World Group

Riccardo Massari Spiritini

NOW AND WHERE YOU ARE

short personal report about Contemporary (¡) Music in Spain and in Europe

It is truth that many orchestras are quitting in various European countries, it is truth that the situation of contemporary music is quite marginal in the so called cultural production domain. It is a matter of fact that Spain and other countries are economically, politically and culturally following a process that fifteen or twenty years the most important European countries got to follow, on a longer period.
With the death of the Spanish dictator 29 years ago the age of “closed doors” finished for this country. Suddenly Spain was once more opened to the world, having done a jump in one step from the 30’s to the middle 70’s. It is clear that many artists (like the great Mirò and Picasso) left Spain to live abroad and developed in other countries their work. But in the music domain Spain could not produce a minimum nucleus of artists (although some great interpret) compared with countries like Italy, France, Germany, but also Holland, Belgium, England where composers and creators where many. Why? Very difficult to explain but surely even too late to explain. We must take a picture of what we live in with a much more panoramic position of the camera.
Now at the beginning of the XXI Century things are changed deeply . The so called globalization took many variables into the game(s) of western activities. The sense of history and geography is changed. It already happened in some other times. In the XVI century for example. But now it is once more a non-linear change: a different change with different parameters. Now, for instance, it is not “our” culture wich is taken abroad, or which is softly melted with some exotic flavors. Now any expression of art is virtually anywhere. Here and there, in Europe and in the world. Anything an artist does must take in account this, and on the other side it has to make sense for the inner ancient original spirit he has, for his or her cultural origins (comprehensive of languages, behaviors etc).
This “end of history” as various contemporary philosophers and sociologists affirm is visible in many fields.
In music means the fusion of expressions coming from any spot of time and space.
It means the annihilation of the concept of development of language through history, so to say that anyone with his/her activity is (should be) the expression of the situation he/her is living in. In this prospective any art expression has a dignity, it does not mind
what is the mean used, but the intensity.
On the top of this situation we have to consider the global economic (cultural) model imposed by the only political system survived in the western world. Art is a product to consume. It is not a free activity related to the necessities of every day life.
The only art activities which idealistically still perpetuate this “puristic” model are produced by some branches of the so called Contemporary Arts. Even in this field , if you look carefully and with a certain objective criticism, you will find few artists who really go for the sincere expression, without hiding themselves beneath a curtain of intellectualism, technology or/and other forms of exhibitionism.
Probably what we see is just the end of a long process wich could have been starting already between the XVII and the XVII Cent. May be it is not really important to discover how, but certainly John Cage predicted a future of small groups of musicians-composers, and I am sure that he was right. In this line I also think that composers should play more their music and share with other artists (like Cage did) coming from different (de-fero means in fact take away) fields.
Coming back to orchestras and new music for large public it must be noticed that a limit of the so called classical music education is that tradition created a standard not only in the language but also in the body, so that anyone could possibly get a musician following a certain number of courses. This is in fact a paradigm of the industrial era , the era of the great populist ideologies, the era in which industries needed hundred of peoples to go on (like orchestras). Now we are in the post-industrial era, some of these old parameters wich could work for a while in the electric and digital domains survived, but slowly we are moving more far (lukly) in the direction of a more fragmented social tendency.
The big market of entertainment is following those old principles, but already many people live artistic experiences independently, out of the market in closed circles. It is there where you can find sometimes the most free and necessary way of expression through art.
That is why I think it is too late to ask to a Catalan, to a Spanish, to a Greek or to a Turk (…) if he could or not take the European train wich take to the “sublime Olympus of the so called Contemporary Music Art”. Anyone, in different forms, lost a train in the Western culture in the prospective of today. Because any form of art which can survive is a result (and a justification) of the social environment in which it has grown.
Even the apparently very solid music buildings like those constructed by composer like Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono and Cage himself should be seen now in this relativity prospective. The consciousness of history is a very important issue which must be driven on. But it must not be anymore a progressive type of consciousness.
How many artists are not considered at all in this "official" version of history, cause their strange ideas and opposition to (euro-western) social forms and structures (take Henry Cowell for ex.)? many of them are not jet understood by a large public, even if they own to a couple generations before us, they are never programmed in concerts.
This music is not relevant for the western art credo.
We should consider this fact and take a way out. History shoul be re-written with more objectivity and with less ethnocentrism.
We have to study and read, continue our trip through the immense creative knowledge which any country of the world, any human experience has and had in different forms. Get the ability to see and read what this differences mean and suggest.
We have to be always curious and, without forgetting our not only latin and not only Anglo-Saxon, not only white, not only black, yellow, red etc. origins, build together a much open way to live the arts, as far as Art is one of the activities wich mankind did since ever.

In this days is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the nazist camps in Polland.
In Auschwitz there are big celebrations with great discourses given by presidents and ambassadors. While we celebrate this important date, in other but not disconnected places, are happening analog things, new walls divide countries, new olocausts happen.
Humanity is once more unable to have a lucid view of the facts and do really something about. How can you think that art can change if life remains the same on this planet?



(24 november 2004 barcelona)

postscript:

Also it is a funny thing that, in this open situation which I described above, composers and musicians follow the traditional attitude in the classification of music (actually almost the same classification as used in the market, a clear sign about how we are living any musical and art experience).
I mean that it is quite absurd in 2004 to talk angain and again about serialisms, tonality and polytonality, free improvisation and open forms, large orchestras or chamber ensembles, use and/or implication with electonic and digital means and so on. It is just a tecnical classification, good for the surface (appearence) of things, but not for what is inside.
In fact the main preoccupation at this point should be content and the consequent projection of a piece of art in a new direction. This conditions should be searched not in the use of old or new techniques, neither in the participation to one or the other (commercial) context. What is lacking often it is this intensity (something that even Kandinsky foresaw in his scripts), this urgence of expressing what is happening to the artist, this urgency to give a testimony a representation of our existence.
Many things we do are just automatic, they simply not follow this principles I mention.
That is why most of the works we hear and see (with some lucky exception) are indeed “superficial”. They simply not go for the inner part, they stay at the surface, the technique, the context without passing through. The public on the other side (and many artists) is mostly used to anything, bored, sleeping with open eyes, curious about the techniques, the faces of the musicians, the decorations, the glamor and so on. They even get surprised when they notice that some luky piece let them think more, or let the desire to be re-listened a second or a third time.



All this elements make slower the process of change. It will take some decades to see a something concrete. Sometimes I think about the frase of Erik Satie: “I was born too young in a too old world”.