One more time, with feeling...
“People, beware! we are living, today, in a moment of crisis, in a continental twilight!” This phrase sums up a surprising recurrence in the research we’ve embarked on — a project-within-the-project we’ve decided to call Unearthing Imaginary Music. It belongs, along with the concept of Imaginary music [muzica imaginara], to Octavian Nemescu, a Romanian composer celebrating 80 this year. And no, it’s not recent, though it might seem so. In fact, it iconically reappears in his older and newer writings, often along with the mention of his imaginary music series, which can thus be seen as an escape, a reaction, if not a possible solution. Some conditions apply.
Today, it looks like Nemescu’s rather nihilistic outlook has never been as close to being reflected in the actual world. The global Pandemic has reshaped our society in ways we would have never imagined, its scope and uncertainty seemingly all-encompassing. The first? lockdown period passed a while ago, and our lives are still a long way from returning to normal. Not only are live music and events transfigured, but our reduced social interactions bear various amounts of anxiety. And, at a first glance, the migration of performances to the online seemed like the logical step. While ease of access to concerts worldwide for an unlimited audience presented a golden opportunity, we now come to realize that variables such audio quality and one’s general disposition are fundamental factors of the experience, which we also should be taking into account.
COVID-19 times need artistic proposals through which special (and virtual) connections can be remade between creators and audiences. It’s likely that now not only concerts are all but dead, but also the attention devoted to the art of sounds suffers, for reasons technical and subjective or simply put, lack of concentration. With Imaginary music, instead of looking for a collective form of celebration (group values) in music, we re-discover an exercise of individual reflexivity and creativity.
Developed by Nemescu in 1974-5, this new genre starts in fact from a very radical scenario: imagine yourself without access to an instrument or unable to use voice, resorting to sounds created entirely with your inner hearing! In this particular case, both resistance and censorship seem to be built in… More importantly, Nemescu posits a rare “insight" – imagination is where music is new. And he has shown interest in formalising it, to today: last time in 2017. Please find in the archive we’ve prepared translations from several important texts. The project has gathered more than 200 articles and book entries, on top of the original instruction scores. We’ve translated some of the very important ones, with more to follow.
From the project Unearthing Imaginary music - gathering an eclectic group of artists, musicians, researchers, academics and composers - we can also present here activities of imaginary music realised by other composers, as well as online workshops, comissioned articles, and other artistic proposals planning to spark a series of contemporary interpretations, catalyze inter-disciplinary connections and ignite an ongoing conversation about what seems to us like a temporary, unexpected alternative to live music.
A (transcultural) trajectory for Imaginary music: Ritual - Metamusic - Antispectacle - Postspectacle
In looking for music experiments in Romania, all but forgotten today due to the radical change brought by the Revolution in 1989, our working definition / selection principle favours initiatives that were not directly useful, required by the system in place, which were thus uncalled for, sometimes even having results the state felt needed censorship one way or another. No longer so in the free market economy taking hold after ’89… when unfettered enthusiasm from different kinds of experimentalists was soon confronted with the cold shower of commercial relevance. This spelt crisis, again, and slowly silenced for good many aspiring musicians. It kept looping back Nemescu to his pre-revolution assesment of a fatal crisis in high culture, whenever the ocassion arose for him to take a public stand on new music.
For a short while after ’89, enthusiasm seemed de rigueur. We have as sign of this
All his work and public positioning can guide a broader reassesment of music experiments in the Socialist Republic of Romania, as well as for the period after its demise in 1989, when the market economy turned the attitude to experiments on its head. He still testifies that European high culture is nearing exhaustion, that in spectacle the visceral triumphs over the spiritual, and, particulalrly in this interview 1, elitist tastes or high art, as it was once supported by aristocracy, AND, he interestingly adds with this ocassion, sometimes possible in the folds of ideological interests of totalitarian regimes, is now no longer possible. This kind of analysis is more and more possible now, but it might still quite a bit of (moral) processing for many.
LOW VIBRATIONS::tune in and drop out with Octavian Nemescu
Stefan Tiron
„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 concerning an Imaginary music as that proposed by Nemescu, in his 1988 publication, M. Henry takes the key historical avant-garde figure of Kandinsky as a turning point not only in art historical terms but in the entire history of making the invisible visible, of making thus accessible to the world the very essence, movement and trepidation of “life”.
The METABIZANTINIRIKON piece by Octavian Nemescu, in the same time a score for tape and musician, and a set of instructions for imaginary music practice, while most probably unrelated to these contemporary movements and intellectual turning points in philosophy and aesthetics (F. Laruelle/M. Henry), nevertheless invites us to pry into it, follow dissipative paths, predispositions and convergent theoretical fall out.
In this sense, the present series of paragraphs, personal quips, blurbs and fragments will not try to re-inscribe this composition into some larger flow of similar affects and forebodings, but start investigating the underpinnings of some strange & startling synchronicities.
Metabizantinirikon, initially worked on and recorded during a residency of the composer at I.R.C.A.M. Studios in Paris 1986, stands at a certain (yet to be discerned) crucible, when transformative conceptual formations and philosophical underrecurrents became manifest.
It is perhaps poignantly an example of what, in the early 1990s, developed into a hot debate around “the theological turn of French phenomenology” (Dominique Janicaud), when a series of important intellectuals (among them M. Henry) allegedly started smuggling in biblical, theological and mystical terms. As part of this ‘illegal’ intellectual trafficking, the 1980s were also the time of full-time immanence via Spinoza, as well as a time 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 the pre-Socratic. Maybe not so anecdotal and parenthetical, Laruelle himself was described as a somewhat philosopher musician, who was forced to work with ideas rather than sounds, obliged to confront ideas-as-notes within an atonal composition (John Ó Maoilearca). Going even deeper in search of (im)probable synchronicities, we find French economist and scholar Jaques Attali (part of Mitterand’s government), who had started to believe that avant-garde music and the forecasting power of probabilistic mathematics in market economics was basically one and the same thing. In his 1977 book Attali brings together economists and composers as having found a way to transform statistical and sonic noise from a fluke into a resource (Robin James 2019).
Outside of this hypothetical French-Romanian context, it is maybe high time to also confront the programmatic “transcultural” (transnational?) metaphysical tuning-in of this piece, as initially elaborated by Octavian Nemescu. First with him and away from what we might consider his immaterial, abstract, altitude flight, reserved for post-spectacular, imaginary music practice. His naturalistic and corporeal/abstract, humanoid sonic hierarchy of listening (structuring graphically the score and evolving from bipedal leg region -A- towards the mind/head/auratic -C-) is specificially situated above and apart from meta-Byzantine planetary sound visions (detailed in the electroacoustic music committed to tape and described in the use instructions for vinyl and CD release), which allow for various continents, musical spheres, worlds, orbited by melodic lines inscribed by the instrumentalist accompanying the tape as “satellites”. How is one able to assess this tuning to the excluded and precluded (foreclosed?) realms of sound and vibrancy? How are certain sonic para-phenomena, low intensities of all sorts, rhythmic entities, or people being crunched, integrated or excluded. How are they muted or downshifted below the range as well as the above the range: filtered “in the Red” (borrowed by Robin James from Tricia Rose’s study) range of the sonic spectrum as opposed to the green? “In the red” example aptly ponders on the default state of musical software or digital instruments and how they pre- select for certain values, certain ratios and otherwise color in red everything that exceeds, filtering the “incorrect sounds” (that are too loud, too low or considered not right).
Various practices and concepts have been recently deployed and developed within critical race theory, afropessimism, black quantum theory and black musical futurism, endowing us with new ways to assess 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 “non-spectacular” inner music (O. Nemescu) in regards to older 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 critical cues from such recent and important groundwork as that done by Robin James in her 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 seems to be vibrating in resonance or in tune with the increasing drive of computational capitalism, and leading towards reality quantification/purging the non-quantifiable. Thus, the physics of sound and forecasting based on math-probabilistic statistics vibrate more and more in tune with both explanations of pop theoretical physics (String Theory) or trendy new materialist (Barad, Grosz, Bennett) conceptions of materiality, either as an analog real (J. F. Martel) or based on a research program that refuses representations, propositions, images and focuses rather on resonances.
