Lucia Ronchetti concludes her tenure with a Biennale Musica in unmissable stages: here are the 10 sections into which the sound journey in the city from 26 September to 11 October is divided.
Speaking of absolute music, such music that holds no connection with any other element – voice, theatre, multimedia – that might limit its power to enchant the spirits and speak to our hearts, it is clear that, centuries later, we still make a difference between symphony, or orchestra music, and chamber music, with prominence given to the individual instrument. The difference lies, more than in the sheer number of instruments, in the places where music was to be played. The chamber (court halls and the like) music developed in the early 1600s, then we have theatre, and obviously church for the whole corpus of sacred music. We shall also remind our readers that the first public theatre in the modern world opened in Venice – the San Cassiano Theatre in 1637. Sure, it was an opera theatre, for opera was all the rage at the time and the term symphony was just making its appearance. It would take a further fifty years to codify it thanks to Arcangelo Corelli, whose concerto grosso is the forefather of symphony. Section Polyphonies explores what became of symphony from the postwar. We will be seeing compositions that, while keeping no historical connection with the fourfold structure of classic symphony, do keep complex writing and a sophistication of compositional technique that is not dissimilar from Beethoven’s or Brahm’s method of symphonymaking. Let’s focus on Beat Furrer’s 2020 concert for violin and orchestra: we will still find that animated conversation between solo instrument and orchestra that is typical of 1800s music, even though in this case, the orchestra is a swarm of violent sound, and everything sounds confuse when compared to the established roles we once knew. This is why we might go out on a limb and conclude that the relationship that, in classical times, was finalized to a common goal, is now deeply conflictual.
The section will explore what became of music for solo instrument in the first two decades of the third millennium. Piano will take the lion’s share of the programme, much like it did from the 1800s onwards. George Benjamin, Alberto Posadas, and Unsuk Chin are three musicians born around the 1960s who have different views on music and on the piano. Benjamin is known as a great pianist since his younger years. He was merely nineteen when he wrote Shadowlines, though he was already at the point when his maturity was all there. Benjamin can blend tradition and avant-garde, intellectual rigour and expressive emotion in a music of absolute charm that creates beautiful sound landscapes. With Erinnerungsspuren of 2018, Spanish composer Posadas re-reads a piano solo repertoire in six tracks: Couperin, Debussy, Schumann, Scelsi, Zimmermann, Stockhausen. Unsuk Chin’s Six Piano Etudes, composed between 1995 and 2003, demonstrate an extraordinary knowledge of the early twentieth-century piano heritage, a taste she developed thanks to her mastery of dissonance and unparalleled virtuosity.
Throughout the 2024 Venice Music Biennale, the Sala d’armi space at Arsenale will house an installation for individual listening curated by French composer and sound engineer Thierry Coduys. In this space, designed by German light designer Theresa Baumgartner, works of digital electronic music and acousmatic music will exemplify the concept of absolute music. Among the several pieces on the playlist of this digital den are two masterpieces of electro-acoustic music: one is Bernard Parmigiani’s 1975 De natura sonorum. There are barely any other examples, other than this, of sound generated by acoustic or digital means that becomes a proteus-like superior being, capable of infinite expressive immersion. The other is Bohor (1962) by Iannis Xenakis, a twenty-minute listening experience that will make us feel like within a bell that is rapped continually. Obviously, these are not experiences that aspire to take us to any sort of comfort zone – far from it. What they can and will do is take us to another zone, not merely a sound zone, but a zone of our inner self. What might seem the outwards expression of amateur, impracticable chaos slowly grows into the result of precise, intelligent creation. It feels like seeing Donald Judd’s minimalist art and thinking: “I can do that!” – though no, you can’t. The Hermetic Organ by John Zorn will also be played. It is one of the many of Zorn’s musical creations, an improvisation piece on organ elaborated on a 2012 recording. Zorn was in Venice last year, and played the piece at the two opposite organs at the Venice Conservatory.
“Now it is time to drink; now with loose feet it is time for beating the earth” – Horace’s verses are perfect to set the mood for this section, which is dedicated to compositions that explore the physical nature of sound, its Dionysian, percussive origine, its close adjacency with the immersive states of acoustic violence. The two concerts you should be looking forward to are performances of masterpieces of late twentieth-century music: a primordial monument to percussive violence, Wolfgang Rihm’s Tutuguri, and Gérard Grisey’s Le noir de l’étoile, a piece for six drummers, tape, and electronics composed in 1990 and inspired by the discovery, twenty years earlier, of radio signals coming from deep space that at the time made some believe in the existence of extra-terrestrial civilizations.
