clearer why the general reaction to this thaw was to restore Modernist forms with an emphasis on the abstract, universal, and orphic dimensions, with archetypal, organic substance and subject matter. More relaxed and critical, international-minded approaches, such as in leftist poetry (as tentatively proposed, at the height of the early post-Stalinist period, by A.E. Baconsky, poet and editor of the Cluj-based literary magazine Steaua[ii]) or as in music (with Tiberiu Olah and Anatol Vieru having studied in Moscow, but not having changed the Romanian climate), had no chance whatsoever of providing a wide scale correction to the remnant Stalinist dogmas.
Features of the folklore, other than the rhyming schemes abused by the socialist realists, were necessarily brought instead to focus, such as the obscurity of riddles as recycled by neomodernist poets, or the features of folk music and instruments as influential on the spectralist composers of the same period. This new-found obsession for the archetypal and also for the mythological – explained by the fairly classical education imposed by the regime over a booming population, exposed like never before to high culture – represented a more comfortable uniformity than socialist realism, resented as artificial.
By the ‘70s, young neomodernist poets such as Nichita Stănescu – most prestigious exponent of metaphysical poetry – were introduced in the textbooks, influential philosopher Constantin Noica was allowed to published books such as The Romanian Philosophical Utterance (1970) and The Romanian Sense of Being (1978), while claiming that the ”authenticity” of Being benefits from the restrained development within a closed society (as opposed to the open Western society, criticized for ”denouncing all that is repression”[iv]); in the same time, the essayist Edgar Papu promoted Protochronism[v], an isolationist cultural doctrine founded on unscientific narrations of an idealized national past – all in tune with the Ceaușescu’s own increasingly isolationist political agenda, hostile to any potential criticism even on the left[vi].
It is in this context that Octavian Nemescu, as oft-cited pinnacle of such a metaphysical direction in music theory and practice, is included in the book, despite having debuted earlier than most other authors analyzed by Tartler[vii]). He is singled out for being the “sole promotor of this unusual contrivance”, i.e. the Imaginary Music, despite it not being considered the most representative feature of his oeuvre, briefly surveyed in the standalone last chapter. (As it addresses the principles of Imaginary Music, which have been explored already here, I will skip Tartler’s synopsis.)
Byzantine music and spirituality, with its “interiorization” and struggle against dis-order (p. 203), are the acknowledged roots behind Nemescu’s attempt of turning music from a passive spectacle into an active art seeking sound “essence” completely on one’s own. The same roots informed phenomena that Grete Tartler does not or could not mention, such as the then-emerging movement of Neo-Orthodoxism in the visual arts (whose founders were formerly renowned for their conceptual or even constructivist art, and brought a similarly peculiar vanguard rhetoric to their pursuit of religious symbolic-abstract art), or Byzantine and Protochronist adventures in the poetry of Ion Gheorghe[viii].
Rejecting Gadamer, who perceived addressing an actual or absent audience as the core of art, Nemescu responded in his theoretical writings (Capacitățile semantice ale muzicii [Semantic Capacities of Music], 1983) to a perceived risk of losing meaning, against communication unable to transmit knowledge, positioning himself in opposition to the aleatory and the mundane interferences that were being welcomed by the likes of John Cage. This is why Nemescu’s phenomenological endeavor in Muzica Imaginara excludes any part of the actual sonic world: the interpreter and mind-listener of CROMOSON or Song of the Objects (1974-75), while focusing sensory input on the visual information, intensified in the activity of mental perception, must also isolate themselves from interferences that might disrupt the purity of the support, just as the blank page or canvas and the white cube gallery walls prove crucial to the majority of modern poetry and arts.
In a following text, I am going to further explore what limits and possibilities such an approach, of disciplining acoustic imagination, might hold today, when music and poetry may deal differently with “archetypal” signal and “mundane” noise. For now, suffice to say that Tartler concludes her chapter Muzica Imaginara with a task we are trying to unravel: “Even if there won’t be other composers (or poets, since the text accompanying the “imaginary music” scores is outright poetry) to follow Octavian Nemescu’s “solution”, his way of thinking will nevertheless urge them to perceive the art of sound (and of words) differently”.
[i] Grete Tartler, Melopoetica, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 1984.