"top of a mountain" or "from the plane" panspectric sensing
Here is a preliminary attempt at tuning our imaginary fork to an “acoustic resonance” that preselects and orders our experience of sound in a much more prevalent and pervasive way than we might like to think.
In a small note from the Romanian Muzica magazine text commenting the Metabizantinirikon score O. Nemescu elaborates on with precise and detailed instructions, he also mentions how his proposal for a view from Above became problematic right away after the first performances.
And this, because his meta-stylistic approach, his penchant for a universalist or cosmic view, looks down on and leaves behind the Byzantine - “cultural planet” moving towards something more encompassing and dilated.
As seen from above, from a stratospheric meta- gathering point, this view from the "top of a mountain" or "from the plane", culminates in what today we might not have any trouble identifying as the surveillance drone look, the God-eye-view of the Global Positioning System as well as t.he gathering clouds of Computational Capital involved in high freqency trading.
More precisely it is this non-ocular Above, more pointedly described as a Cloud Computing, Big Ear or Antenna-in-the-Sky – that is now busily reshaping, sensing, aggregating and relegating electro-magnetic wavelengths (of which the humanly ‘musically’ audible ones are only a tiny part), assigning values of high or low frequency far from our senses. Even as at this “altitude” everything recedes further and further away from the human sensorium, sound theoreticians have hypothesized since the 1970s how environmental resonant frequencies might affect human hearing and sound retention. After experiments with his students, R. Murray Schafer has posited that the electronic age has achieved various “tonal centers” with people able to “prime tune” locally because of local devices such as lights or generators running at particular AC frequencies.
As this quirky and insidious techno-perceptual vantage point vacuums, sequesters and sifts through ever increasing data streams, it detects and scans for frequency activity even across the computer air-gap. Today, staying “nonspectacular”, interiorized and quiet in a Dark Forest (Liu Cixin 2008) universe has never seem so remote and perilous.
Even if disconnected, isolated and one may suppose “nonspectacularily” blackboxed, left alone, all these computer components that emit choreosonically snitch on you, from the speakers, PSU fans, infrared cameras, keyboard LEDs, even exfiltering data out of Faraday cages.
With this distant hum in mind, that most ubiquitous instrument of the Cold War surveillance iconography (the actual time and place of the Metabizantinirikon composition!) – the spy and telecommunication satellite — seems to have receded into the background radiation suction vortex of panspectric technologies (Manuel DeLanda 1991) with the ascendancy of more devious and invasive data mining (James Bridle 2018).
Once again thus, sometime after the Metabizantinirikon’s 1986 recording, this conceptual meta- of the “from Above” managed to stir up controversy both in the secular as well as the religious/philosophical camp (Octavian Nemescu also briefly mentions it in an interview, but does not name, how a “respected philosopher” voiced out criticism).
However unlikely if not inconsequential, let us now consider the underbelly of his naturalistic classification of sounds to attune oneself to and which comprises several “imaginary, individual and intimate (non-spectacular)” schemes for altitude, immaterial flight / mesianic contemplation and transcultural meditation. Descending at the very bottom rung (reversing ascendancy with a plunge, reverting the rise up with a reentry into matter), Octavian Nemescu’s quasi- gnostic, sonic-cum-cosmic slide along evolutionary spirals, linear or concentric successions places matter as the starting point – matter as hyle viscerality (“of condensed energies”) associated with the lowermost vibrational levels of the reptilian.
My interest in the vibrational layering of this compositional cake takes Metabizantinirikon as a reptilian end point of un-grounding at the A level (the first level of his ascendant scale), permitting us a way to exfilter data in and out of (closed and idealized) new/old metaphysical hierarchies of sound.
If successful, this sonic ungrounding exercise would at least incite us to quantum tunnel imaginatively further into the impure matter of improper and improbable unphilosophical pulp, trash, vulgar, lore or conspirative reptilian matter that coils into academic, performative (comprising but not exclusively musical) or philosophical realms as we speak. Instead of going up-up-up the slope, let’s walk down-down-down these resounding tunnels.
What has been completely relegated to the ‘lower A’ domains and caverns of blasphemous influence or crass sensationalism, the irreverent hoax and the dirty pulp imagination, finds approval from the most unexpected corners.
For example, Carl Sagan, the celebrated positivist, astronomer, planetary scientist and author of Dragons of Eden: Speculation on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977) uses and integrates the reptilian matter into an extraordinary-evolutionary biological fable of onion like consciousness, space travel and pedagogic politics, reading human primate fears of mythological dragons and biblical serpents as instances of actual deep time ophidian traumas of pre- human mammals suffering from almost forgotten dinosaurian bondage.
Carl Sagan’s rhetorics might be an integral part of what Andrew Pilsch has recently grouped under the evolutionary futurism mode, in a more transformative, plural and diverse category than is accepted by strictly techno- obsessed sci-fi posthumanism, driven either by outright scientism or by a rapture-of-the-nerds aptly fictionalized by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross in Scifi form.
Speaking of its reception, Dragons of Eden (also translated into Romanian) remains one of the most important, albeit relatively unknown popular science 90s books to tackle speculatively the issue of the reptilian - at many levels, from the so-called reptilian ‘lower’ affective or cognitive neuronal core functions (hit and run “alungă-l, fii bestial sau ascunde-te!”O.N.) of the mammalian brain to the reptilian threat arising from potential cultural hardwiring brought about by conservative ideas and politics who target those layers.
In Carl Sagan’s 1970s cautionary tale of neuronal and cultural cybernetic processes, the reptilian feedback loops with low vibrations could still confound the neocortex, stocked up by hawkish militarism, social-darwinist logics of competition, greed and entrenched hierarchies of thought. This was deemed as extremely dangerous by Carl Sagan - if coded as reptilian academic curriculum, espousing pedagogical models that reinforce inert ideas, blind obedience and unquestioned authority.
deleterious Dinosaurid Man or Troodon sapiens
The lidless eye of the reptilian at level A blinks at us, risking heightened attention from unwanted corners, within academia & beyond, from the 1980s onward in a strange slithering loop.
Thinking about and imagining another humanity or other evolutionary pathways - as if mammals did not exist or humans didn’t expand into myriad ecological niches after the demise of the dinosaurs is the domain of speculative biology and evolutionary theory replay.
The infamous “Dinosauroid” or Troodon sapiens – was a speculative reptilian humanoid proposed in a paper by Dale Russell and Séguin in 1982, actually a paleontological thought experiment made in the tradition of Einstein’s Gedankenexperimente– in order to think about how natural selection might have played out in case mass extinction did not happen at the end of the Creataceous, right at the K-T event horizon 65,5 million years ago.
In an interview from 2000 quoted in Wire, Dale Russell acknowledges that the ‘"dinosauroid" was based on an observable, general trend toward larger relative brain size in terrestrial vertebrates through geologic time, and the energetic efficiency of an upright posture in slow-moving, bipedal animals.’
Even if highly interesting in regard to questions about anthropocentricism, bipedalism, braininess or other cherished features associated with humanity’s tendential rise to planetary fame, the effects of this speculation were quite deleterious on its academic and artistic career.
All attempts to artistically reconstruct or represent a family of humanoid reptilian Dinosaurids descendants of the real-life Troodon dinosaur disappeared as fast as purged key members of the party where taken out historical pictures.
My mentioning of Carl Sagan and Dale Russell is not an attempt to foster scientific credibility for the non-scientific or pseudo-scientific, but rather to acknowledge that the reptilian matter as such - cannot be confined to the ‘proper’ low channels of the vernacular, the pulp, lunatic conspirationist fringe or the plain weird.
On the back of these 1980s and 1990s trends, Dinomania as theme-parking and animatronic Dino attraction arrived in lockstep with previous reverberations and spillovers that inundated franchised pop culture (W. J. T. Mitchell 1998) including selfish genes, chaos and complexity theory as well as ever greater CGI virtuosity.
