INTRODUCTION

Potraviny

(groceries, basic needs, nutrition, in Czech)

Potraviny is an informal discussion group  about the concept of non-professional and non-separation of creative activities. Some famous artists such as Picasso, Dubuffet, Svankmajer, Wölfli (and many others), did not hesitate to cross the borders of disciplines, to both films, texts, music, etc.. to serve a and wider and larger purpose.

Potraviny also offers topics of surveys, articles about artists, interviews, inquiries, online updates of rare works.

See General statements for more.

Sorry if some articles are only in french.

Svankmajer in Prague, exhibition 2012

A new and big retrospective of Svankmajer in Prague!

his collection of invented animals.

A lot of props and sets from the movies.

Here elements of Alice.

Here the cross in Sileni.

Here the puppets in Conspirators of pleasure.

beautiful and rare documents from shootings.

Here a pic taken during Food, featuring Ivan Kraus.

And texts...

The exhibition is accessible for the main part to non czech speakers.....

find the details here

The New Discipline, by Jennifer Walshe

“Theater provides the unique experience of watching the body in real time, inside a story…there is reality occurring in front of viewing eyes, and the combustible mix of reality with what is being presented on stage is enticing and electric.”

— Richard Maxwell, Theater for Beginners

“…I was born with an ectomorphic body, all skin and bones. However, after being inspired by a passage from the diaries of the Pop artist Mr. Andy Warhol – a passage where he expresses his sorrow after learning in his middle-fifties that if he had exercised, he could have had a body (imagine not having a body!) – I was galvanized into action…..Hence, I now have a body.”

— Douglas Coupland, Generation X

“The New Discipline” is a term I’ve adopted over the last year. The term functions as a way for me to connect compositions which have a wide range of disparate interests but all share the common concern of being rooted in the physical, theatrical and visual, as well as musical; pieces which often invoke the extra-musical, which activate the non-cochlear. In performance, these are works in which the ear, the eye and the brain are expected to be active and engaged. Works in which we understand that there are people on the stage, and that these people are/have bodies.

Examples of composers working in this way include: Object Collection, James Saunders, Matthew Shlomowitz, Neele Hülcker, François Sarhan, Jessie Marino, Steven Takasugi, Natacha Diels, myself.

The New Discipline is a way of working, both in terms of composing and preparing pieces for performance. It isn’t a style, though pieces may share similar aesthetic concerns. Composers working in this way draw on dance, theatre, film, video, visual art, installation, literature, stand-up comedy. In the rehearsal room the composer functions as a director or choreographer, perhaps most completely as an auteur. The composer doesn’t have aspirations to start a theatre group – they simply need to bring the tools of the director or choreographer to bear on compositional problems, on problems of musical performance. This is the discipline – the rigour of finding, learning and developing new compositional and performative tools. How to locate a psychological/physiological node which produces a very specific sound; how to notate tiny head movements alongside complex bow manoeuvres; how to train your body so that you can run 10 circuits of the performance space before the piece begins; how to make and maintain sexualised eye contact with audience members whilst manipulating electronics; how to dissolve the concept of a single author and work collectively; how to dissolve the normal concept of what a composition is.

And always, always, working against the clock, because the disciplines which are drawn from have the luxury of development and rehearsal periods far longer than those commonly found in new music. Then again, the New Discipline relishes the absence of that luxury, of the opportunity to move fast and break things. In this way, it is a *practice* more than anything else. And the concomitant: the New Discipline is located in the fact of composers being interested and willing to perform, to get their hands dirty, to do it themselves, do it immediately.






The New Discipline thrives on the inheritance of Dada, Fluxus, Situationism etc but doesn’t allow itself to be written off merely as Dada, Fluxus, Situationism etc. It’s a music being written when Dada, Fluxus, Situationism etc have aged well and are universally respected. It takes these styles for granted, both lovingly and cheekily, in the same way it takes harmony and the electric guitar for granted. As starting points. As places to begin working.

New Discipline works can easily be designated, even well-meaningly ghettoised, as “music theatre”. While Kagel et al are clear ancestors, too much has happened since the 1970s for that term to work here. MTV, the Internet, Beyonce ripping off Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Stewart Lee, Girls, style blogs and yoga classes at Darmstadt, Mykki Blanco, the availability of cheap cameras and projectors, the supremacy of YouTube documentations over performances. Maybe what is at stake for the New Discipline is the fact that these pieces, these modes of thinking about the world, these compositional techniques – they are not “music theatre”, they *are* music. Or from a different perspective, maybe what is at stake is the idea that all music is music theatre. Perhaps we are finally willing to accept that the bodies playing the music are part of the music, that they’re present, they’re valid and they inform our listening whether subconsciously or consciously. That it’s not too late for us to have bodies.