[ii] Modernism had less of a radical impact in Romania, perhaps because it lacked an overburdening cultural memory. This paradox would help explain why Octavian Nemescu, even in more recent conferences would believe that postmodernism merely implies the “return of tradition” and a circular, non-progressive time, rather than a false return involving irony and deconstruction. Based on
[iii] A.E. Baconsky, Opere. I: Poezii [Oeuvre. I: Poems], Academia Română. Fundația Națională pentru Știință și Artă [Romanian Academy. The National Foundation for Science and Art], Bucharest, 2010. Relevant information in the introduction by Eugen Simion, pages V-VI, as can be consulted in this online preview: http://books.corect.com/ro/books/preview/277/pdf.
[iv] Cf. the postface by Christian Ferencz-Flatz in Theodor W. Adorno, Jargonul autenticității [Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen Ideologie], translated in Romanian by Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Editura TACT, Cluj-Napoca, 2015. Adorno himself is cited earlier in Tartler’s book with Philosophie der neuen Musik, where he made a comparison between serialist music and structuralism, both of which seemed to have been often largely misunderstood and easily criticized in the Romanian context.
[v] In the article “Romanian Protochronism” (1974), essayist and literary critic Edgar Papu argued that “contrary to views widespread in Romania, the local literary tradition was not largely inspired by Western forms, but was highly original. Romanian literary creations had often anticipated creative developments in the West (such as Surrealism, Dadaism).“ (Steven G. Ellis, Lud'a Klusáková, Imagining Frontiers, Ccontesting Identities (2007), page 410. Protochronism was also associated with the revival of interest in Medieval history and also in the pre-Christian ancestors of Romanians, the Dacians, as reflected by the filmmaker Sergiu Nicolaescu, as well as in the theories of N. Densusianu or R. Guenon.
[vi] German-speaking writers such as Herta Müller and the members of Aktionsgruppe Banat were clamped down in the ‘80s for their bold approaches to quotidian reality, almost entirely excluded by many Romanian writers, or veiled behind cryptic language or bookish references.
[vii] Grete Tartler opted for a broad, inclusive, and non-hierarhical selection of Romanian poets and composers from the ‘70s-‘80s, some of them quite obscure today.
[viii] Ion Gheorghe’s name is dropped merely once in Melopoetica, as he belongs to an even older generation of writers (of the socialist-realist milieu). We should mention here volumes such as Zoosophia (1967), Cavalerul trac [The Thracian Knight] (1969), Megalitice (1972), Dacia Fëniks (1978), Proba Logosului [The Logos Challenge] (1981). Partially censored in 1980, Elegii politice [Political Elegies] criticized prior industrialization imposed by the Communists.
Composed in 1984, this score has a configuration based on that of the human body, in which there is a part corresponding to the legs, sex and the abdomen; another, suggests the hands, as well as the level of the heart and lungs. And one more zone designates the presence of the head, the mind and the aura, located in seven steps of altitude, of Transfiguration, of Ascension, of which the last one represents the highest state. First zone (A) is the seat of the visceral, reptilian instincts of matter (of condensed energies), of the lower vibrational level. It is the level of NATURE.
Second zone (B) is the area of CULTURE or, in other words, of natural models, aware and transfigured into cultural projections, being destined for the spectacular perfomance of the work.
Third zone (C), the upper part of the score, represents the TRANSCULTURAL and post-spectacular approach and practice of this opus. This means that those who have played or listened to the work in its spectacular version or listened the version recorded, and want or feel the need to practice certain fragments of it in order to improve their own being, purpose that transcends the simple "aesthetic meaning” of music, have the possibility to gradually go through the spheres, the upper circles, in the order of the ascending vertical, of the zone C. It is an individual practice, and then, on the last circle, an inward one, based on some components of the piece.
More about complete score of METABIZANTINIRIKON, with spectacular and non-spectacular music, here
LOW VIBRATIONS::tune in and drop out with Octavian Nemescu
„The naive American contemplates the sky; the Russian, or at least that Russian, settles in the sky, and contemplates the Earth.” Chris Marker on Tarkovsky (1999) quoted in the Black Star chapter from Benjamin H. Bratton’s 2019 book The Terraforming.
Maybe a false lead, but worth following: Out of the Romanian-French context arrives Metabizantinirikon by Octavian Nemescu.