Jazz’s ability to renovate and regenerate, to adapt to the times and be an active factor in interpreting them is nothing short of incredible. From this point of view, it reveals a liveliness and a better inclination for renewal than rock’s, which is looking at silent survival after Radiohead’s descent started. Sure, we seem to owe some of these ‘resurrections’ to a kind of mimicry that follows, a bit too closely maybe, the splendour of the past. I’m thinking of Kamasi Washington’s epic music of obviously post- Coltronian matrix. While the most innovative jazz of the last two decades is the jazz that tries to smooth out as much as possible the difference, which is classically jazz, between composition and improvisation, and to work on the technical prowess of performers that show a common vision, freedom to cross over onto different genres, and willingness to listen to one another. Artists like Vijay Iyer, Tyshawn Sorey, Makaya McCraven, Mary Halvorson, and Joel Ross do have a common vision: great freedom in exploring different genres, an amazing ability to control their instruments while keeping clear of showy, swanky bravura, and perfect interplay. Also, and above all, a vision of the structure of the music where exposition of a theme and improvisation are not separate moments, but live in intimate connection and cross-references. They’re not opposed, but biologically symbiotic. This is the kind of jazz we’ll see: compositional praxis and improvisational research blend, mix, hybridize, thanks to Georg Vogel, Tyshawn Sorey, and Peter Evans at the 2024 Venice Music Biennale.
A section that lists living and past composers (like George Crumb and Galina Ustvolskaya) whose work prominently features counterpoint, structural complexity, and alienating charm that will make the audience lose touch with reality. In this section, we shall meet some of the greatest names of contemporary music who have been on the scene for decades, like American David Lang and Frenchman Tristan Murail, as well as professionals who established themselves in more recent years, like Clara Iannotta and Vito Žuraj.
Padiglione 30 at Forte Marghera is where all three concerts in this section will take place, starring some of the protagonists of experimental electronic music. First night, DJsets by Sam Barker, Tim Hecker, Cecilia Tosh. On the second date, Danish musician Son Gunver Ryberg’s liminal music will occupy a diverse, multi-disciplinary space: DJ-sets, film music, videogames, installation art, dance theatre, performance art. On the third day, a composition work by Zsolt So˝rés: Mut Naq Fo Mus (Ic) for five-string viola and electronic instruments.
From the Venice Music Biennale, we expect an unambiguous message: there exists a place where music is still used in music as instrument of prayer, of dissociation from our corporeal dimension to acquire radical, pure, ecstatic spiritual rarefaction. This place is the Baltic, with Estonian Arvo Pärt, Lithuanian Juste˙ Janulyte˙, and Latvian Santa Ratniece. There will be two dates for section Pure Voices. The first is September 30, with the Baltic musicians we mentioned, who will present Pärt’s Missa Syllabica, Ratniece’s Saline, and a live electronics performance by Janulyte· . The second date is the final day of the Biennale – October 10 – and will take place nowhere else than St. Mark’s Basilica. The programme includes Lisa Streich’s modern Stabat and the two Stabat Mater by Giovanni Croce and Palestrina, and is a continuous game of refractions and references between ancient and modern, truly the key to understand the 2024 Venice Music Biennale.
Musica reservata, also called secreta, was a music style popular in Italy and southern Germany, and its interpretation is twofold. First, is it a performative practice that makes use of chromatic progression, impromptu ornaments, and strict adherence between music and poetry. Second, its refinement and daring style restricted its appeal to few connoisseurs at mid-1500s courts of nobility. In this section, we shall find music of ambitious research, for either solo instruments or small ensembles.
This is the section of research, of questions and answers, of round tables, of knowledge exchange, of interpretation of the secrets of music. And of education, too. The library of the Biennale’s Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts will host conferences held by some of the musicians participating in the Music Biennale (David Lang, Georg Vogel, Tristan Murail, Golfam Khayam), two meetings by music historian Oreste Bossini with Marco Momi and Luca Francesconi, and a talk with Salvatore Sciarrino. The programme also lists four round tables with international scholars and researchers. There will be an interesting one on silence and liminal music on October 3. As for educational content, musicologist Giovanni Bietti will hold four Lezioni di musica on Messiaen, Stravinsky, Machaut, and Bach; while musician and educator Luca Mosca will hold piano readings of Vivaldi’s Estro armonico and Marcello’s Sonate op. 2.