Jennifer Walshe, Roscommon, January 2016

jones big ass harmonisation

Where does this fascination for the harmonization come from ?

A lot of musicians nowadays post arrangements of anything spoken, sung, whether it is spectacular, like Obama 's speech, or funny and cheap, like the example of Jones Big Ass Truck rental.

What is the source of this attraction, and of this interest ?

First one must say that the technic is not new: already in the seventies, and early eighties, artists like Zappa have been interested in the music of the speech, and reinforced it by simple doubling :

Then the next step in elaborating on spoken voice introduced into music was to add an harmonization, by Steve Reich, for instance:

Here the samples of the voices are very short, and the music is more important than the quantity of text, of prerecorded material.

In the case of pre recorded material, like Big Ass Jones, the idea is more to give a musical environment to natural sounds, whether they are vocal, or environmental, accompanied with image. In the case of Reich, it's more a material to elaborate a classical composition.

THe fundamental idea in this doubling is the idea of melting different layers of perception and reality: one being daily, without value, with no importance: the spoken voice, even for Big Ass Jones, parody, dirtiness of signification. To give it a new value, a astonishing value, a preciousness which is far from being implied by the first material :

 In the case of Reich, it's a bit different, since the samples are cleaner, and selected to such a degree that they could have been recorded on purpose.

The basic, the fundamental idea in this confrontation of reality and the precious world of delicate harmony (in the case of Big Jones Ass it's particularly sophisticated) is the magical idea of revealing the invisible in the visible, namely to reveal the hidden musical structure of the banal common life. 

It is restauring a sort of unity which is not lost, but seems to have always been here although hidden.

It is not religious, since it doesn't imply an idea of any god or any humiliation/passivity/acceptance, it's really inside the nature of music, which is to be a magical act of revealing the secret relations between our perception and nature.

body and music

The relation instrumentalists have with their physical body is of a particular kind. Their body is substituted by the instrument, at least during the performance. All the muscles, the nervous system is dedicated to make this weird keys and holes system that we call a clarinet obey to the sound image the performer wants to transmit.
When this practice lasts for years, to ask a musician to take the instrument out and express him or herself without, is a source of serious difficulties.
As a retired cellist i´ve always considered the instrument to be part of the chain which doesn´t make music but more surely keeps us encapsulated in the net and the chains of duty, control, and conventions (a certain idea of beauty, a repertoire, orchestras, etc.).
It doesn t mean that using the body to produce music necessarily goes into either the direction of Bobby mc Ferrin (substituting the sound of the instruments by the ones of the body) or dance. The body can express many sound activities, either while producing sound, or by the memory of it. By memory i mean that some gestures convey some sounds even if they are produced in silent. Our memory reconstitutes the absent sound. And this effect is of the same nature and importance than the dissociation of the sound and its source provided by the loudspeaker. It is an abstraction, an opening towards broad interpretation, and the substrat for layering and constructing a work.
For that reason i would like to insist on the perversion and the highly problematic usual denominations “music”, “theatre”, “music theatre”, “performance”. I know like everybody else the reasons and the usefulness of these terms, and i´m not claiming the need for a new one. But they are terribly misleading because they isolate phenomenons, an isolation which doesn´t belong to us. I think we are generally analogic in our interpretations, and synesthesic in our perceptions. The example of the memory of the sound given by the look, the example of the instrument that we visualise when we hear its recording shows (among thousands) that our life is entirely depending on this supreme faculty: associating, reflecting, reverberating impressions, perceptions, consciously or not. It has nothing to do with one special field.
The separation of activities, already theorised by Plato, and then generalised in our every day life certainly is part of the source of these conception. “ You shall do one thing only, for the sake of the City”. The ancient idea of the poet, who sings, composes, writes texts and carries the divine voice is pulled back to earth by the social and economic regulations. In other cultures, like central Africa or Thailand, the artistic practice is not reserved to the specialists but can be part of everyday´s life, mixing the sacred, the decorative with the functional and the useful aspects of life.



