ISABELLA BORDONI / ROBERTO PACI DALÓ
LINGUA MADRE
A paper on:
opera & digital technology, languages & translation,
voice & text, and the dangers of radio

For Demetrio Stratos

Zeitgleich installation by Roberto Paci Daló : NAPOLI


LINGUA MADRE:

PRELUDE I


I have been thinking long and laboriously about a contribution to this symposium but I couldn't get over a difficulty. The difficulty was to arrive here with a contribution which would fit the theme without blurs and logical leaps. Then I decided not to bother. The result is a contribution full of thoughts which constantly stray from the theme - and with many logical leaps. My problem was and is, that for a theoretical approach I had to step out of my own world, to cross a territory beyond my own identity.

I thought: in my daily routine I use something ancient and something modern. I use writing with its rudimentary but primary and irreplaceable tools, pen and paper. I use my own body. I use my own voice and I use space. I employ physical space when it is a theatre, concert hall, or recording studio, and I use machines. Machines allow the space I use to shift from a physical to a non-physical one.
On the air.
Ancient civilisations called it Ether, that higher, pure and bright part of space beyond the limit of the earth's atmos-phere. That is the Primo Cielo, but this word (meant to define a particular space) reminds one of a peculiarity of Time.

"They called the place 'excelso etere' and they gave it this name because it always flows."1

But why is the thought of technology, of a philosophy of technology, difficult for me to express, or only temporarily access-ible to me?

I had no answers at first, so I lived with this difficulty and in this way, little by little, words came back to me.
Appearance
Ether
Feminine
And the process of combining these words and their opposites. I can only speak of this because, with all its particularity, this is my own experience.

The idea of appearance and truth not only as a duality, but as open worlds influencing each other, is an idea that has pursued me since 1989. "Temporale" (a theatre piece) was composed as a note about Time and had "appearance and the return" as a subtitle.
At that time an "ego" was dramatically set, searching for a world which would reveal beneath mere appearance its true essence.
But what is the borderline between that which seems to be and that which is real?
Maybe living in a common place makes us recognise things, understand events?
But appearance or "parvenza "- even if the moral interpretation implies deceit - is rather an "appearance" and is already a thing in the tangible (real) world.
Many other things have cut across these years, in myself as an individual and as a part of a thinking community, many ideas have crossed and stayed, more or less productively, in the world of art and sciences and thought.
In the collective consciousness there is an upheaval in the perception of time and space thanks - but not only - to a type of information and communication processing that are becoming telematic.

In myself - and this is recent - a motherhood.
Even before this, and now together with this - and I am grateful for it - I now experience a direct contact with a feminine genealogy practically and symbolically (not metaphor, but symbol) experienced.
Experienced...
experienced...
and that redraws the whole map of a new and ancient sense of Time and Space.
I believe this to be a typically feminine attitude, one of living, more or less happily, the paradox of thought, taking care of the details and open to the alchemy of change when change must come.
I believe the central point is this: how can these two paths of the absolutely ancient and the absolutely new live together?
Two paths crossing two genders, the feminine and the masculine, always engaged in different tensions, one in preserving, the other in operating, one in belonging to a world often unshared, the other in moving in the public sphere.

I don't ask myself if there is a writing, a theatre, a politics or a technological scene which is feminine because now I know they exist.
I know it today, after years of believing in an idea of equality, which nevertheless left me disoriented through my incapacity to practice it.
Unexpectedly, the painful certainty of a distance arose in me, the idea of a practice and thought about the difference.
Distance and gender are not in the object or rather they are not there 'a priori'. But in a product they can be there or not be there but - and this I want to emphasize - they are in the origin, in the archetypal forms. Always.


Every thought is following this.

Every thought following this carries the memory of an upheaval imprinted in its genetic patrimony.
That one of Time which Science knows
ordination, simultaneity, duration.
That one of Time in which is placed the feminine history of generation,
enigma and tale of the origin which perpetuates itself.
Because in Time (literally) we grasp the word,
and in Time (literally) we learn to talk.

