If I produce something, I transmit a message to someone else.
The origin of the flow of information comes not from matter, but from the "I", from an idea.
Here is the borderline between physics and metaphysics: this is what interests me about this theory of sculpture.
.
Joseph Beuys, interview to Willoughby Sharp in 1969.
Lucrezia De Domizio,
Baroness Durini, and I have mutually collaborated in many projects
over the last almost twenty-five years. Several of them were
dedicated to Joseph Beuys. In 1994 I created a virtual sculpture
for a large exhibition dedicated to Beuys in Perugia, curated
by Lucrezia De Domizio. In 1998 I composed the concert Difesa
della Natura. Then, I composed the concerts Olivestone
in 1999 and Diary of Seychelles in 2004. Many other things
were made. Now, in 2013, Lucrezia De Domizio invited me to compose
a new work in celebration of Joseph Beuys. I called it Kleve.
Beuys was not really born in Krefeld, as virtually all academic
texts indicate. In fact, he physically born in Krefeld, but with
few months of age he moved to Kleve, the city he considered his
true birthplace. Lucrezia De Domizio asked me to compose something
related to the roots of all us. Beuys dealt, all over his life,
exactly with this: roots. That story of an academic and
official birthplace - Krefeld - in opposition to what Beuys assumed
as his place - Kleve - seemed me an interesting starting point.
After all, the last thing Beuys could have in mind would be an
academic point of view. The name Kleve intrigued me. Some
of its possible etymological roots point to the Proto-Germanic
*klibanan, which meant "to glue", "to stick
at", "to connect". There is also a possibility
to find a connection with the origins of the word clan.
Anyway, "kleve" indicates the idea of a power to keep
people connected. Curiously, if we could recall, in some way,
the Indo European particle *k, we would find the idea
of cosmic movement connecting people, from where we have the
Latin words caelum and canto, respectively sky
and song. Then I imagined what could indicate such power
of connection among people. Immediately I had in mind the sound
of claps. A clap is unpredictable and individual, but its sense
emerges from the connection with different people. Since 1979
I had a project for claps - I even wrote something about it many
years ago. Thus, I had a good collection of claps recorded in
different countries over several years. Kleve is a composition
for claps. The material was recorded in the United States, Brazil,
Italy, France and Japan among other countries. I worked on a
complex virtual music score connecting all these claps. This
was one of the voices in Kleve. The other two ones - the song
- were worked on sounds from vocal chords and also on a masterwork
by a great composer: Hildegard of Bingen, who lived between 1098
and 1179. Exactly nine hundred years ago, she was fifteen years
old. She was a polymath and wrote theological, botanical and
medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems,
while supervising brilliant miniature illuminations. She lived
at Disibodenberg in the Palatinate Forest, not far from where
Joseph Beuys was born. From Hildegard of Bingen I choose her
Ordo Virtutum, composed c. 1151, which is the earliest
piece of the kind by more than a century, and the only medieval
musical drama to survive with a clear attribution for both the
authorship of text and music. The three voices were worked after
an electronic process, following to a virtual musical score.
Everything in Kleve is about the origin, about the root.
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
2013
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