During the early years of neoliberalism just-so stories of vertebrate care work, evolutionary psychology and parental investment abounded, yet in the pop imaginarium - motherhood stopped being such a celebrated mammalian stronghold when in 1979 Robert Makela & John Horner’s discovered 80 million year old duck-billed Maiasaurus (good mother lizard) remains of what amounts to altruist reptilian creches.
Even as it exited paleontology, Lizard Land becomes a place, a telling of an experience that cannot be unmade, unseen, an integral part of the freaky corners cyberdellic culture, where imagination as such (i.e. imaginary music) could become an essential hyper-dimensional navigational tool - of visiting other realities as real as this one, just more improbable ones, and where crossing into these less likely portions of our universe became common sense.
Yes, this very unlikely 1980s alternate Dinosauroid holy family is my non- herpetophobic conjuring up of the reptilian in the context of Octavian Nemescu’s reptilian vibrational ascendency towards the abstract and the extraterrestrial. This makes us more sensitive to reptilian shivers - that material, visceral, cold-blooded non- mammalian other [“sediul instinctelor viscerale, reptiliene ale m a t e r i e i (energiilor condensate)” O.N.] and one that for once does not brand the alternate humanoid as our bad double, the scaly Cain that has to take all the blame for the Ozone Layer depletion, Promethean overreach during Chernobyl Cold War paranoia (more of that below) or the AI that uploads us inside Roko’s Basilisk eternal torture chambers.
performing the Reptilian-Ophidian chill mood continuum
“Waste basket” is a notion taken up recently by Erik Davis in his magisterial High Weirdness on 70s countercultural vibes from sociologist of the occult Marcello Truzzi, who had used it in order to fit whatever was diverging away from the ontologic and epistemologic Establishment or whatever was just too strange and too unclassifiable even for taxonomies of the aberrant.
To name just a few far-out local examples that could easily fit the bill: quantum dacian theory, Romanian Braşov engineers designing Nazi UFOs on the Moon, the Sumerian system of Romanian language, Mihai Eminescu as co-discoverer of relativity theory, tunnels from under Carpathians to the Andes and back, Hungarian bear-maiming Yeti’s from Harghita county, Mapping acupuncture point on the Bucegi Sphinx, pre-human gigantic skeletons unearhted by catterpillars during the building of a dam, The Report on Psichotronic Weapons of Mass Destruction. There remains to be seen in what way these aforementioned differ from say much of recent conspiritual thinking - Chemtrails, Trilateral Commission, QAnon etc although I believe there is room for divergence.
One such paper found its way into the Romanian occultural “waste basket” of anomalies. The Romanian punctuated equilibrium evolution of the reptilian – makes Lorin Fortuna (1948-2016) the perfect mouthpiece of a more modulated reptilian-ophidian mood continuum, weary of recently unleashed market forces as well as sensitive enough to the centrifugal mass democratic and utopian/dystopian potential of the Romanian 1989 Revolution.
In retrospect, it feels as if from the B&W Ceausescu TV interminable speeches through the homevideo tape underground of illegal Cannon Films fodder and towards the full-color ophidian vision thermoreception of 24 seven/h TV news there was only one step.
It is high time to acknowledge here and now L. Fortuna as a bruised meta- survivor of privatizing the mental commons, of repackaged collective hallucinations, of not yet settled ideological clashes, of strange panics (J F Martel 2016) when street delivery wellness didn’t deliver and when an abundant bouquet of Ponzi & pyramidal schemes (infamous Caritas) was topped of late by crackpot tech-solutions, addons and commercial gimmicks for desperate end times.
Maybe the only crooked serpentine way to pull us through the disruptive, post-everything, non-linear political purgatory was as a sometimes unwilling mediator of fringe culture.
Lorin Fortuna’s declassified and rapidly re-classified weird (waste) knowledge got transmitted in a perfectly mundane color TV talkshow manner by chatting, live prime-time endless listicles and incantations, gossipping about good and bad alien civilizations on every occasion possible.
The message was the malformed medium, and the message was speaking about a bruised and grotesque reality in strident tongues, channeling all the contradictory, “ontologically unstable” (Erik Davis 2019) eerie, abnormal, ‘outer’ cathode-Ray vibrations making The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Twin Peaks, X-Files feel like the backyard of local living unit communist blocks, working class hoods illuminated only by mall parking lots and dotted by derelict industrial halls.
The OTV para-mediasphere (cable TV fairly infamous in the Romanian 1990s and 2000s) known as the principal channel for whatever could not fit the program grid of anybody else at the time, was eager to host Lorin Fortuna. This I contend was an early sign that low reptilian vibrations could not be easily contained by a single metaphysical mould or stored by one kind of medium (radio, TV, print or just plain spiritualist).
It was easy to medicalize and pathologize this utterly ludicrous meta-Romanian pop phenomenon, easy prey for TV freak shows. Nevertheless let’s also seriously consider Fortuna’s constant accounts of saving the day while wresting fallen archons on local railway travels, his blurring of reptilian/citizen identities and mind-boggling skirmishes with illicit forces that gave room for non-human agency here on Earth in our very midst.
His matter-of-fact proselytizing activity and high weirdness trafficker role regarding ridiculous and extreme subjects was proof that he was tinkering with new pantheons and a new post-secular “spiritual hybrid” (Bogdan Lypkhan 2017) sensibility exorcising all sorts of ills and unsolvable contradictions. That simple fact makes him prophetic in a more shifty, insidious and “non-spectacular” sense than the banal schlock of Nostradamic 2012 prophecies for which he became famous.
As a psychic engineer, a kind of tinkerer (meşter) of worldviews, Fortuna was trying out, fusing, improvising and soldering a freshly minted multiverse.
However erratic and ridiculous he might have once sounded when seen from an exclusively secular-rational perspective, such speculative world-building by a former Timişoara telecommunications expert turned poet and fringe nationalist oddball now appears perfectly in- tune, curiously at home in the freakish present. It arrived pre- adapted (Ion Dumitrescu 2019) and at the very same time at odds with our quarantined muzak, alt-therapeutic, auto-immune, eternally hackable ‘meme magic’ present.
Yes, he was intervening against “virtual mutants”, meddling in invisible conflicts and policing “miscegenation” across his astral scheme of planetary civilisational species, and yes he was praying on new recruits and adepts, and yet at the same time he was recurrently and insufferably dissing constrictive family roles and vituperating against orthodoxy and established boring cults. One might still dismiss him as just one more cult leader on the Romanian post-secular map, yet with reptilian gusto we must slither further than that.
Lorin Fortuna’s stunted cosmology is a fully formed worldview, a maladjusted child of the recurrent crisis cycles of capitalism, able to broadcast itself as if with no past, strictly bottom-up, topsy-turvy, coming from a place where strangulating demonic webs of hyperlinks, big data, mindhacks, homemade hoaxes and infernal paranoid self-referential connections become indistinguishable.
His remarks and TV happenings are centrifugal ready-mades to be catapulted, easily misquoted, copied, imitated, and able to withstand mutations at its source code - no matter how much ridicule and debunking is heaped by YT response videos and online trolling.
This venomous, troubling and mutating reptilian pop canon has also been adopted and adapted to the Romanian graffiti urban scene because / not in spite of the fact that it was disconcerting, memorable and had dogged all explanatory attempts by local specialists and experts.
And for sure there are many more examples that warrant a mention or two in this context, from videoclips, urban legends and other sticky corners.
The stickiness of the subterranean and inhuman materiality of obligate ophidian alien coldness was somehow contradicted and supplemented by a vibrant fluorescent Goa-psy imagology of good sentience, the good alien headz that sprouted at crusty trance festivals across valleys and Carpathian mountains. Green-Red warm others offering a welcoming UFOlogical spaceship (more sunpunk?!) futurality to a dishevelled, poverty-stricken mass started gracing graffiti legal walls and decorating urban tattoo salons, art pieces and advertising (home) studios during the later 2000s and 2010s.
Homo-saurus or the reptilian asymptomatic
The reptilian – as evolutionary omega point and looming catastrophist cata- scenario gaining street cred has also gained in time new performative currency elsewhere - in the lecture circuit with We are all Reptilians Nowby Florin Flueraş, initially published in Bezna #3 August 2012.