"Language is my human effort. By fate I have to go and search, by fate I come back empty-handed. Yet, I come back with the 'unspeakable'. The unspeakable can be given to me only through the failure of my language".2

The Unspeakable is preserved in the heart itself of the Word.

Agamben writes in Idea della prosa quoting a statement by Paul Celan:
"Only in our mother language can we speak the truth. In a foreign language the poet lies."

I would like to take two things into consideration here:
First the relationship between language and motherhood. In the vernacular: we say mother-tongue, pregnant thought, to conceive of an idea - thinking nourishes, then the waiting, then the word is the birth.-
Then the lie.
There is a place where we can stay that is not exactly the place of lies but rather a place of partiality and of loss.
Languages, different languages, do not coincide.
The function of translating is not one of creating copies.
Creating copies would mean to believe that an original exists and therein lies the Truth.
To stay a foreigner in a language is to broaden loss and error.

But why and when is the language a mother?
The Italian philosopher and researcher Luisa Muraro, writes in her beautiful book L'ordine simbolico della madre:
"from our mother we have learned to talk and she has granted the language its capacity to say what it is."
"We learn to speak from our mother, the matrix of life is also the matrix of the word."
"I state that to be (or have) a body and to be (or have) the word are one thing and that the work of the mother consists precisely in that whole."

The word as an act of creation.

"To know how to speak basically means to know how to bring the world into the world and this we can do in relation to the mother, not separately from her."


Let's go back to the dawn of modernity and back to the masculine and feminine. First radio, then TV transported the outer to the inner, inside the home, inside the place of individual reflection, into a territory of the feminine.
Woman is the cell of inner thoughts, of inwardness, of the Home.
But not only: woman is the Abode (I think about the Madonna della Misericordia by Piero della Francesca)
First Radio and then TV make the home the centre of information establishing an interpenetration, interpenetration between outside and inside, between masculine and feminine.
Today radio and TV technique belong to archaeology. I can only partly grasp and interpret things happening today. There is a further trespass, a further interpenetration of different worlds: the micro is host to the infinitely vast and immaterial. What will be the result of the new meeting, encounter, trespass?
Which language will we learn for the community that will come ?



PRELUDE II

In the 70s Stratos wrote: "The material recorded here must be understood as proposals for freeing the use of the voice as naturally as possible. For this reason no 'technological tricks' have been taken into consideration: only a piece of string, a Rizla cigarette paper and a glass of water. If a 'new vocality' can exist, it must be experienced by everybody, and not just by one person; an attempt to free oneself from the condition of listener and spectator, to which culture and politics have accustomed us. This work must not be taken as a listening experience to undergo passively, 'un jeu dans lequel on risque la vie' [but as a game in which one risks one's life]".
(J. J. Lebel)

Time is changing. When Demetrio Stratos adds this comment to his recording Metrodora the technology still looked difficult to access. Now we can work on relatively inexpensive miniature technologies easy to transport and, for anybody who wants to deal with "democratisation of access" are, in Max Neuhaus' phrase, "... a simple means to an end".
But Stratos took important steps across the boundary between "high" and "popular" music which were radically reinterpreted and modified in his work, from the progressive rock group "AREA" to his work with John Cage.

And Stratos also posed important questions in Italy about tradition and modernity and the political/social approach to art and daily life.


OPERA
Opera is a form which is well defined, including all its neo-logisms (intermedia performance, interactive... etc).

TEATRO DELL'ASCOLTO
In 1985 we created GIARDINI PENSILI (Hanging Gardens) a theatre company, publishing house, studio for radio productions which would produce all of our work. From the very beginning much of our work was related to nature in a way close to Cage (quoting Coomaraswamy) "imitation of nature in its process".
Teatro dell'Ascolto is the definition which Giardini Pensili created to describe the work developed since that time. Teatro dell'ascolto was to reflect the Teatro della Memoria by Giulio Camillo and the tragedia dell'ascolto by Nono/ Cacciari (the Prometeo) as well.
Through Teatro dell'Ascolto we produced a corpus of works (in Italian "opere") which are always referring to one another.