This synesthesic approach, where our senses and our memory are sollicitated without distinction is certainly a completely underestimated one, even in art.
I´ve been experiencing these ideas in a series of short pieces, called Situations. These pieces use one or two found phrases (slogans, proverbs, aphorisms), a certain physical configuration (one, two three performers), a space (chair, table or nothing, preferably nothing), and use a very traditional notation that can be read by music beginners. They can be performed in any language, with no gender, age etc. considerations.
They float between music, theatre, music theatre, performance, actions, rituals. But they all have in common the importance given to the gestures, the net of significations deployed by them. The different layers (text, situation, gestures) are not necessarily consistent, which connects to the absurdist theatre of the 60´s, with a possible comical effect. However, the musical notation keeps them in a different shape, or texture than the one of theatre, which is the time order: the set of actions is musically organised.
Useless to say that these little pieces (although they are very successful among musicians) still have difficulties to find their perfect performers: a lot of musicians have difficulties to give up with their instrument (their transitional object). Opening the borders of music towards these crossed perceptions (involving maybe the eyes, or the smell, the touch) requires an absence of specific in one specific domain. One must be able to give up with a lot of excellence references in order to find the fine tuning between the fields of action, voice, action, rhythm.
These Situations are very small, very short, and confidential (for a very limited audience and small amount of performers), but i keep looking at them as one of the keys to unlock our categories, our limitations and our absence of bodies.

françois sarhan, feb. 2016

the work and life of mario bossi

PART I
The Ocean of the Unknown Composers

Most of you may have heard that this year 2016 is the 70th birthday of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für neue Musik.
Consulting the archive of the IMD, i ve been (like everybody else i guess), stunned by the richness of the musical activity and the high numbers of composers who came here in Darmstadt.
Thousands …
I was also slightly overwhelmed by the number of works or publications which are today absolutely forgotten. How many hours of work, passion, dreams are now vanished, or remaining under the form of an archive entry and a few scores...
Among these discret composers, one caught my attention: Mario Bossi.
As far as i know, Mario Bossi has only one occurrence in the IMD archive, where he is programmed in 1948, almost at the very beginning of the Ferienkurse, for a large project piece called the LA LUCE di PROMETEO.

A fragment of the score is visible there, you can consult the 14 pages of the manuscript i´m going to describe.

What stroke me was that his name is mentioned one time in the pre program of the 1948, but strangely enough, the piece is canceled, although it was a big project, and he is not invited anymore.
Even stranger, is that no notice, no biography, no score is kept in the carefully organized archive. Mario Bossi is erased from XXs century s history.


But not completely!

LA LUCE DI PROMETEO

This is one page of the 14 pages of manuscript of LA LUCE DI PROMETEO, 1926-1948:
which was certainly promised to become a vast work, an opera, cosmic and tragic, political and visionary.

 

This is a sample of an interesting viola line from the same manuscript.

The viola part is underlined in yellow.

And this is its modern notation:

That music is banal in the context of the 60s, but before 1948?
It evokes a little bit what Sciarrino will write later on.

  Let´s go a little bit further.

 This yellow section indicates "spectrum della tromb.", with a low E.
Doesn´t that remind us the beginning of Partiels, by Gérard Grisey ?


So far, Bossi could a sort of genius but messy precursor of a lot of ideas. That doesn´t make him particularly a good composer. Maybe a visionary artist, but since he didn´t finish any piece (as far as i know, if anyone has info about it, please write me here), it´s not so interesting.

But at that point, i found something really, really intriguing:
This is a sample of the page called “Il maestro del martello” in the 14 pages of LA LUCE DI PROMETEO
this section is dated : 5th of January 1926, Strombolo-Bollo.

And now a sample of a famous Boulez piece:

Interesting resemblance, isn´t it ?

And Boulez´s title is: Dialogue de l´ombre double. It sounds like a half confession, at least a discret tribute to Bossi, but still…


I was then convinced to be at the edge of a discovery that would revolutionize the history and the hierarchy of XXs century´s music.
My task was then to go further, and look for ANY occurrence of Mario Bossi in the music writings, since the 30s.
Unfortunately, there are so many Bossi´s that my quest became very quickly a hassle, and i couldn´t get successful immediately. 

I spent hours to find occurrences of his name in dictionaries, libraries, etc.
This is what i found


One letter from B Britten where the name M.B. appears:

another letter from Respighi, where Bossi appears in full letters this time (in yellow):

Of course, it´s not a lot.