If we are all Covidians now, it is because we are all dreaming about keeping our temperature low, reptilian and asymptomatic, below the radar of Telethermographic systems that keep mammalian burning out in the glow!
Owning up to this intimate but under acknowledged interspecies relatedness, he brings the “homo-saurus” as a missing profile in the “we” affinities and friendships investigated by Moldavian-born Dr Aleksandr Kogan in his 2015 co-authored study of prosociality On wealth and the diversity of friendships: High social class people around the world have fewer international friends.
Without this burden of metrics, F Flueraş tried and attempted to measure up to the impossible task of converting the reptilian vibrations of capitalist rich over-predator into higher level frequencies.
Love-bombing the apex financial animal - the hedge-fund manager was not getting us anywhere, although going through the motions was important in order to feel the mismatch in applying current healing tactics via good vibes (+ government bailouts) when confronting a cold-blooded reptilianism animating disaster entrepreneurs, investment bankers and inhuman algorithmic entities.
Performing promissory visions, tracing the insinuating effects of defeatism both inside/outside beings of one kind or another, one is a reptilian accomplice no matter what, with ophidian pension funds coiled up in fossil fuel industry complications of overwhelming and inextricable climate change odds. The witnessing that this reptilian mea culpa acknowledges is still to be reckoned with.
As more and more seem to realize it is more than just plain facts vs conspiracy thinking, and what we should look for is maybe this meta- conspiracy of conspiracy, the taste as such for incredible computational obsessions, big data epiphany and the tremendous insatiable appetite for networkings upon networkings, a thicket of wild connections that unceasingly heap upon each other complications after complications.
“Băgărici” electrocenic RO intrusions
In tow with the humanoid reptilian - another strange source of extra-musical mischievous agency is to be found in the form of vernacular scapegoating that puts blame, complicates and complains about the “little people”, the fuckup evil (largely invisible) other-than-human brethren riding on cultural undercurrents we chased along the overgrown margins of Metabinzantinirikon’s metastylistic adumbration.
Vasile Leac mentioned to me several times the case of humanoid “băgărici”, the hidden Luddite beings that seem to rule over all our mismanagement, incompetence, horrible bad luck and meta- corruption scandals. Like the reptilian turn – the “băgărici” seem to me to be both irritated and stimulated by neoliberal shock doctrine stasis and nearly universal forms of destructo-capitalism.
“Băgărici” - were and are the local gremlins, sprites, gentrification poltergeists, unwanted denizens, critters from neglected corners of in-transition Romanian economic life, scurrying and multiplying in thickets of faulty accounting, welfare state pull-back, manifest as Internet bugs, on plots of arable land fallen into disuse on abandoned COOP farms as well as inside LED illuminated server farms.
“Băgărici” wreck havoc, mess up your connection, slow down Internet speed, damage wifi modems, bend TV antennas and crack TV screens, scrambling the signal and also jumping on stage in theater settings. They initially started their mischief in the region of Zalău Romania, based on a real case later dramatized for theater by Flavius Lucăcel from Cluj.
Creatures of neglect we all are, as the reptilian preaching finally reaches its prosperity theology summit limits at the PULPit we leave the ”băgărici” to do their mischief. We have been almost unsuspectingly working through the anthropotechnics (Peter Sloterdijk 2009) of Octavian Nemescu’s 1984 Metabizantinirikon “non-spectacular” imaginary music sheet towards the current over-abundance of self-help literature, personal improvement manuals and mindfulness coaching.
These auto-genic “techniques of individual and collective self-transformation” can be approached from many directions and can be as varied as funambulist string walking practices or athleticism or any sport you like, including ecstatic dance, practicing sex magic, fasting or joining a meditative fitness studio that will harmonize your spiritual and economical vibes.
Preaching at the PULPit
Mihai Lukács recent drama MAMA/MOTHER - a 2020 piece which I urge you to check out - somehow loops, swoons over and scoops up all end time scenarios, including – that deepest local rumble, the one preceding any seismic change, any Next Big Earthquake and ensuing rejuvenation of the nation, the sound that is being heeded and tended by local human seismographs, tremor whispers speaking on YT channels giving survivalist advice on the severely broken aftermaths and investopedia entries.
Like choral pieces exuding an irresistible revivalist and highly irreverent outward holiness, the catchy newskool sing-a-longs of this last-hour theatrical performance question as much as tune into the low frequency drone of the previous and next big earthquakes, be they geologic, economic, social, political or theological.
At this end of the super-heroine charismatic spectrum there is an ever growing convergence between geek Fan Conventions, Mega-Churches, Mind Body and Spirit and Young Living Essential Oils International Conventions filling stadiums and pockets. The PULPit of MAMA does this with one difference – this time it’s two female (played Oana Rusu & Maria Sgârcitu) Gaian charismatics isophonically harping on post-secular trends cashing in on extinctionist doom, metaprogramming and mindfulness apps that are aimed more and more at a fully secular, disenchanted and enlightened corporate audience yearning for ‘otherness’ and exotic cures at luxury ayahuasca retreats.
The cheapo Tschuessi Fengversion, at home and away from hyperdense super-spreader events, one has just to tune into (during deep sleep!) the specific Hz ratios and harmonics while replaying Abundance Affirmation frequencies videos such as Millionnaire Mindset Subliminal Affirmations for Wealth & Abundance Alpha (10hz) Binaural Beats, 526 hz “I am” or Jupiter Spin*Theta Binaural.
In a path breaking book of sound studies and theology - Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, Ashton T. Crawley gets away from the glam aesthetics of multi-screen tele-evangelism, uncovering ‘alternate’ choreosonic vibrational possibilities emerging from specific black socialities, starting with the simple act of breathing in the wake of immense inequality and the systematic production of underdevelopment in tow with dictator chic, police militarization, and a lack of air due to both tear-gassing and air pollution during crumbling planetary systems of life support when risk is being constantly externalized on a vast majority at the bottom end.
Speaking-in-tongues speaks of all these unspeakable things and more, the “humming”, “shouting” at congregations and specifically at this Black Pentecostalism Christian sect congregation responds to all of this and offers true venues of expression and engagement with social and musical phenomena that seem to be strangely at odds with both the rise of prosperity theology positive thinking (Barbara Ehrenreich 2009) or with ‘new optimist’ atheists.
devoured by the buzzfeed
Time to conclude, as all previously internalized (A - B – C Metabizantinirikon ascendency) maker-spaces of subjectivity have unsuspectingly shifted the inaccessible, intimate “non-spectacular” into the grasp of insectoid cadaveric buzzing - the thrill and exhaustion of vibrant experiential economics (Tristan Garcia 2016) tending to the wellness craving of insular, individualistic Selves (Sebastian Big 2017) wherever they crop up, linger and quickly corrode.
The total overcoming of this “aesthetic scope” (rost estetic O.N.), the simple transformative practice of “improving one’s being” (îmbunătăţirii propriei fiinţe O.N.) clearly does not impede cultural appropriation of multiple “transcultural” planets, plastic shamanism or Walmart and Afi Palace selling white sage smudge sticks and myrrh body oil bottles.
And yet, as more and more of us become co-conspirators, insiders, psychonauts, intermittent fasters, we might greet this strange reptilian encounter in the digital swamp of a dilated, rarefied, expanded consciousness without a “lamentable” ending up “being devoured by insects, by moths” (“devorat de insecte, de molii” O.N.) with our own tongues sticking out at the pesky clouds of targeted ads, captcha I-am-not-a-robot logins and myriad unread messages. Wave dynamics of amphibious lizard people with extended and protruding tongues slurping the buzzfeed, resonating full FOMO, gulping every ounce of free floating attention precipitate, croaking hungry and harassed at the same time, distracted and completely ribbit on-demand. Plop!