YOU/brief woman you grieve in haste and unwind in haste and are always tying yourself up, may I ask you when will
when wiiill?
when will when will - sweaty handkerchiefs are lost
- is a look coming back to the eyes?
I'm waiting for monsoons from over the ocean,
waiting for the seas to retreat, the approach of land,
what kind of look do you have
what kind of look do you have, what kind of look
do you have, heh, heh, you, you
what kind of look do you have in your den-home
free - free who?
Lips? Hyperlips. Calypso the fires of the bivouacs
I don't see them. I must look much further, up to
where?

||: Lanciata nell'aria in movimento hai lasciato nell'aria un movimento :||


AURORAS is an opera where the main character cannot appear on stage because the protagonist is the Radio,the radiophonic media in a scenic context, within the tradition of opera yet with an up-to-date "intermedia" structure.
The composition is based on the voice. The opera is strictly related to language, the language of all ages. Voices of kids, voices of the old, voices in between.
Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, German, English, Russian, Hungarian, Greek, Armenian, Yiddish, Persian: language generates a spontaneous polyphony. The original text acquires infinite shapes and meanings through the translation into these different languages: on their "voice" the entire musical structure is built.

As the French philosopher Marc-Alain Ouaknin writes: "La vérité n'est ainsi ni du côté de l'original ni de celui de la traduction, mais dans un au-delà des deux qui les transforme tous les deux. La traduction, le nouveau texte, n'est pas la reproduction de l'original, il devient autre chose qu'un produit assujetti à la loi de la reproduction. Lorsque Rabbi Nahman affirme que 'la sainteté de l'hébreu dépend de sa traductibilité en araméen', (l'autre langue), il signifie par là que l'oeetre-à-traduire et le acré ne se laissent pas penser l'un sans l'autre... Ils se produisent l'un l'autre au bord de la même limite. La traduction conduit deux langues l'une vers l'autre dans une promesse de conciliation."3

AURORAS is an opera which returns the melodrama to its origin: the fairy-tale dimension. It is a story to tell.. Those stories which already contain all the questions that move people, pushing them to return once more. The more personal the thoughts, the more they reflect the universal questions about Birth, about Love, about Death.

[Rabbi Nahman from Breslau decided to burn all his books, just to become a storyteller again.]

In AURORAS the singers are evocations of the traditional opera singer's role.
A game of the theatre within the theatre.
AURORAS is constructed from some instrumental and vocal conventions of classical music, clichés of the opera and of baroque musical theatre.

A LECTURE UPON THE SHADOW
Very little is known about Monsieur de Sainte Colombe - not even his first name - and the mystery surrounding his person has only intensified the mystery of his music. The Concerts à deux violes are the only pieces that we can remember him by. Monsieur de Saint Colombe not only gave the French viol the seventh string which makes it so original, he also gave it its soul. Thereafter French viol music was characterized not only by its distinctive technique, by the use of polyphony, the frets, the form of the bridge, the seventh string, but also by its elegiac crepuscular mood: it was the music of light and shade.

Except our loves at this noone stay,
We shall new shadowes make the other way.
As the first were made to blinde
Others; thesa which come behinde
Will worke upon our selves, and blind our eyes.
If our loves faint, andwestwardly decline;
To me thou, falsly, thine,
And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.
The morning shadowes weare away,
But these grow longer all the day,
But oh, loves day is short, if love decay.

Love is growing, or full constant light;
And his first minute, after noone, is night.4

In the history of the performing arts, opera always dealt with the newest technologies and the opera remains the perfect place to develop the relationship between text, sound, space. In one word: "multimedia".

