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Music Theatre as Space–Time Reversal: Aldo Clementi from 1961 to 1979

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 30; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/07494467.2011.648367

1477-2256

Alessandro Mastropietro,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Abstract Though principally noted as a composer of works on a small scale, Aldo Clementi also worked for the stage on several occasions. The following article is a thorough investigation of the earliest of these projects, what the composer described as his ‘five little steps’, and their context. Keywords: CanonsCarillonsClementi, AldoMusic TheatrePerilli, AchilleVisual Music Notes Various (1981, April). Quale musica: lettere di giovani compositori. Musica/Realtà, II(4), 67–93. The core of the dispute was an ‘open letter’ by Marco Tutino to his teacher Giacomo Manzoni, published with a well-balanced introduction by Luigi Pestalozza and a collection of other letters by young composers, including Lorenzo Ferrero. Lorenzo Ferrero (1951–) and Marco Tutino (1954–) were, in those years, the leaders of this trend. The former drew the attention of the opera world with his work Marilyn, staged in 1981 at the Opera di Roma, where a few years later his more ‘neo-melodramatic’ titles were also staged: Salvatore Giuliano (1986) and Charlotte Corday (1989). The latter started producing a long list of music-theatre works, including Pinocchio (1985, staged at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa) and Cirano (1987, staged at the Laboratorio Lirico in Alessandria), soon after signing the aforementioned open letter. On the ‘figural’ conception of Clementi's music, cf. Mattietti, G. (2001). Geometrie di musica. Il periodo diatonico di Aldo Clementi. Lucca: LIM. This text is contained, like that of 1984, in a collection of essays, including texts by Franco Donatoni and Franco Evangelisti, with an introduction by Luigi Pestalozza. Editor's note: The choice of Clementi to use a capital letter for Time, i.e. Tempo, is significant, in revealing the reverence with which he held temporality. Szondi, P. (1959). Theorie des modernen Drama [Theory of Modern Drama]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Coherent, too, are the later works ES, Finale and Carillon, in which interpersonal dramaturgy is replaced by ‘dramatic temperature’ and the plot is replaced by the ‘mechanism’, i.e. a combinatorial rule that organises in time the totality of theatrical and musical elements, as elements of an overall counterpoint-/canon-like mechanism that may be represented in synch with a determined spatial perimeter. Regarding the shift from the collage principle to the carillon principle in Clementi's music in general, see the article by Maria Rosa De Luca in volume 1 of the present journal. On Clementi's later works of music theatre, see the article by Graziella Seminara elsewhere in this issue and Mattietti, G. (2001), op. cit., pp. 188–267. Mauro Bortolotti, who died in 2007, confirmed to the author in private conversation that young, Rome-based composers of neo-avant-garde tendencies were curious about Collage. Mastropietro, A. (2003–04). Nuovo teatro musicale tra Roma e Palermo, 1961–1973 (Doctoral dissertation, ‘La Sapienza’ University of Rome; University of Palermo, 2003–04). On the concept of remotivation in dramaturgy in the second half of the 20th century, see De Marinis, M. (2000). In cerca dell'attore. Un bilancio del Novecento teatrale. Rome: Bulzoni Editore. The numbering of the scenes according to Perilli's visual–narrative scripts, reported in pp. 69–77 of S. Lux & D. Margoni Tortora (Citation2005), follows the script called, there, ‘B 8’, reproduced in photographs in pp. 46–49 of Perilli (Citation2005). As to the musical numbering of the scenes, the adopted one appears in the autograph score kept in the archive of the Accademia Filarmonica Romana in Rome. On the status of this score and its relationship with the score published by Edizioni Suvini Zerboni with the title Sette scene per orchestra da camera da “Collage” (n. 6040, prizewinner at the third competition of the ISCM, 1963), see Mastropietro, A. (2005). Drammaturgia, intertesto, testo: su Collage di Aldo Clementi. In S. Lux & D. Margoni Tortora (Eds.), Collage 1961un'azione dell'arte di Achille Perilli e Aldo Clementi (pp. 218–37). Rome: Gangemi Editore. Musical sources contain no hints on the insertion of these two interventions of vocal sounds. However, the live intervention was not included in the première in 1961, owing to the technical difficulties of the staging. The only references to this point are, therefore, the oral and written words (the latter contained in Perilli, Citation2005) by the composer and other contributors to the performance. As a matter of fact, these two elements could even coincide as a double, i.e. an overlapped element. The hypothesis that the vocal intervention should be placed during the projection of a film, specifically in the one foreseen in scenes VIII–IX, derives from the autograph note written by the conductor of the première, Daniele Paris, on the autograph score, at the boundary between scenes VII–VIII (‘wait 17″ after the beginning of the film’). Perilli confirmed this idea in a private conversation, in which he remembered that the film, realised by Pino Passalacqua, a student of the CSC [Centre for Experimental Cinematography – Rome], has a duration of about 4′. One could suggest that the 17″ of silence were to be filled by an element that appears nowhere in the score, managed directly by the composer at the director's desk. However, what Perilli and Clementi told me in private conversations makes me believe that this Cagean non-relation, i.e. two parallel, autonomous streams, was valid only at the level of sense, whilst their explicit goal at the level of the temporal structure of events was to obtain a synchronised parallelism (parallel, interdependent streams). Such a goal is exactly what could generate the free constructions of sense at which Perilli aimed. The ensemble of Ideogrammi n. 1 is two flutes, three clarinets, bassoon, three horns, two trumpets, trombone, piano, xylophone and two percussion. Another clarinet, four saxophones, another trombone, a vibraphone and a contrabass are then added from Ideogrammi n. 2, whose solo part for flute is divided, when necessary, between the two flutes of Collage. Even if the Roman artist Mimmo Rotella, another pictorial reference for Clementi, makes no use of the ‘velatura’ technique, his collages contain a triumph of the vertical dimension. He works with décollage, progressively sticking several layers of commercial and cinema posters atop one another, which are then minutely cut and torn off. They may not be transparently visible, but the graphic and chromatic elements of the different layers may be reconstructed, within a fragmented and chaotic perception, to create a holistic look. Also, this ‘velatura’ technique may be seen as a particular technique of vertical collage, in which the overlapping surface never obscures what is underneath. Such a technique remained among the basic tools of Clementi's musical thought until the end of this creative life, much longer than the technique of collage itself. Nato Frascà (1931–2006) was an artist involved in various forms of expression, including painting, sculpture, graphic arts and architecture, and particularly engaged with the problems of the theory of perception. In 1962, he founded the Gruppo Uno in Rome, which began its activities precisely with a concert-exhibition of electronic music. After being awarded, as a student, a scholarship for the Centre for Experimental Cinematography, he realised his first and only experimental film, Kappa, in 1965. The project involving Clementi should have followed immediately, but no document confirming this suspicion has been found. Cf. the full translation by Dan Albertson of this text from 1967 in ‘Aldo Clementi: Mirror of Time I' (Contemporary Music Review, 28: 6). The text in question is derived from a radio broadcast for Rai RadioTre (at that time, Terzo Programma), Club d'ascolto, on 27 August 1967. It was later published in the programme note for DIES IRAE—Sancta Susanna—Œdipus Rex, staged at the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome in 1978, pp. 172–73, then in Mollia, M. (Ed.). (1979). Autobiografia della musica contemporanea (pp. 53–55). Cosenza: Lerici. The apocalyptic atmosphere of this conclusion may well have inspired the composer in his choice of subtitle. Between the two performances in 1961 and 1975, Perilli had further experimented in the field of music theatre with two works (the ballet Mutazioni, music by Luciano Berio, 1965, Teatro alla Scala, Milan; the piece Kombinat Joey, staged in Rome in 1970 by the artist collective called Gruppo ‘Altro’, to which the composer Domenico Guaccero belonged) that included the participation of live performers, hence meaning the comeback of the human body among the elements on stage. Cf. Lux (Citation2005). The shapes à la Mondrian are pictorial works that, in the titles, evoke again an enigmatic, mythic literary plane, this time related to the culture of the Jewish occult: Tentativo di ricostruzione di Golem: distaccato e carnale, or Tentativo di ricostruzione di Golem: acuto e concentrato. The photographs of these works (marked ‘Galleria Marlborough’—Rome, which was a focal point for contemporary art from the USA), together with other stage photographs of the performance, are kept in the archive of the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome, whose staff I especially thank for invaluable help. The quoted text is published in the programme note for DIES IRAE—Sancta Susanna—Œdipus Rex, pp. 173–74. Documentation on the performance was published in 2010 in the exhibition catalogue Alexander Calder. Work in Progress. Memoria di una messinscena, 23 gennaio–30 marzo 2010, [Rome] Sala Annibale Brugnoli, Rome: Teatro dell'Opera. The performance consisted of the alternation of six painted curtains, which could be transformed by means of projections and lighting games. In front of them, mobiles of different shapes entered the scene and moved—some in the purest Calderian style—together with mimes, some of whom rode bicycles wearing cyclist suits, performing geometrical figures. On Silben-MERZ and Blitz, cf. reference 9: Mastropietro, A. (2003–04), pp. 