A Collective Effort
On this week's menu: another theoretical essay on Imaginary Music, hors d'oeuvres from CROMOSON by the artists in the project, and vintage from the archive. All well distanced. Dig in!
Imaginary Music as Collective Labor
Nemescu’s Imaginary Music as witnessed by what’s already published here - and there’s more to come - is an innovative and unique kind of work. However, it can also be seen as profoundly touched by the era it was created in. At its core, the mystical mode of operation and its anti-spectacle attitude are tell tale markers of (self)censorship, gnosticism and other byproducts of living and creating under an increasingly oppressive communist regime.
We feel it’s important to argue at this stage that the concept behind Imaginary music is not so much aimed at revolutionary works, but more of a coping mechanism. This explains the objet unique nature of the CROMOSON score and of other pieces in the genre, as documents intended first and foremost for personal use, conserved in original copy, so to say. What is a bit paradoxical in our ongoing research on Muzică imaginară is that we keep finding more and more information from Nemescu himself at the end of the ‘70s and in later decades, as he introduces and explains the score through several articles and interviews, published in contemporary art or music magazines. Yet, he seems to not have pursued official publication for the entire content, even though the nature of CROMOSON, for example, is that of a treatise. It’s been our greatest surprise to discover the manuscript has around 150 pages!
Creative in format and riddled with drawings and metaphors, this little-circulated manifesto of imaginary music relies on a fair amount of music terminology and notation. We have been faced with the fact that while such specialized knowledge was more commonly taught and therefore better understood then, as we attempt wider distribution now, potential readership is diminished by the decrease in sight reading abilities or “perfect hearing”. How to address the midi crowd?
From this perspective, our initial ideas on how to unearth such a unique concept like Muzica imaginara looked for help in the articulation of guidelines and sonic aids aimed at the post-digital generation. Sharing is caring, and through Muzica imaginara, we want to make this amazing idea from a Romanian composer behind the Iron Curtain available for interpretation to a wider “audience” - as well as adding contributions from a few musicians that have already stumbled upon the idea in the larger Nemescu repertoire and already knew what to do with it. More on their efforts, coordinated by Irinel Anghel, in a future installement.
For now, suffice to say that from the Imaginary Music scores circulated among the members of this project, CROMOSON attracted almost everybody’s attention: it’s long, methodical and abstract enough to be read in multiple ways, with some people being intrigued by its links to meditation, others attracted by its poetry or simply drawn to its graphic form. During the current quarantine, it can become a serious activity indexing objects according to categories in the score, along the way developing a new inner understanding of the world based on sound. CROMOSON can be read as a form of hyper-ecology, its intricate protocols for individual explorations, a form of fine tuning the world.
They say that restrictions bring about the most creative solutions, so operating within this given framework is bound to generate some interesting results. Deeply intimate and ultimately a solitary practice, we feel nevertheless that Nemescu’s Imaginary Music is infused by a spirit of collective purpose – it may address an individual, but its purpose is to help alter the world’s imagination.
Hopefully, Imaginary Music is to be used as a tool for each person’s needs, as well as a springboard for creativity rather than this semi-sacred, historical object that needs to be revered and preserved accordingly. Some might integrate parts of it into their meditation practice, others might think of its principle of the vibrating landscape on their next nature walk, while some people might be inspired to use its poetic language to think their own works: all these approaches are equally valid.
Anything is possible in someone’s imagination and, especially during these uncertain and troubling times of social and cultural restructuring, imagination remains the one thing nobody can cancel or take away.
Andra Nikolayi and Octav Avramescu
from Musique imaginaire, 1976
Music is, first and foremost, an organizational principle. However, I believe that no matter how objective or non-confessional a creator may be, they still transmit something from their own dimension. In art, I am interesting in revealing the intimate, hidden relations among things. I seek to manifest a form of meditation through art. Octavian Nemescu, 1968
CROMOSON’s different color exercises each have a central melodic line, labeled M, proposed as the basis of every imaginary music. Later Imaginary Music pieces also have similar central elements. How do we proceed?