AURORAS is a sound environment with voices and instruments coming from several different sources: radio signals, voices not classically trained, electroacoustical ensemble, with live electronics for their continuous modification and spatialisation. Speaking, singing, telling voices - voices modified.

In AURORAS the body reveals itself as an incomplete machine. Here the body is very close to contemporary thought and far away at the same time, in equal, opposite measure.

Aurora B. lebt in der Bibliothek, von der sehr hohe Leitern ausgehen. Eine deckenlose Bibliothek, die über Epochen hinweg entstandene Klänge aufbewahrt. Wo Aurora B. lebt, hört die Musik niemals auf. Im Zimmer nebenan und in dem dahinter und in dem dahinter und in dem dahinter und in dem dahinter ist immer Klang. Alle Klänge, alle Stimmen durchdringen sich ohne Unterbrechung. Ohne Anfang und Ende, man erreicht Aurora von jedem beliebigen Punkt aus. Das Fenster, das sich in die Klänge der Welt weit öffnet. Aurora B. wendet sich ab und die ganze Stadt ruht in sich.

Different languages allow different ways of presenting a text.

Il sonno è arrivato così, senza motivo, ha masticato ultime parole commestibili mentre qualcuno bussava piano. Il cielo è un tormento di stelle. Occhiali ricolmi di malinconia lasciati distrattamente sul comodino.

The milk ambulance arrived too early as always, just in time to stop the sequence of a little man who was waving his arms around at regular intervals in the middle of the street, in the everlasting sun of mid-October. Open closed open closed eight six four two the night came just like that, for no reason, surprising the little man on his green stretcher (you are stealing my memories do you know?) green little elephants on a white ground, books piled up book covers open notebooks on a turn-table, refrigerated counter, the smell before of the school, outside light early afternoon.

I would like to sleep for a long time.
The light came just like that, for no reason, but not the light of an anyday, rather luminous plateau over green overall, the glittering sun of festive December on breasts overloaded with milk, ode to providence written with a charcoal on the little crib.
Deplorable dramatization of dizziness, little hysterical boy good for nothing tears off pyjama buttons you've stolen my memories do you know that? The face half-European half-Asian sweats between the pupils of an acrid odor.
I would like to look at you for a long time.

Adolescent bones the drama seems forever inevitable.
Historiography of love violent, of love sacred, of love profane.
Vacuum spinning stool accompanies whirls of thoughts?
The film of innocence and mediocre holinessn sacred-heart-mad.
The wind arrived just like that, for no reason, surprised the little man in shirt-sleeves, miniscule tattooing round trip 2nd class in the inner fold of the left arm.
The thirteenth year elapsed with the spade in his hand, he was shifting around piles of sand on the shore, not a word not a smile.

L'omino brucia piano ma questo è un dettaglio.


In AURORAS we have a continuous anamorphosis made out of the superimposition of soundscapes from the cities of Berlin and Napoli, both places provoking specific acoustical memories.

THE DANGERS OF RADIO
After the outbreak of the last world war, listening to "enemy radio stations" was made a punishable offense. Nazi leaders wanted to prevent the Germans from learning about the actual course of the war or hearing the political aims and military objectives of the Allies. Despite this, opponents of the regime in particular attempted to become independent of Nazi propaganda news bulletins and the Wehrmacht reports.

"Short Italian News Comment" 269, 22 april 1941, 22.40 (Bbcn s.l.b.5.)

"Buona sera. Due mesi di arresto e mille lire di multa colla condizionale: è questo il prezzo, per ogni cittadino italiano incensurato, dell'abbonamento alle trasmissioni di Radio Londra, oltre al canone annuale dell'Eiar e all'eventuale confisca dell'apparecchio, se questo è di proprietà del nostro ascoltatore. Il prezzo è caro, ne conveniamo, ma non siamo noi a trarne profitto; e, d'altronde, il numero crescente dei nostri ascoltatori dimostra quanto siano vaste le categorie di italiani che affrontano questo rischio per ascoltarci.