Selected Bibliography
Andrew Pilsch, Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34850431-transhumanism
James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future 2018 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36696533-new-dark-age?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=EFjjhMF775&rank=1
Carl Sagan, Dragons of Eden: Speculation on the Evolution of Human Intelligence 1977 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32276.Dragons_of_Eden?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=enUR3e0lMD&rank=1
Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, The Rapture of the Nerds 2012 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13538762-the-rapture-of-the-nerds?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=9E8oxxQuGP&rank=1
Manuel DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, 1991 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83650.War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=wdnXVUzW2M&rank=3
Brian Switek, Troodon sapiens?: Thoughts on the “Dinosaurid” 2007 https://www.wired.com/2007/10/troodon-sapiens-thoughts-on-the-dinosauroid/
Michael Ryan, The Return of the Dinosaurid Man 2005 http://palaeoblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/return-of-dinosauroid-man.html
Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies 2019 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42800306-high-weirdness?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jUqRB96ZZL&rank=1
Erik Davis, Gnostic Psychedelia and the Archetype of the Archons 2020 https://techgnosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Davis-Gnosis-5.1.pdf
Tristan Garcia, Life Intense: A Modern Obsession 2018 https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-life-intense.html
Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America 2009, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452749-bright-sided
Ashton T. Crawley Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility 2016 https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823274550/blackpentecostal-breath/
Florin Flueras We are all Reptilians Now 2012 https://www.fflueras.ro/2012/08/we-are-all-reptilians-now.html
Bezna magazine #3 2012, https://archive.org/details/Bezna3
Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films 2014 documentary directed by Mark Hartley https://www.denofgeek.com/books/the-history-of-cannon-films-to-be-told-in-new-book-trilogy/
Bogdan Lypkhan, Hibrizi spirituali/Spiritual hibrids 2017 https://revistaarta.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/revista-arta-24-25-spreads-1.pdf
Alexander Galloway, Sonic Episteme (review) 2019, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/acoustic-resonance
Jeremy Hsu, China’s ‘Dark Forest’ Answer to ‘Star Wars’ Optimism 2015, https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/chinas-dark-forest-answer-to-star-wars-optimism
Tiron Stefan, Deep Time Industries: the law of Prochronism, future Paleontology and the unforeseen effects of planned and in-built obsolescence 2013 https://tironstefan.wordpress.com/2020/02/28/deep-time-industries-the-law-of-prochronism-future-paleontology-and-the-unforeseen-effects-of-planned-and-in-built-obsolescence-open-monument-exhibition-2013/
Lorin Fortuna on YouTube 2020 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Lorin+Fortuna
Ion Dumitrescu, PRE 2019 http://www.fractalia.ro/pre/https://www.academia.edu/36053075/PRE
MOMA text 2020 kindly provided by Mihai Lukács (script) and Maria Sgârcitu (lyrics)
Carl Cederstrom and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working 2012, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14612378-dead-man-working
Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism and Biopolitcs 2019 https://spectrumculture.com/2020/03/18/the-sonic-episteme-by-robin-james-review/http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/acoustic-resonance
a series of podcast based on the chapters of the book by Robin James
J.F. Martel Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things 2016 http://www.reclaimingart.com/reality-is-analog.html
https://www.metapsychosis.com/reality-is-analog-philosophizing-with-stranger-things-part-three/
W. J. T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon 1998 https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/532046.html
Sebastian Big, Eul îmbunătățit, o soluție? 2017 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39151839-eul-mbun-t-it-o-solu-ie#bookDetails
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things 2012 https://www.dukeupress.edu/vibrant-matter
Florentin Tudor podcast collaboration, Tschuessi Feng: un radio pentru chakrele tale 2010
Testimony for the Future
Irinel Anghel
"In the year 1975, I was proposing a different kind of music: an unexteriorized chanting, not to be performed by using the human voice nor any musical instrument, orchestra, or electroacoustic means. Hence, an inner music, interiorized, private, introvert, targeting the individual and appealing to the imagination. It could also be called SILENT CHANTING.
It is as if a person who would be "thirsty" for music, deprived, at some point in their life, for any reasons, of the means to externalize their musical inspirations, in other words, would not have any musical instrument within grasp. Furthermore, one would also be prohibited from using their voice. As such, one would have nothing else to do but to pour their sonic inspirations in this secret chanting, with the help of imagination, not heard by anyone outside them, the practicing subject. The act of artistic-musical creation, especially in its initial phase, of inspiration, of envisioning the acoustic project, by a composer, also appears to us as an act of inner imagination. Accordingly, the statute of being a PRACTITIONER seems to be the most adequate for imaginary music. Even though at first this practice would seem difficult, by repeating and persisting, the imaginary chanting would naturally instill itself as a state of things." (Octavian Nemescu, Muzica imaginară [Imaginary Music], in Muzica magazine, 3-4 / 2015)
This is the starting point of the project Unearthing Imaginary Music, carried out by Asociația Jumătatea Plină, now, in the summer of 2020, a year of great crisis, an unexpected crisis caused by the emergence and spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19), in which our priorities and means of communication have been changing. In which our personal life is changing, perhaps determining, in the future, substantial changes in our collective existence. In this context, the performing arts are gravely affected, as physical distancing forces us either to withdraw and await return to normality, or to find new artforms and new means of transmitting. We recalled in this context the proposal composer Octavian Nemescu made in the '70s of the past century – that of opening towards imaginary music:
"What is thus imaginary music? A new MUSICAL GENRE, alongside others such as chamber music, symphonic music, opera, ballet, electroacoustic music, choral music, ritualic (church) music, ambient music, pop music, jazz, etc. What does it represent? A reaction to, an antithesis of the Spectacular, an ANTI-spectacle. As a reaction to the spectacle, the imaginary songs would be performed without spectators (observers) and critics (commenters). In this case, the transmitter, the interpreter of the message is, at once, also its receiver, within an inner, individual Ritual, counting on the imaginative effort, excluding the passive stance." (Octavian Nemescu, Muzica imaginară [Imaginary Music], in Muzica magazine, 3-4 / 2015)
It is possible that, for Octavian Nemescu, imaginary music represented a way of protesting in the context of the Communist period or of the rapid sequence of avant-garde movements, driven by reactions on the axes extreme control of all sonic parameters / randomness, maximum complexity / maximum simplicity, invention / recuperation (hence the opposition towards the spectacle, reflected in the proposition of an ANTI-spectacular genre). However, for him, I think that the most important motivation was returning to the NON-spectacular (which is different from the anti-spectacular), to another function of music, freed from conventions, of deep communication with the self, with nature, with the universe (as it happened before the emergence of the spectacle). Octavian Nemescu’s imaginary music scores extend his preoccupations for archetypes, towing the line of a sacred minimalism, recuperating sonic symbols.
We might even speak of a proto-spectacular genre, since, at least in the case of Octavian Nemescu’s music, there is an intention of returning to the "roots", when people communicated ritually with trees, with animals, with the rain, with God. And the drawings of his scores refer to the times prior to the emergence of the arts of the spectacle (performing arts).
Image from the manuscript CROMOSON by Octavian Nemescu (1974-1975)
I shall also include here a few comments I had made in 1997, regarding imaginary music, in my book Orientări, direcții, curente ale muzicii românești din a doua jumătate a secolului XX [Orientations, Directions, Movements in Romanian Music of the Second Half of the 20th Century] (Editura Muzicală, 1997, Editura EIKON, 2018):
For Octavian Nemescu, the new musical genre was born against the backdrop of his pursuits in unearthing fundamental patterns of sonic order, as a variant or upshot of the archetypal movement.
In an earlier article - Dimensiunea interioară a sunetului [The Inner Dimension of Sound], printed in Muzica magazine, nr. 4/1992, Octavian Nemescu considers that the "capacity for representation that humans are endowed with provides the possibility of triggering sensations within oneself based on imagined reality which are just as potent as those due to real contact; sometimes, it is even the case that inner images may trigger more powerful sensations and satisfaction than real ones." In music, we may therefore refer to imaginary sounds or sonic images which are conceived as symbols of transcultural "presences" and presuppose a mental effort to practice, an exceptional focus on inner audition, thus transformed into an "individual and inner ritual."
His scores of imaginary music, CROMOSON and Crezi că vei putea singur? [Do You Believe That You Could Do It By Yourself?], for instance, establish an active art, an innermost change of being. The interpreter becomes spectator and vice versa, for decoding the sonorities proposed, a modicum of musical knowledge is needed. The disappearance of the mediator between the creator and the receiver determines the conception of music as active, individual contemplation, which obviously elicits a considerable mutation in the mindset of the European musician.