Because this graphic score describes possibilities for a medium - the inner hearing - which was in fact never explored so … democratically, Nemescu did not choose to render it in a known, readable, easily decipherable language. Inner hearing, in music, was previously used only as a workspace or building mode by composers and players.
And just like in some kind of Communism, Muzica Imaginara presents all of us with an ideal, an utopia – a score impossible to perform as spectacle, according to its own instructions, but nevertheless, ready to impress itself upon its practitioner. The exercises start all with “Imagine…”
We need to further explore in relation to graphic scores in CROMOSON a series of characteristics linked to its production and reception: it does not have a specific duration – making or experiencing it is not bound by time or space; it is to be practiced remotely, without reference to some ultimate sonic reality that can be owned somehow; and it’s practically cost free (its production expenses are basically zero). In contrast to these characteristics, operating mentally with the memory of frequencies and with ratios between sounds like all scores have calls for skills that even the most avid music lovers with an impressive culture in the field do not really possess. Can we nevertheless conclude that being an individual practice rather than passive audition or some other reception process, CROMOSON’s attributes and graphic score imply that practice makes perfect, not competence? After all, channeling participants into a “chosen”, “pure” crowd of initiated practitioners that somehow have earned the right to canonically conceptualize Muzica Imaginara would be an impossible and ultimately futile endeavor.
In a preliminary conclusion, “the act of imagining involves the inner representation, as a form of self-hypnosis, of an object, a real-life situation or of an artistic image with symbolic undertones”. Moreover, Octavian Nemescu considers that the “capacity of representation that humans were born with presents the subject with the possibility of experiencing sensations within their inner self in contact with an imagined reality, and these are just as intense as those from the real world, even sometimes experiencing sensations and rewards greater than those.”
This thesis, which might seem strange for many of the disciples of the spectacle, is rooted in the ancient practices of archaic civilizations, in contemporary meditation techniques, as well as in certain therapeutic methods devised by psychiatrists, all examples that strengthen its validity.
Habitually, “the visual image, in the sense of the inner representation of certain sacred images, has been used as a technical mystical method of purification, being extremely efficient in various religious doctrines.” The same traditions also mention the concept of clair-audiance (as opposed to clairvoyance, n.tr.), relating to the “active role that imagination can play, as a faculty which can serve to prepare for experiencing subtle sonic realities and can efficiently contribute to entering a state of trance”, thus pointing towards “experiences in which one could reach the capacity to hear cosmic sounds through meditation and not through the hermeneutics of listening to actual sounds.”
Irinel Anghel, transl. from Orientari, Directii, Curente ale Muzicii Romanesti din a doua jumatatea a sec.XX, 2019
At the cognitive level, the ideal conditions for Muzica Imaginara lie somewhere between a memory proficient in the tonal system (including the trained, unconscious allocation of a sonic identity that is the sound’s timbre) and … creativity or access to a medium of inner projection (of sounds and images), where the transmission should be comprehensible, even enthralling.
In this respect, establishing correspondences and sonic identities noted in a score in order to develop your inner hearing also means to become attuned to the particularities of musically coding instructions that govern some potential development of the world of composition - the other alternative seems to … trance.
Here lies what seems to be ultimately a choice between compositional and spiritual practice. And we won’t try to make one in the name of Nemescu.
Traditionally in music, translating the score into sound is the final result. But when it comes to the kind of imaginary music proposed by Nemescu, the aural rendition is just a prop, a temporary, auxiliary construct, a work aid, not meant to represent an interpretation, but rather as a deconstruction of one’s own practice based on music notation proficiency.
Ana Szel
From the Archive
Section for selected (and translated) fragments from our growing Archive, a digitization project for articles and other materials on Romanian culture and experimental music from the period. Some material dialectics involved.