Non vi è esortazione della stampa o delle autorità fasciste, non vi è minaccia di pene, non vi è sanzione effettiva che possa circoscrivere o fermare questo continuo allargarsi della massa dei nostri ascoltatori in Italia. Nel Nord e nel Mezzogiorno, nel centro e nelle isole, nelle città e nelle campagne, in montagna o sul mare, non vi è un centro abitato nel quale la voce di Radio Londra non sia ascoltata; furtivamente eppure con intensa attenzione, colla emozione di fare ciò che è proibito e di preservare qualche cosa di caro.

In ogni grande casamento cittadino, a una data ora del giorno o della sera, vi è almeno una radio il cui altoparlante parla sommesso come un sussurro. E l'ora di Radio Londra: e il capo-fabbricato non deve sapere, per quanto forse, sia occupato ad ascoltare anche lui.

Si mandano i bambini a letto: perché non parlino l'indomani a scuola e qualcuno faccia la spia al maestro, e il maestro faccia la spia al fiduciario rionale. Se una visita batte alla porta, la radio viene spenta di colpo. Si spengono i lumi a volte; come se l'oscurità dovesse attutire il suono; si ascolta alla cuffia; si adoperano antenne portatili orientandole in modo da favorire la ricezione ed eliminare le rumorose interferenze delle stazioni fasciste; e quando si può ascoltare perfettamente è come un trionfo.

Lo stesso avviene nei piccoli centri rurali dove il radioamatore, coraggioso ed ammirato, è magari, uno solo; e tutti sanno chi è; e nessuno lo dice; e tutti attendono da lui notizie: le vere notizie, iragionamenti politici, i veri ragionamenti. Forse è l'albergatore, forse il farmacista, forse il dottore; comunque, una persona fiera di compiere un atto di coraggio e di intelligenza che lo distingue dal gregge di coloro che non osano e coi quali, nel giorno delle celebrazioni, egli è costretto a confondersi indossando la stessa uniforme nera e lo stesso berretto alla tedesca. Il maresciallo dei carabinieri lo sa; ma sorride sornione, pensando che forse non è lontano il giorno in cui questi isolati detteranno legge.

Questo fenomeno generale e profondo inquieta il regime fascista, perché forse è l'unica forma di protesta possibile contro il regime. Protesta muta, anche se non sorda; spontanea, anche se non inorganica; concorde, anche se sgorga da sentimenti diversi e contrastanti; vasta, anche se composta da elementi individuali; e progressivamente sempre più vasta, più concorde, più spontanea.

Questo fenomeno generale e profondo inquieta il regime fascista, perché forse è l'unica forma di protesta possibile contro il regime. Protesta muta, anche se non sorda; spontanea, anche se non inorganica; concorde, anche se sgorga da sentimenti diversi e contrastanti; vasta, anche se composta da elementi individuali; e progressivamente sempre più vasta, più concorde, più spontanea.

Non è merito nostro, di noi che lavoriamo giorno e notte qui a Londra per informare il pubblico italiano di quanto avviene nel nostro paese e nel mondo: noi cerchiamo soltanto di avvicinarci alla realtà dei fatti, e di ragionare con sincerità e buon senso. Ma sappiamo che l'Italia ha sete di verità e di senso comune; e non è possibile allontanare l'acqua dalle labbra degli assetati.

Due mesi di arresto e mille lire di multa sono troppo pochi per questi imputati; e di più sarebbe troppo per i giudici.

Buona sera, Colonello H. Stevens"5


THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS
Woody Guthrie's guitar is still valid. Expanding its boundaries of course, to include not just fascism but any government control which seeks to limit personal and collective freedom. We view the radio receiver through Guthrie's testament.
Sergio Messina's Radio Gladio is a masterpiece of easy listening, a strongly political documentary piece. Exactly now is the time to be involved. Exactly now is the time to be political.
The Radio can be a place for the other voices.
The utopia of Theatre as one community. Theatre as place of conflicts.