For instance, in the work CROMOSON, subtitled The Song of Objects (as opposed to The Study of Objects by Pierre Schaeffer), Octavian Nemescu attempts to stimulate the musicalisation of some visual sensations, with the score conceived as a „vocabulary of correspondences between the real color and the imaginary musical symbol”, but he abandons this association in Crezi că vei putea singur? [Do You Believe That You Could Do It By Yourself?] ‒ a real challenge for the receiver-interpreter to accomplish the effort of obtaining an inner audition based on a melody of sound-symbols which no longer depend on any outside suggestion. It is beeing recognized that the image transcends the material, that the imaginary sound, unlike the one made, exteriorized, surpasses this condition, transforming itself into the ethereal, subtle matter of thought.
Grete Tartler considered in 1984 that „even if there won’t be other composers following Octavian Nemescu’s solution (the path of imaginary music), his way of thinking will nevertheless urge them to view the art of sound differently” (Grete Tartler, Melopoetica, Bucharest, 1984).
If we are referring to Octavian Nemescu’s imaginary music creations, these follow the direction of his entire work - minimalistic-archetypal, and come with a justification behind (the author chooses to work with a few sounds in order to charge them with a trans-aesthetic meaning).
It greatly interested me to launch the challenge of conceiving imaginary music scores to other academic ally trained composers (Corneliu Dan Georgescu, Diana Rotaru, Maia Ciobanu, Diana Gheorghiu, Sabina Ulubeanu, Gabriel Mălăncioiu, Darie Nemeș Bota, Mihaela Vosganian, Sorin Lerescu, Constantin Basica) and to myself, in order to see how each "pours" their own substance, ingrained by their aesthetic direction, style and visions, in this new manner of musical communication. The scores have been gathered in this collection dedicated to Octavian Nemescu, bearing the (historical?) marks of the year 2020.
Certainly, imaginary music, as conceived by Octavian Nemescu, occupies the ground of conceptual music in all its forms (graphism, textcomposition, schematic conceptualism), the territory of partial randomness and of the openings of intuitive music (as launched by Stockhausen) – yet all of these forms of music had spectacular purpose. They were meant to be performed. What makes imaginary music singular and defines it in this context is the fact that it cannot be heard on the outside. It is sung/listened/performed inwardly, in the mind of the one who reads/contemplates the sheet.
These scores have a wide target (meaning they are not destined solely for musicians). Not by chance, other artists around the world whom I have seen making such attempts are minimalist composers.
Thus, the „strong” point of this project employing the word music in its title is that the results CANNOT BE HEARD out loud. The way I see it, the purpose is to inform and perhaps train (in all possible creative forms) people’s inner ear and sonic imagination. Upon this exercise of reading/contemplating/practicing imaginary music scores, the goal would be the musicalisation of all perceptions. Octavian Nemescu says:
"The score for this music could become Nature itself, the surrounding environment, on all of its sensory levels. The act of musicalisation, performance might acquire a continuity, a quasi-total duration: from morning to night. For days, weeks, months, years. It would be thus possible a continous, life-long singing in which each sound would unfold throughout a year (for example). And the timbral materialization, on an imaginary plane, would exceed the real, of vocal-instrumental or concrete-electronice type. For instance, one would imagine the vibrations of crystals or of mountains and rocks, thunder voices, vegetal sounds in an ascending movement, etc. One could imaginarily sing even without the trigger of sensations of another kind. And certain sounds or musical intervals may take on, in sonic imagery, the status and, consequently, the power of arrows, nails, thunderbolts, and as such, of sonic weapons in the struggle of the practicing subjects with themselves, against negative, dark (obscure), egotic parts, in order to enhance the human condition. Music thus concevied could acquire a TRANSCULTURAL function."
Image from the work Crezi că vei putea singur? [Do You Believe That You Could Do It By Yourself?] Octavian Nemescu (1976)
For Octavian Nemescu (and this is his original mark which needs no imitation), by non-spectacular imaginary music or post-spectacular transcultural practice — such is the case of the work Metabizantinirikon, which has both a "classical" score version and an inner one, to be practiced after audition —, the aesthetic purpose of music is being questioned.
I am quoting from another article published by Octavian Nemescu, in the Muzica magazine, nr. 8 / 2017 (METABIZANTINIRIKON (1984). Practicarea la altitudine TRANSCULTURALĂ a muzicii [The Practice of Music at TRANSCULTURAL Altitude]):
The upper part of the score represents the approach and practice in a TRANSCULTURAL and post-spectacular of this opus. That means that those who have played or listened to the work in its spectacular version as the one recorded on CD, and who wish, feel the need to practice certain of its fragments for the purpose of enhancing their own being, purpose which thus transcends the mere „aesthetic purpose” of music, have the possibility of going through the spheres, the superior circles, in the order of the ascending vertical, of the C area. This is about an individual, and later inward practice at the last circle, of certain elements of the piece. Here, there is also a synthetic phenomenon, in the sense that gustatory, visual, olfactory and tactile sensations are being transformed, ”translated” into imaginary music sounds (derived from the sonic discourse of the Metabizantinirikon).
METABIZANTINIRIKON (1984)
By withdrawing music from the audible and transferring it to imagination, the composer has sought a recovery of certain functions of music (others than those purely aesthetic). Its human function of communicating with oneself, with the energies of the Universe, with nature, its therapeutic function or the one which shapes conscience. From this point of view, his approaches are closer to the those of active meditation.
However, for other composers, who are attempting now constructs addressed to the individual imaginary, the purposes and the forms by which these are communicated may be different. The narration/ riddle score, the game sheet, the map score, the body score, the mirror score, the performative score, the traveling companion score, the postcard-score are some of the creative methods found by those who accepted my invitation to be featured with a contribution in this imaginary music volume.
For things to appear as clear as possible to the reader, I will extract some starting and access points for this topic and toward this practice.
An imaginary music score contains 2 components:
1. it contains a set of musical and / or extramusical notations and thorough guidance from the author in order for the practitioner to imagine the music suggested by the composer.
2. the outcome may not be heard (it remains inward). The idea is as radical as John Cage’s 4'33" (which, of course, is something else).
To become imaginary music "scores", images need — if one aims to turn them into that — to have a guiding text, so as to possibly guide the one who sees them toward hearing what you want them to hear. Aside the inner "silent chant", imaginary music is distinct from mere graphic score music by explicitly involving the author in communicating intention. Imagination is not let free. It is guided. Surely, even so, there is a large degree of relativity of inner "translations", yet entropy is much reduced through communicating intentions.
Starting with the writings left by Octavian Nemescu, we could define the imaginary music score as a set of musical, pseudo-musical and especially extramusical notations (images, drawings, texts), which enable the one who looks at the scores to imagine a music according to the author’s wish. Therefore, guidance, suggestions must be present. I insist on this aspect. It is not just mere graphism letting imagination run loose, it is about conducting aural imagination towards that which you want to be heard. The receiver (who is not necessarily a musician – albeit some might opt for this limited option) is the interpreter of the score and everything is going on in their mind.
What happens in the practitioners’ mind:
They make contact with the composer’s guidance and appropriate it. From this point, there will be a hidden "negotiation" between the author’s suggestions, its clarity and power of impregnation, and the imagination of the practitioner. It is a process of co-imagining or of co-creating. The nearness/furtherness percentages will vary from person to another. We are in the territory of partial determination (controlled randomness).
The action of deciphering, revealing, materializing the outcome of this process falls outside the sphere of imaginary music. The deciphering may only be individual and "secret".
This is a great challenge for those who feel the need to listen to a music produced by (some)one (else) or feel the need to translate the stimulus through sounds, audible illustrations for the exterior, out of the desire to share one’s experience. Look, I hear this, what are you hearing?
Resistance to this temptation keeps us within the sphere of imaginary music. Otherwise, breaking the "rule" kicks one out of the "game”.
We had many discussions in the research period with different people about inner music and the need to translate it outloud, audibly for oneself or for others. The word used by most of them was "sonification".