NEW STRUCTURES / IN THE CREATION OF OUR YOUNG COMPOSERS
Instead of answers, no less conventional, that we would have received from the composers approached here in the advent of a "Creative worksite" material, focused on dull questions and stereotypes with which we have repeatedly "enjoy ourselves” in the musical pages of newspapers and our magazines, a "What are you working on at the moment, maestro?”, or "What works await on your desk?", or "Tell us some of the inner concerns of your creative lab", etc., etc., Amifiteatru Magazine prefers the direct, visual plea of the graphic scores that bear the content of the music itself. And this is a perfectly functional direction, from the fact that the orientations - otherwise complementary - of the Romanian musical structuralism (structuralism of "detail", structuralism of "sound blocks", structuralism of "random" incidences) manifest themselves strongly in the originals presented, sometimes in visually captivating, graphic forms. Their necessary modernism, dictated by a logical inner meaning related to the mastery, often mathematical, of the immense material available to the composer today, and not in the least owing to artificial, formal exhibitions, this graphic aspect of the new structures brings once again to the attention of specialists the problem of the truly European level of the syntheses undertaken by our young music.
Without intending to present synthetically the phenomenon of Romanian musical structuralism, as well as without any hierarchy according to a judgment of value, we reproduce, at random, some titles from the recent creation (mostly works not yet performed publicly and not in print) by some young creators - which, we openly confess, we had more readily at hand, now in the middle of the summer season.
AUGUST 1967
*selection criteria in the archive:
#August feeling from ‘67
#featuring Nemescu and close colleagues like Mețianu and Cezar, in an unsigned article that is suggestively friendly toward experiments in structure, stressing in bold a “Romanian musical structuralism” that is based on the newest concepts like aleatoricism, sound blocks (spectralism?), graphic scores and … European standards? Times were changing, and half of the composers mentioned will soon flee the country, which has silenced their contribution to a generation.
CROMOSON
study group: RED
Musician Bogdana Dima has been leading an online weekly study group for better understanding the score
RED, the first color in the CROMOSON score, is all about speed and intensity. Its metaphors describing timbre rely on molten metals, blood and poison invocations and covert Communist metaphors (mentions of the hammer and sickle). Is it a high-pitched, acute, polyphonic and heterophonic endeavor of swarms and divergence.
Bogdana also recorded the melodic line from the score as an audio aid for those who don’'t know how to read music. This is by no means an interpretation (again, Muzica imaginara is just to be imagined in the end).
Here are some thoughts from the study group:
Stefan: When I think about the color red, I associate it with a very low, intense, deep sound, riding the fine line between audible and visceral. I am not sure if I do this as an automatic association or if I do it because I know that red has a longer wavelength/lower frequency and is near the lower limits of visual perception. For me, red is a very special color, not due to its symbolism (which can be different in various cultures) but strictly due to its inherent visual impact.
Andra: Red instinctively makes me think of blood. And anger. It is always used to create suspense or express anguish in movies. Mostly, red to me is both anxiety and excitement.
Bogdana: “Here, the colors of winter are green, red, yellow and earthy, but somewhere far away the only color is white” Oana Tudoran – “Calaiacanaia”
After flipping through CROMOSON, I imagined with enthusiasm how I would go through each score and I would practice an inner ritual for each color and so my inner world would be enriched, I would bring light to the dark areas of my subconscious, things hidden from the inside would be revealed to me, and the perception of the outside would be updated.
However, the direction I took, which also includes the performative part (in my own “autistic” solitude) is outlined as being more Apollonian: I started a series of online meetings with the artists in the project (and not only -> an open call will follow!) who want to discover an imaginary music based on that proposed by Octavian Nemescu in CROMOSON in which, even if we do a kind of dissection on the score, (with the risk of going beyond the limits of imaginary music by offering sound landmarks to those who can not read notes), different interpretations also meet to bring new forms of creation, even to the ability to transform everyday reality.