The 1980s were, separately and with different stakes, a turning point in the work of French philosopher of “non-philosophy” François Laruelle, as well as the moment in time when French phenomenologist Michel Henry published his most salient work on the aesthetics of the invisible: Seeing the Invisible: On Kandisky. In regards to music, Michel Henry followed a Schopenhauerian Lebensphilosophie line of thought, stating that music “does not express the horizon of the world or any of its objects”, and that out of all the other arts, it remains poised over the precipice of non-representation. If life was for him immanent auto-affection and affectivity, music allowed for an “intensification of life”. More to the point, in this 1988 publication, M. Henry takes the key historical avant-garde figure of Kandisky as a turning point not only in art historical terms but in the entire history of making the invisible visibile, of making accessible the very essence and movement of “life”.
The METABIZANTINIRIKON piece by Octavian Nemescu, while most probably unrelated to these contemporary movements and intellectual turning points in philosophy and aesthetics (F. Laruelle/M. Henry), nevertheless allows us to pry into, follow dissipative paths, predispositions and convergent fall out. In this sense, this series of paragraphs, personal quips, blurbs and fragments will not try to re-inscribe his composition into some larger flow of similar affects and forebodings, but start with a series of strange & startling synchronicities. Metabizantinirikon, initially worked on and recorded at I.R.C.A.M. Studios in Paris 1986 as tape music, stands at a certain (yet to be discerned) crucible, when transformative conceptual formations and philosophical underrecurrents became manifest.
Also perhaps poignantly an example of what, in the early 1990s, was critically named as “the theological turn of French phenomenology” (Dominique Janicaud), when a series of important intellectuals (among them M. Henry) started allegedly smuggling biblical, theological and mystical terms. As part of this ‘illegal’ intellectual trafficking, the 1980s was also the time of full-time immanence via Spinoza, and when the “non-dialectical” became preeminent, foregrounding a thinking that positions itself programmatically against European “master thinkers” (or previous avant-gardes) according to a “style of thought” (in Laruelle) that harks back to pre-Socratic. Maybe not so anecdotal and parenthetical, Laruelle himself was described as a somewhat failed musician who was forced to work with ideas rather than sounds, obliged to confront ideas-as-notes within an atonal composition (John Ó Maoilearca).
Outside of this French-Romanian context, it is maybe high time to confront the “transcultural” (transnational?) tuning-in of this piece (and others?), as initially elaborated by Octavian Nemescu, together with him and away from his altitude flight, or his naturalistic and corporal-humanoid sonic hierarchy of listening (from bipedal leg region towards the mind/head/auratic), above and apart from meta-Byzantine planetary sound visions and towards other continents, musical spheres, worlds, or “satellites” as he names them in his presentation of the imaginary music score for the piece.
How is one able to assess this tuning to the excluded and precluded realms of sound and vibrancy? How are certain sonic para-phenomena, rhythmic entities, or people being excluded, muted or pushed down from above into the below, filtered “in the Red” (borrowed by R. James from Tricia Rose’s study) range of the sonic spectrum?
Various practices and concepts have been recently deployed and developed within critical race theory, afropessimism, black quantum theory and black musical futurism, offering ways at calibrating the “epistemic, ontological, aesthetic, and political practices black people have used to build alternative realities amid white supremacist patriarchal domination" (6, Robin James, Sonic Episteme 2019). Thus, this minor contribution would be also a first tentative assessment of “postspectacle” (O. Nemescu) in regards to other more recent or contemporary developments such as the work on “quietude” by Kevin Quashie, Édouard Glissant concept of opacity, Devonya Havis notion of “sounding”, Katherine McKittrick work on the “demonic” calculus or Alexander Weheliye notion of “phonographies” or even in regards to enacting a new spatio-temporal consciousness (Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips).
This primary investigation of Metabizantinirikon will also take its cues from such critical works as Robin James book Sonic Episteme, updating an age-all metaphysical hierarchy (at least since the Pythagoreans) of beautiful (geometric) ratios and correlated pleasing vibratory patterns that has also served as a classification of people along rational/irrational, class, gender, and racial lines.
In James’s book, the “acoustic resonance” of this old metaphysical hierarchy also seems to be vibrating in resonance with/within the increasing drive of computational capitalism towards reality quantification/purging the non-quantifiable, as well as in tune with theoretical physics (String Theory) or new materialist (Barad, Grosz, Bennett) and mediatic conceptions of materiality as an analog real (J. F. Martel), based on a research program that refuses representations, propositions, images and focuses rather on weird resonances. (to be continued)
from the Archives::Octavian Nemescu and Wanda Mihuleac
Subjective Spaces, in REVISTA ARTA, ….