GETTING MULTIMEDIA
The big companies, multi-nationals and the ubiquitous Japanese, just now discover the beauty of multimedia (that magic and obsolete little word). They have identified the potentiality of a new market: fans of video games along-side serious researchers and artists as well as companies that simply want to present their merchandise in increasingly seductive ways - approaching virtual reality - are all new customers, ripe for exploitation. As Giovanni said "col cavolo", not because he refuses high-tech and new developments a priori, but because the weight of business is at times too heavy a load, unbalancing the work. The way some companies can graciously sponsor any kind of artistic or cultural event is often too massive not to be considered suspicious.

"Col cavolo!" Disse Giovanni di
fronte all'ennesima rivista che
propagandava il piacere sublime
della completa interattività.
"Col cavolo che ci casco ancora.
Non mi fregano più..."

Giovanni has said that he doesn't really want to be plugged-in with everything, just with 'something'. He would prefer to make his choices in his own time (internal/external) in order to use the new toys in his own way.

We like to think about technology as something which has lightness, precision, speed - all titles of Calvino's American Lessons, written for the Norton Lectures at Harvard University.

But people can get literally sick from an overload of information. To know everything, everywhere, all at once, has become a password, to be 'on-line', 'up-to-date'. And then?
The dream of the video artist in the beginning was the possibility to record everything - in real time - every moment of the day, but they very soon discovered that the recording of ten hours requires 10 other hours to view it, and that's a nightmare. Again the anxiety of getting it all without leaving the mind free to work with its memory.
Just memory, and even sleep, give us the feeling of a life cut into parts, periods, moments, which make it possible to give an order to things. Memory can be considered a filter, a survival tool for us.
A danger is the continuous stream of images - also acoustical images - which overload our brain. The capacity to choose, even to forget, is somehow becoming a pertinent technique to practise today.

Thus the "partiality" of the radio, its very limits becomes one of its most interesting features.

On August 30, 1993 - with LA LUNGE NOTTE (The Long Night) - the cities of Jerusalem, Cologne, Innsbruck and Rimini were connected in one space. Musicians and singers worked together on live voices by the poets Samih al-Qasim, Palestinian, and Yehuda Amichai, Israeli, coming over a radio bridge between Italy and Israel (from radio 'Kol Israel'). That night Yehuda Amichai said that the event was the first baby born into the new era.

Of course the signal was not pure but whatever the loss from a technical point of view, it makes this piece particularly touching. We can "feel" the distance. We can feel the desert.

In the development of art projects in electronic space today, we cannot avoid the beauty of a continuous interchange between old and new technologies.

In REALTIME (1993) the image is again not corresponding to the technology. Clearly old fashioned costumes referred to the beginning of television broadcasting, in order to establish a discordance between the image, the sound and the concept as a whole.

In 1992 the performance LA NATURA AMA NASCONDERSI, linked the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna with the Tiroler Landesmuseum in Innsbruck by a high-tech video and audio bridge. Simultaneously a traditional Hungarian ensemble with singer and string players plus an old actor in Vienna appeared with a children's choir plus musician and actress in Innsbruck, the latter controlling the sound and video trans-mission.
Once again this combination of old and new was to subvert the clichéd technoscape.

Map of parallel projects surrounding AURORAS:

- Lectures. Berlin, Cologne, Innsbruck
- LOST MEMORIES, live hörspiel, ESC Graz, ORF Kunstradio
- THE MARVELLOUS SPRING, composition, Cologne, WDR Musik Triennale
- LINGUE DA AURORAS, Ravenna
- COMUNITÀ, installation, lectures, theatre fragments, edition, concerts. Civitella d'Agliano
- AURORAS, a film for television
- AURORAS, the book

I am the phrase without wording, I will smear myself on your back with all the sweetness of honey.

along the avenue that leads to the plain you can see
shooting stars
see
if
each one
is
a wish
someone wishes to drowse tonight and in a torpor
stay without intention,
or form.




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