“Humanity has evolved technologically, but now it must also develop its human side” Anonymous, 2020
-Now I am not looking for the most suitable music to make my plants happy, now I look at their color until the music is made inside me…
-Now, the bee sting causes the blood to revolt and inside myself I can hear the hot, chromatic, agitated hums…
-Now, the redness on the cheeks is the boiling of pure and multimelodic water….
Words that give that feeling you have after repeating a word too many times:
Sonificare.
Imaginar.
“I'm starting to be human”
Seeing Red: Artistic Reinterpretations and Other Projects
Lala Misosniky: One of the things I observed while trying to enact some of the protocols of Imaginary Music from CROMOSON (1974-75) into a series of spoken word/soundscape experiments was the need to use a multi-sensory approach when studying and practicing the instructions, the importance of connecting the visual, sonic and vocal elements.
In my work with the scores, I tried to embody the text of the protocols by listening to the aural translations of the musical notation (performed by Ana Szel on piano), and merging these with some landscape field recording elements Nemescu mentions, trying recreate thus the visual associations he mentions (i.e., a red natural object in the daylight, in the shadow or in the artificial light).
The effect of listening to the melodic lines is that they played in my mind afterwards, throughout the day!
For me, listening to Ana’s piano is the only way I can imagine the core melodic line proposed, and work with it afterwards.
I notice color more often these days, I catch myself observing the image in front of me more carefully, freezing it for some seconds or accidentally finding a red natural object, be it flower, fruit, vegetable etc. Also, when I’m outside, I notice more the sounds of the landscape. "The tendency is to unify the two sensations: sound and visual, real and imaginary " - a quote from the text for the protocol Red natural object in daylight that influenced me.
Due to the cultural censorship at the time, CROMOSON exercises were meant to be performed solely in the imagination of the listener, the last territory of freedom for experimental art during those oppressive times.
Not only was censorship affecting experimental practices, but the unavailability of sound technologies made it more difficult to create such musical experiments. Nowadays, we are facing the perspective of isolation in the physical world, coupled with hyper-interaction through the virtual realm. Does the accessibility of new media technologies and the freedom imparted by online communication enable us to better understand the Cromoson protocols and its mix of imaginary and real within a new real-virtual language?
Mitos Micleusanu:With Mitos Micleusanu
In reading the first Imaginary Music score by Octavian Nemescu, the Red part of CROMOSON, some of the references that guided me are more than clear and evocative, with easily recognizable layers, one concrete, pertaining to the instructions and the interpretation, followed by a deeper, poetic one, injecting the video with the fluctuating, lyrical dynamic of the original text.
CROMOSON begins with the formula “Imagine the burning vibrations…”, then continues with concrete explanations for the imaginary interpretation and culminate with historical, political, philosophical references, in rather subversive, metaphorical manner. For example:
“... of simmering bloody waters/ of sudden, melting flashes of hammers and sickles/ red-hot/ deadly/ of the wasp revolution/ red / wild/ sweltering/ of the hissing of baby vipers/ gelatinous / fanatic/ angry”
“wiggling vibrations overflowing in scorching swarms, / from the bed of the RED OBJECT/ trying to attack/ ignite / and pervert your sleep-deprived/ weak/ impassioned senses/ shooting sick sensations straight into your veins”
On the one hand, this made me think the work "On the Marble Cliffs" by Ernst Junger, and on the other, of the German expressionism represented especially by Otto Dix or Georg Grosz, and, last but not least, of the "outsider” artists from the Prinzhorn collection, as well as those exhibited in the Museum of Raw Art (Collection de l'art brut) in Lausanne.
With my audio/video reading of the fragment Red from CROMOSON I tried creating a post-processing color effect (using filters) of some footage from director Sergei Eisenstein’s 1928 film rendition of the 1917 October Revolution in St. Petersburg. I created the soundtrack (my voice, reading the score) in an attempt to achieve a temporal concordance with the video material and, of course, in order to amplify the historical imprint of the chosen passage.
George Drimbau: I have organised introductory and voluntary discussions and practice with various people doing meditation from circles exterior to our own artistic ones