In response to Revista Arta magazine thematic proposal to discuss the intimate architecture of her artistic process, Wanda Mihuleac imagines "with all the margins of subjectivism, a series of graphs, contained in and containing the necessary tools for that type of biunivocal symbolic communication that is creation".
Graph 2 has in its center egocentric time, primitive time felt in the center of the action with today in the present, yesterday in the past and tomorrow in the future, then the practical time - related to the integral action, as J. Piaget shows, then the intuitive time, limited to the relations of succession and duration in an immediate perception, and the operative time (human psychic time) which consists in relations of succession and duration based on operations analogous to the logical ones.
The concentric graph 3 has in its center the locus as a spatial determination of corporeality, a transposition of the concept of correspondences between the universe (macrocosm) and man (microcosm). Then the hearth - as the ultimate unit of territoriality, the territory - the vast space and beyond the periphery, UTOPIA - as a place that does not exist anywhere.
Depending on the limits of the senses (graph 3B of sound intensity, graph 3A of colors, tastes and smells), knowing that sensations slide depending on the context and that they tend to adapt to a personal model delimited by the brain, previous experience, the psycho-intellectual particularities of the individual, of the spatio-temporal (graph 2A and 2C) and cultural categories (next graph), we can establish several types of topoi.
Conversation with Octavian Nemescu, interview by Andra Frățilă, in MUZICA no.1 /2016
"One of my first creative tendencies, after graduating, was towards a music that I called ecological. I had then a wonderful collaboration with a visual artist: Wanda Mihuleac. The two of us set out to cultivate this aesthetic. Let's not forget that at the time, the ecologist movement, with its return to nature was only at its beginnings. Wanda was in charge of the visual side of the project, while I created the sound environment. Both of us were eager to get out of the conventional space: me out of the concert hall, her out of the exhibition hall, out of the museum. We wanted to revert art to the energetic context of nature, as it once was - speaking of postmodern, pastiche trends."Down with the concert hall! Let's go towards nature! Let's fill our works with cosmic energies and let them fill others, in turn. Basically, she wanted to make an "installation", considering herself neither a painter, nor a sculptor. She made geometrical figures from lichens, grass, from natural elements and my purpose was to make music using hums and crickets’ sounds. The hum is a component element of my music, along with the sounds of crickets, water and breath. My work was called Combinations in Circles and her creations were called Spirals. Closed circularities in the case of Combinations in Circles and open or spiraling circularities in the work of Wanda Mihuleac. The result was a ritual, as my music also had this character, involving several dancers who fought with their inner demons at sunset. […] It was really crowded! The audience came in with buses! Lots of intellectuals. It was getting dark, and the light came from flashlights, there were a few spotlights as well, and I had a cellist placed inside the installation. Notice how much similar are my scores and Wanda's installation. The closed circles and the open ones…"
Here’s a glimpse to the score
Here you can listen to the piece
“Meditation and Audacity” vs. “The Patriotic Song - the song of the masses”
a dialectical & retro interview collage intertwining two materials from 1970s’ journal ROMANIA LITERARA, one dedicated to avant-garde composers Corneliu Cezar, Lucian Mețianu, Octavian Nemescu, Costin Miereanu and Mihai-Mitrea Codrianu, the other, Proletcult composers Teodor Bratu and Sergiu Sarchizov, completely forgotten today…
5 composers on Meditation and Audacity, by Sever Tipei
1. Corneliu Cezar (C.C)
2. Lucian Mețianu (L.M)
3. Octavian Nemescu (O.N)
4. Costin Miereanu (C.M)
5. Mihai Mitrea-Celerianu (M.M-C)
Patriotic Songs - Songs for the Masses by Vera Micznik
—A dialogue with the composers Teodor Bratu (T.B) and Sergiu Sarchizov (S.S)—
- Is there a way of thinking that is exclusively musical?
C.M. - Yes, there is, but today it becomes insufficient and anachronistic. The sensation of leaving behind the condition of a professionalised musician is more and more acute. Let's focus on our own Self in order to meditate on why we live, why we make music and only after that let's face, simply, the music.