Nevertheless, imaginary music is situated on a superior level of communication, coming after an extended practice of listening and assimilating a basic musical education. Octavian Nemescu arrived at imaginary music after having written many scores for being presented in concerts, after having acquired complex compositional techniques. Renouncing exteriorized singing was done intently, with a purpose. Imaginary music is above matter. Any exterior sonic translation would mean a fall. A lapse into matter.
Octav Avramescu, the coordinator of the project Unearthing Imaginary Music, gave me the idea of eliciting a comparison of inner music with Jochen Gerz’s invisible monument, for a better understanding of this artform.
I have gathered a few comments on Gerz’s concept, reproduced below:
<With his « Invisible monument », Jochen Gerz plays with our custom of seeing. He doesn't impose to us a great monument as we often see, but an invisible monument that is only in the person's mind who thinks about it. It has a strength we can not ignore once we know it exists. In his view, knowing is more important than seeing.> (whereismymind.over-blog.com)
<Gerz has described invisibility as both intellectual challenge and as a protective measure; what is unseen cannot be defaced.> (Ed. Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957, 2012)
For those who feel the need to translate, to decipher, to "sonify" imaginary music sheets with audible outcomes, asking the question “why not?”, reflecting on this comparison helps understanding the necessity of imaginary music to remain secret, innermost, not materialized on the outside, so that it may justify itself as it is.
*
Corneliu Dan Georgescu, of the same generation and good friends with Octavian Nemescu, sends a few thoughts on imaginary music, as well as a riddle narrative score, entitled „Harmonia Universalis in Musica per Octabis / Universae Harmonia Musica per Octabis / Omagiu lui Octavian Nemescu [Homage to Octavian Nemescu]”
I think that I was not at the beginning so enthusiastic about this idea... In general, I am not attracted by try-hard efforts to find or redefine originality in solutions that are „beside the music” (or „beside” painting, literature, etc.), they seem to me a way of avoiding to attack the main issue. Of course, no harm done, but we are no longer under the empire of sounds and the spell they exert, we are beside them. As this empire holds no borders, the infinite is no longer enough for us?
However... first of all, music is conceived in the mind, „its borderless empire” derives from another empire, that of imagination, of communication with unknown spheres, which may hardly be described by words or put into notes, except in an ill-suited manner. If renouncing an empire puts us in contact with another empire which includes the former, then it couldn’t be a renouncement, on the contrary. I think that here is a mistake that was done not solely by me: to confuse the essence of music with its notes, sounds, instruments, accepting to become their prisoner.
Now I view this idea differently: to remain for once in the world of „unknown spheres, impossible to be be described by words”, of imagination, seems to me a very subtle and profound attempt to manifest oneself without stumbling on conventional physical and acoustic limits, but in a complete freedom that may only exist in the realm of the ideal. I recognize here something of the idea of the Sublime, idea that was haunting me for a long time on different levels, thus I could find it everywhere: so, I renounce matter, conventions, the certainty of a physical support for something immaterial – something which I do not know if it exists, if it is going to speak to me or not, if I may reach it only with my imagination. It is precisely that something from the notion of the Sublime which is not easy to comprehend: willingly giving up the safety of the material world, after having mastered it in your own way, is not a cowardly escape, but the challenge of a great inner force, which usually goes unobserved.
Then, there is also this autistic idea, which seems to connect with the interest for a purely inner force. However, is it really exclusively inward? I’m not very sociable, but I didn’t comprehend this discretion any other way than as an opening towards something greater, as a liberation from other conventions, this time, the social ones. If you may convince your fellow beings that to love, to think, to sing with no demands of recognition or of contact with conventional, limited material forms, is in fact a test of strength which may put you in contact with the Sublime, then you have succeeded to come out of „your autistic cocoon” and provide your fellow beings with something which they will certainly find beneficial someday. I think that it is in this direction that Octavian succeeded to make one first step with his idea... Yet any path, no matter how long it is, begins with such a first step.”
Harmonia Universalis in Musica per Octabis
Universae Harmonia Musica per Octabis
Homage to Octavian Nemescu
The imaginary music sheets submitted by the composers invited each has its original manner of presentation. It is proof of the fact that, by "accepting the rules of the game", it doesn’t mean that you are giving up on your own vision, your own creativity, on being yourself.
Diana Rotaru provides a choreographic mini-lexicon score for a one-man orchestra. The title is „Choreosymphographia”. Her practice is addressed to a dancer-composer or a composer-dancer. She also gets really close to another possible idea for actualizing the directions of the project: that of a dance to imaginary music. Here is what the author is telling us about her "choreosymphographic" score, "whose sound is exclusively inward, imaginary":
"The body is entirely musicalised, each body part corresponding to a group of instruments from the symphonic orchestra. By the time they begin to move, the dancer begins in the same time to compose his/her own music, heard solely by them. The dancing ritual thus becomes an intense exercise of concentration and imagination, a profoundly synaesthetic act that may only be entirely experienced by a single person: the one who practices it, the dancer-composer or the composer-dancer (who is not necessarily a master of either of those domains). Potential spectators may face the situation of being in contact with merely a half of the artistic act, the other half of which is to remain a completely mystery to them."
metal percussion
harp
violins, violas
piano/harpsichord
celli, double basses
wind chimes
trumpet
harp
flutes, oboes, clarinets
tympani
vibraphone, marimbaphone, xylophone
basoons, horns, trombones
wind percussion
"...!" is the title of the score that composer Maia Ciobanu contributes to the collection. Not this or any other score one resembles another: variety, challenges and subtleties are distinguishable even within this artistic communication form, proposed for the first time in Romania by Octavian Nemescu, in 1975. The investment of personality each artist made in their creation proves that <unearthing imaginary music> does not tamper whatsoever with Octavian Nemescu’s originality and singularity or with the personal style of each of those who also choose this manner of communication. On the contrary, it offers artists the chance to experience another manner of composing. Even if these experiences of the summer of the year 2020, severely challenged by the effects of the pandemic, might remain isolated amongst the works of these composers, they contain their distinctive mark, their visions, their aspirations.
Maia Ciobanu proposes as a starting point of the "adventure" in individual musical imaginary a poem by her son, Tudor Mihai Cazan. Unlike other scores whose images or guidance provide different parameters of sound (pitches, durations, intensities, timbres), with the trigger she chose, Maia Ciobanu refers to other levels of composition – those of form and musical expression. In other words: fill in the blanks!
Maia Ciobanu
Imaginary music score
I have met Diana Gheorghiu prior to her entrance exam at the National University of Music Bucharest. I advised her to join Octavian Nemescu’s composition class, as intuition told me this choice would fit her. Hence, Diana was also a student of Nemescu and is very familiar with his music and ideas. Therefore, I addressed her to send an imaginary music score, relying on her creativity and playful spirit, which enable her to be open toward such challenges.
From her I’ve received a mirror score. „Insert mirror here" incites a practice of imaginary sonic self-exploration, guided by the author’s indications.
Hello. My name is Diana and I invite you to look in the mirror
The composer Mihaela Vosganian, with the graphic-frequential score „Către Planeta mea nenumită” [To My Untitled Planet], invites the practitioner to experience an imaginary 5-act show for an astral voyage. Karla-Maria Broșteanu’s inspired drawings represent the main attraction and stimulus for the imagination, guided by the author of the concept by way of adjoining texts. The appearance of the score takes us back to comic book format crossed by waveforms placing demands on the sonic imaginary, bringing through this manner of presentation the impact of originality in the context of other works within the present volume. Mihaela Vosganian’s proposal aligns with her preoccupations for active meditation, imaginary spiritual explorations, lucid dreaming, representing also an initiation into the practice of astral voyages.
SCENE 1 Imagine yourself in a place your heart longs to be…
Between notation, swimming [natație], meditation, and rotation, Gabriel Mălăncioiu’s „riotation” invites the practitioner to musicalize the course of a mountain stream, whose abrupt riverbed shapes the sound waves — their dynamics when getting closer and farther from the subject.