But to go deeply in the manuscripts of Bossi, all the roots of our music was popping up like bubbles:


the root of Microphonie by Stockhausen

Here we see the tamtam and the 6 microphones.

The inderteminacy, later magnified by John Cage:

4mn33 (by john cage) is already mentioned!!! In 1926...

etc
etc
etc
etc


Ladies and gentlemen....

seriously....


According to my counts, and i would need a full team of workers to be able to be more precise, but so far  i found 1459 samples that have been copied by other composers.
Some very short, some very long,
sometimes also pure concepts, all from these 15 PAGES OF THE ORIGINAL MUSIC !!!!

This opens a whole new perspective on new music !
 ...except if my discovery was already written and described by Mario Bossi...

Because maybe somewhere lies a text for a conference written by Mario Bossi where he describes somebody analysing a few pages of manuscripts containing all the music to be written in the next 50 years... A composer named Georges Perec, for instance.

But i prefer not to think of this possibility which would destroy all these months of work.


PART II
enquiry, who will confess the plagiarism ?
So the best for me was to go and ask directly to the living composers or in their personal archives if there is anything about this Mario Bossi.


In 2011, i went to Kürten, and asked, for any stupid reason, to have access to Stockhausen´s papers about the conception of Vibra Elufa.
Stockhausen diaries are clear:
“Ich habe noch einmal in Darmstadt B. gelesen. Ein Genie.”
“Lange Gespräch über Zeit mit Maderna. Nach B. Briefen, gibt es kein Zeit.”

Nobody knew who this B. was. Boulez ? Bruno Maderna ? Berg ? Berio? “
now we know….

In march 2015 I wrote to Pierre Boulez a letter asking if he has ever heard of a Mario Bossi. In april Boulez spokeman made a statement saying that Boulez had no public life anymore. Boulez died on the 5th of january 2016.


That was a dead end....

even if i meet a living composer who copied bossi, who would confess ?
so i had to keep that for myself at the moment, and show it to the world when i m ready. today is the Bossi day!



PART III
Who was Mario Bossi ?

I made an extensive research to find a Mario Bossi, composer, in Italy, in the 20s…. but it s probably easier to count the number of spaghetti produced in the whole world….
But in the area of Strombolo-Bollo, i found a village, called Mafiune dei Cucionni, where a Mario Bossi, music teacher, was born in 1867, and died on the 23rd of march 1948 in Germany. His works have been burnt by his widow, who was  Luigi Dallapiccola´s sister… who was here when she burnt letters, and all manuscripts of her husband.
he was leaving near a pottery atelier:

At the town hall, the registers showed me that he had a first name, Giovanni, and a last name, Humboldt.
His complete initials , therefore, are GmbH.


I found a marriage registration, hopefully of our man (but who knows...)

So what happened in march 1948 that could be fatal to Bossi ?
I went back to Stockhausen diary and Boulez schedule, and i found an interesting missing piece: from the 19th of march till the 22. They met in Darmstadt at the beginning of the month, they discussed with Wolfgang Steinecke about the program of the summer, where Bossi´s master piece is to be premiered. Bossi was supposed to come during this month to discuss with Konrad Otto Böhmer-Stutz, then in charge of the concerts.
Let´s just mention that John Cage at that exact time, march 1948, meets Grete Sultan, a German born pianist living in New York. This Grete Sultan is seen in February in the south of Italy.
(just to mention).

So Boulez and Stockhausen meet at the end of march 1948, probably with Böhmer and Bossi.
Then, he comes back to bari and disappears from the musical scene for ever.

In fact, financial crisis in the 50s in Bari : Bossi was forced to take a side to make ends meet.

no conclusions about Bossi, but what  does he have to tell us ?

CONCLUSION
some reflections about Bossi´s phenomena



All composers owe their music to one (or more) Mario Bossi.

Mario Bossi composed all the music to come.

There is no music that Bossi hasn´t composed yet: Bossi is the Babel of composition.  
STOP COPYING BOSSI!
(he already copied you)

Everything you composed was already composed by Bossi.
 Everything you haven´t composed was already composed by Bossi.
 Everything you´ll never compose was already composed by Bossi.  
Let´s reconsider institutions in this new Bossi´s perspective:

let´s call IMD

IMB (institute Mario Bossi) 

All music © Mario Bossi  

more about Mario Bossi:

a facebook page dedicated to harmony, paying its tribut to Bossi, here