98–104. This piece was premièred in 1974 at the Goethe-Institut in Rome by Carla Henius, Gisela Kontarsky and William Pearson. The monosyllable ‘merz’ has no full meaning: it is a fragment of the word Kommerzbank, cut from a newspaper and chosen with ironic intent by Schwitters to state the non-commercial status of his works. Cage's work closest to Silben-MERZ would likely be Theatre Piece for one to eight players (1960), either for the foreseen verbal and gestural signals, or for the non-relationship of the performers. Nonetheless, in Silben-MERZ, a fossil of narrative theatricality, totally defunctionalised and ‘dehydrated’, remains in the game of the performers' expressive behaviour, determined by semantic differentials—a parameter that will reappear in ES. The signals are respectively, a prolonged high note; bursting laughter; and a sentence pronounced with a bitter tone. The signals described by Clement at point 4 of the legend concern, on the contrary, a single turn within a series of readings and require no reciprocal relating. As a matter of fact, an interruption of the reading process of the materials is not foreseen by a performer or, in the case of a multiplication of the trio, a group of performers. The only scenario possible is, in the case of uncertainty, to emit signals to fill the residual sonic-semantic weight—gentle coughing, clearing one's throat, muttering, etc. The score contains the following materials: (A) three typewritten sheets of notes for the performance; (B) two typewritten and handwritten sheets, with models for the temporal realisation and the special disposition of action; (C) 10 stave-lined sheets, plus a title page, with ‘Materials A’ for the 24 instrumental parts and relevant metronome indication (‘Materials C’); and (D) two stave-lined sheets, plus a title page, with ‘Materials B’ for the same parts. The date of the composition is ‘Värmdö–Roma 1972–73;’ the date of the notes for performance is ‘Roma, January 1973’, with signature. Concerning Blitz, cf. the thorough analysis in Mattietti, G. (2001), op. cit., pp. 192–203. For this score, Clementi chose the subtitle Musica per un torneo di scacchi [Music for a chess tournament], thus putting an emphasis on the necessity of the visual–gestural mechanism that constitutes its principal gear. The date of completion is ‘Roma, February 1973.’ This presentation contains a sly reference to an even earlier precursor than Cage, i.e. Érik Satie, with his furniture music: ‘La musique, ainsi qu'il en découle, se veut principalement une musique d'“entretien”, de divertissement.’ Clementi prescribes that, if the chess games are not finished when the music stops (after 45 draws = 1000″ = 16′40″ of music), a coda ad libitum of Material C continues. As soon as the last match has ended and the winners are declared, the winners, the conductor and the tournament director, bowing to each other, give the signal to interrupt Material C. See also: ‘Here the topic of theatre is in play: Scene at the centre (with the possibility of walking around it) or spectator in the middle (stereotopic)? In the first case, one should go toward radical solutions: Each spectator with his own “free” pathway for body and eyes …’ (Clementi, Citation1964, p. 63). The score indicates the year 1979 and the note ‘work commissioned by Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.’ The performance was included in the 44th season of this festival in Florence, from 30 May to 3 June 1981 at the Teatro della Pergola. Alongside Clementi's work, the same evening included the concert version of Das atmende Klarsein by Luigi Nono and Life, a short choreography by Maurice Béjart on music by J. S. Bach. The fact that the two dancers on stage performed on a highly geometric scenic-choreographic element, a parallelepiped structure made of pipes, is worth mentioning. In Maggio Novità, Das atmende Klarsein—Life—Collage 4 (Jesu meine Freude) [programme note for the 44th Maggio Musicale Fiorentino] (1981, pp. 465–88). Florence: Teatro Comunale di Firenze. Meaningful, too, are the sketches for scenery and costumes, the stage photographs and the print reviews. I sincerely thank the staff members of the archive and of the production office of the Fondazione Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino for their kind cooperation. Michele Canzoneri (1944–) was certainly chosen as a result of his experience with sacred art: among his most important, recent realisations are the stained-glass windows for the Chiesa di Padre Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo, designed by Renzo Piano. At the beginning of his review, Mario Bortolotto, who had always appreciated Clementi's music, defined Collage 4 (Jesu meine Freude) as the last number in a series that ‘time, i.e. experience, has made rather unequal, almost patchy.’ At the end of his text, after underlining the work's faithfulness to the ‘prohibition of pronunciation’ rather than to the traditional conception of discourse and its equidistance ‘between informel and collage’, he places it ‘among the great ambitions, leaving to other works the triumph of predestined achievements’. Cf. Bortolotto, M. (1981, June 29). L'equivoco del censore. L'Europeo.