Therefore, the score indicates place of practice and a specific time of the day (early in the morning). The descending scale present in the score would thus be in consonance with the descent into the day, anchoring it in a fundamental pitch of the mode chosen for this silent chant.
Sabina Ulubeanu combines her composer and photograper skills to create an imaginary polystylistic, postmodern score with the title "Muzica imaginară a muntelui [The Imaginary Music of the Mountain]". During a trip in the mountains, the ascent, the changes in scenery provide the imagination of the practitioner with stylistic changes of kinds of music recalled by their cultural memory. Music is the traveling partner of the one who ventures to explore a mountain from bottom to top, going through techno or Gregorian sound, chansons, baroque constructions and serialist/dodecaphonic structures. These stylistic changes are guided by the author through a text escorting the photos, which addresses both musicians and music lovers, possessing a laid back language urging those who want to try this experience not to be scared by the embedded musical terms. In other words, the score is a hybrid product with a paradoxical tinge that I would call "Cool Academicism."
Composer Darie Nemeș Bota completes the collection of imaginary music sheets with „Scoică urbană” [Urban Seashell], which proposes a polyphonic sonic experience. Here we see that yet another level of music is practiced through this proposal - the syntactic one.
The score challenges the practitioner to imagine an "inner (INTERIOR) sound emerging initially in the lower register, in the area of the feet, gradually ascending through the body and reaching the highest register imagined at the top of the head, like a "personal tone which requires an effort of concentration on the subject’s part", while he or she perceives from the outside two other levels (an urban ambience and its modification by a handheld resonating object, moved in an open circular motion near the ear). The three levels thus coexist, demanding on the practitioner’s part a "spatial" listening and a partially imaginary contribution as a fundamental sound of his/her own body, cohabitating with the noisy surroundings and modifications thereof.
The practice of this "polyphony" also brings a performative dimension to the experience (by placing the subject into the urban space, holding a can or a paper cup in their hand, conducting spiral moves around their ear).
Sorin Lerescu addresses through the versions of his score „Orizontul serii [Evening Horizon]” both non-musicians and musicians, the two options not necessarily excluding one another. The power of an image to generate imaginary music is materialized in different timbral versions which bring together sky and earth, two opposites completing and lending meaning to each other.
Constantin Basica surprises or rather by now does not surprise us anymore with his well known creativity, in the score "Opt vederi cu mostre de muzică imaginară [Eight Postcards With Samples of Imaginary Music]” — a series presenting on the back of images instructions for imaginary music from their author. The images are frames from videos filmed by the author, magnified 33 times. The practice suggested by the composer takes us to a Science Fiction territory, where space and time lose their human coordinates. The practitioner is invited to relocate in the author’s imagination, accessing it by transforming into a microscopic entity teleporting inside the sonic space described, in a Surrealist manner, as a real fiction (combining elements which are impossible or very hard to juxtapose in physical space). Here one shall experience for 0,033 seconds (the duration of a video frame) a musical information which embeds itself in the memory of one’s own imagination, carrying it back into real time and space. An exceptional idea to be brought into existence by making postcards for sending to those who are eager to receive an artistic object capable of generating inner music experiences of a phantasy type.
As for my own contribution, for the last 10 years, I have abandoned "classical", traditional music scores. 4 years ago, I even tore my manuscripts in a nearly ritual performance on the stairs of the Enescu Museum. In keeping with my new interdisciplinary aspirations, I made room for conceptual scores (to be shown to others or not — that is, for my own private use).
The concept of a music piece, of a concert, of a spectacle or performance, of a festival, is very important to me. Sometimes, it fascinates me more than its realization or its materialization. My conceptual scores always had the purpose of being put into practice. They help me structure and lend motivation to my artistic creation, and my partners can understand with their help what I expect from them. I consider ideas, intelligent suggestions, to be powerful triggers of creativity, and even though I am always holding with my hand (quite tightly) the course of things in my projects, I like to occasionally leave the door open for chance, or for others’ creativity. Therefore, an imaginary music score is not too far from the first phase, the one from the preparatory phase of my creations. I’ve often considered that, along this process, imagining all that I wish to make happen and be heard, I might be pleased with this stage. From this perspective, I am close to Corneliu Dan Georgescu, to that ideal whose power and beauty reside precisely in its unachievability, its unmaterialization.
My first artistic proposal within the Unearthing Imaginary Music project was focused on the body-score or score-body, which requires a double practice – immobile (contemplative) and mobile (active).
To make my message understood, I have added to the score my own practice of what I have titled „Muzica din palmă. Practici de chiromanție sonoră" [The Music in the Palm. Sonic Chiromancy Practices]:
Like in performance art, the demonstration video does not have art film pretences, it does not cosmeticize the exhibited action. It is merely silent guidance by personal example. That is also how I work with my partners: I show them something, yet I do not expect them to copy what I had done, but to understand what I want / see / hear.
Since I also encountered in this project problems concerning the difficulty of this music genre when being practiced by non-musicians who wish to do so, I thought of conceiving preparatory exercises, to educate the inner hearing and guide the sonic imagination. Therefore, I conceived such an exercise, titled „Cosmuzica” [Cosmusic] – in the shape of a keyboard-cosmic map-score.
It is possible that, in some dozens (or hundreds) of years, the entire population of the globe will practice imaginary music, just like people today attend concert halls to listen to classical music. We do not know. These things take time to take place. First of all, they must be well understood, integrated, assimilated, and then accepted (or not).
NonSymphony5 / NEMESCU'S STAIRWAY
Mitos Micleusanu
What can't be spoken of, must be passed over in silence! ... this is what crossed my mind, and I have the feeling that whatever I start to write about the fundamental themes that I find in Octavian Nemescu's texts, would not only be too little, but also inappropriate or irrelevant. This is because Nemescu, without a doubt, is an initiated man, and beyond imaginary music, we can talk (in our minds or in a whisper) about the music of the heart, not the music of the spheres, about ascension, not about evolution, about being, not about existence. Let's understand ourselves, in this context, when I refer to evolution I make a reference to the professional evolution or the career of a composer, but in the case of a visionary, we follow a detachment, an exit from time, times, history, so we can say that Octavian Nemescu “structured” through imaginary music (and not only) a true and subtle vehicle, in an alchemical (and archetypal) sense, with the help of which he went out of time, of finitude, and the systematic references (in the 5th NonSymphony score for Imaginary Music, for example) made to the Mystery of the Ascension, to the overcoming of the bodily, to the visceral, the temptations, the snares of power, to virtues or success of any kind, can only confirm this.
”... to throw into the“ mouths ”of these cracks, all the shards and splinters of the barren, fleeting things, born of pride, boastfulness and arrogant boldness, which will thus be crushed, pulverized, followed by tears and lamentations, when are heard the scary sounds of the End of Times. ”
Going into it more technically and certainly taking more risks, the intimate issue of a ”spiritual evolution", when we ask ourselves whether or not a visionary is aware of the fact that he is a visionary? (or whether) an initiated person is or isn’t aware that he is initiated, we come to a paradox, of course. As in the "quarrel" of the two philosophers, when one said: "I know nothing!" and the other exclaimed almost indignantly, "But who do you think you are?" “I don't know anything about that, you still know something! ” Parable aside, and returning to the theme of giving up worldly matters, of embracing and opening up to faith, fasting, and prayer (systematic and fluctuating references in the Nonsymphony), we arrive at an “epistemic dislocation”, at a “personal exfoliation,” or if you want, at a moment when identity clashes with the finitude, and where: the more identity is based on what we’ve accumulated, the more torturous, anguishing, suffocating the feeling of finitude is. Precisely because of this, detachment from the worldly things, Christic identification, the opening of the heart, the renunciation of vanity, the subtle invitation to metaphysical contemplation, to go out of the trodden path, to sensibilize, to personal introspection, and all this undertaken with great attention, without excesses, without stridencies, without waste, so that they can be understood by everyone according to their own training or level.
These are, I think, the basic features of Octavian Nemescu's work, which certainly, in its deep modesty, does not consider himself a visionary, but we know he is. What else to say? Infinitely many, for sure ... but, what of can't speak about, it's better to keep quiet! ...