O.N. - Any kind of sonic manifestation can constitute an operative means towards an artistic work. More important to me are the relationships that are established within the set of operating elements, as well as the point of reference from which we look at things.
C.C. - I am not interested in any kind of art, if it is located at the periphery of meaning. If another art or fact of life will one day be better at encompassing the enormous vein of meaning, I will forgo music without regret. Or I will only use music, if the other arts will betray the meaning.
- What attracted you to this particular kind of music (patriotic)?
S.S. - My generation, which began its creative activity in the years following 23 August 1944, had a natural incentive to appeal to the masses through song. Speed, readiness were required. This may explain the fact that I, and a number of other colleagues like Vieru, Bughici, Olah wrote mass songs at the time (although today in our creation, they are quite occasional), being aware that some things can be properly said only inside this genre.
In the few years I've spent as a teacher in a village in Transylvania, the need to write especially for the peasant choir I conducted, persuaded me of the actual expressive potency of the choral music and of the fact that a well written song is the most natural way of human expression. As for myself, based on the accumulated experience in the field of choral music, I have pursued more complex genres, such as the opera The oak from Borzești, and, in progress, the opera Punguța cu doi bani.
Are you interested in non-European music?
C.C. - I appreciate not only the highbrow art of any country, but even more so the European and non-European folklore production.
M. M.-C. - Yes, first of all as being correlated with spiritual manifestations.
O. N. - Especially the oriental musical, which offers its own and unique way of feeling time.
How do you see the music-text relationship in the mass song? What are the criteria for choosing the texts?
S. S. - Most of the time the composer consults with one of the poets he is used to working with, he defines the general thematic framework, even some details of form. It is necessary to have a unison in which both creators vibrate during the work period, thus avoiding the mismatches between text and music. This is how I work with the poets Vlaicu Bîrna and Florin Mugur.
T. B. - The text is of great importance for mass music. Sometimes, through a misunderstanding of the text-music relationship and through the unnecessary repetition of slogans devoid of poetic fantasy, the audience was less engaged. Personally, lately I also write my own lyrics, believing in the double sincerity of a music born with the lyrics.
Are you concerned with the psychology of perception?
O. N. - The work of art can last by itself, regardless of whether it is understood or not. The problem of perception is completely separate from the artistic object. However, I do not exclude the way in which an artistic object is born through direct contact with its consumers, through permanent contact with the tentacles of its perception.
C. M. - Music is neither a psychogram, nor a scaffolding of sound objects. It is, as Stockhausen says, "The wave, which has become sound, of cosmic electricity," and then a mean of terrestrial purification.
M. M.-C. - It provides us with significant but non-decisive data. Only one receiver counts in grinding the artistic object - you and yourself.
How did this genre evolve? Is there a Romanian tradition in this sense?
T. B. - Undoubtedly, the patriotic choral creation of the forerunners (Flechtenmacher: Hora Unirii, Muzicescu: Trumpets sound, Porumbescu: First of May etc.) are the cornerstones. They will merge with the international workers' revolutionary song. At first, the undertaking of template marches, devoid of any national element was exaggerated and led to schematism and lack of originality. But following the upward and diversifying curve of our entire culture, the mass song evolved qualitatively. A real rebirth was brought on by the young graduates of the Conservatory, class of 1955-1956. Their acquired culture urged them towards the creative takeover of authentic folklore. The lyricism, the meditative in the Romanian folk song, is gaining ground, to the detriment of the "explosive" that has prevailed before. I think that's where the "melting" of mass song into the general notion of choral music begins.
Are you attracted to the idea of a group or do you prefer solitude?
O. N. - I need both just as much.
L. M. - I'm for the group. Today, one man can no longer comprehend such complex fields. It is necessary to exchange views between musicians, mathematicians, physicists, biochemists, psychologists. I see immediate research oriented towards the fields of music perception and especially of musical semantics. (If it turns out it exists).
What are the current characteristics of this kind of music?
T. B. - Today we address an audience with a well-defined cultural and ideological level, which seeks intellectual delight in music and not patterns. Retaining its mass character, from a street song, meant to agitate, it became music to listen to, concert music. Its architectural forms are enlarged: suite, triptych, poem with a socio-political character. Lately, the polyphonic choral treatment, the approach of procedures specific to contemporary music are more and more present.
S. S. - As for the direct, rhythmic, short songs of immediate penetration, there is now a lower interest.
Collected by Ana Szel