Amplification#1 - A. Corelli - op. V - Sonata IX - Preludio (Largo)

The first in a (hopefully long – one that will at least keep me entertained for the next 40 years!) series of pieces entitled ‘Amplifications’, which take their starting point from classical art music and, within the chosen score, create interstices – scars – from which the vapours of a hybrid sonic material emerge, concerned solely with amplifying the signifier, the impressions and the timbres of the original score. This sonic material consists mainly of morphing microtonal electric guitar chords and metallic or ambient textures, distorted natural harmonics from the viola, synthetic sounds and concrete sounds poised between the abstract and an allusion to a ritual action.
In search of a musical aesthetic that clearly takes the work of Carmelo Bene as its conceptual model and manifesto: his reinvention of the text, the transcendence of the written text, the exaltation of Phonė, and the surrender to a past that returns to the present precisely because it is not memorised but rather re-remembered in non-remembrance. An aesthetic that ultimately becomes a political gesture.
 
Written text.
The original score does not need yet another serial performance; rather, it must be torn apart and reinvented, embracing the suggestions offered by sound, experience and the unconscious.
(“The text is a dead oral entity unless there is someone to propel it into sound, event, flesh. The score is not to be performed: it is to be endured and transcended, erasing its memory to allow the unconscious of sound to resurface.”
“Just as we passively undergo all our prenatal perceptions, so too will we subsequently undergo the signifier. In the recurrence of life, discourse will never belong to the speaking being.” - Autografia di un Ritratto - Bompiani, 1995.) 
Sound thus no longer ‘belongs’ to the musician, but is experienced both by the one who produces it and by the one who listens to it.
 
Amplification.
The classical music page is a pretext, a matrix, a fossil upon which to apply a machine of sonic subtraction and deformation, a means of ‘drawing closer’ to sound until its rational contours and formal structure fade away.
(‘Amplification is by no means a magnification… If I look at this page like this, I see and hear; but the closer I bring it, the more the contours fade.’ - op. cit.).
 
Phonè.
Phonè is the sound that precedes meaning, the cry or noise that does not bow to the logic of discourse, of time or of traditional tonal harmony.
(‘Sound must return to what it was before the alphabet: vocal terror, pure vibration not subservient to meaning.’
‘It is the abyss that divides the spoken from the written… the resonance of speech beyond the concept.’ - op. cit.)

Remembrance.
The phonic reinvention of the score is an unconscious evocation, prompted not by memory (in the administrative or factual sense) but by remembrance (the irruption of the unconscious through forgetting).
(“There is nothing to remember. Memory is the farce of history. If anything, one must re-remember within the forgetful, within non-remembrance: letting go of archival memory so that the past may happen again, instantaneously and disfigured, in the present of presence.”
‘It is not a matter of remembering, but of being remembered by sound. The past returns to the present only on condition that it has been forgotten, not memorised.’
‘Remove the subject from the equation to let the event take place.’ - op. cit.).
In the same way, the concrete-ritual sound, rather than being a re-evocation of a historical event, is an empty action that allows sound to emerge from non-remembrance.
The classical text is thus forgotten so that it may be truly remembered anew.
(‘[…] to bring to the surface that which has never been memorised, that which has been saved from the prison of the alphabet because it has remained pure Phonè’ - op. cit.).
The ritual gesture, the sonic matter that originates from inorganic matter, signifies that
“the body, a victim of language […] would call for a truce: to regress to the inorganic, to a matter devoid of will… The void, which is the end of all art, of all history, of all worlds.” - op. cit.

Sabotage of forms of control and power.
The written text and the classical score represent Authority — a rigid code imposed from above.
To de-structure a classic means to attack the hierarchy, to strip the text of its commanding function, transforming the performance from a ‘bourgeois institution’ into a territory of anarchic liberation.
For Deleuze, Carmelo Bene’s approach consisted of cutting away the figure of Power (the King, the State, the Law, Tradition) from the theatrical or musical text.
 
Syntax and the word endowed with complete meaning are the primary tools with which society disciplines the individual. ‘Meaning’ is a social imposition.
Reducing the word or the melody to Phonè (noise, distortion, a cry, inarticulate vibration) means sabotaging the dictatorship of meaning. If language belongs to Power, the only way to avoid being subjugated is to dissolve language into sound for its own sake.
 
In the capitalist model, culture is a commodity, and art must produce ‘value’ or a ‘lesson’.
Opposed to production are uselessness, waste, dissipation and regression to the inorganic.
Taking a classical text — a monument to high culture and a fetish of bourgeois heritage — and reducing it to disfigured matter through distortion, metallic friction and noise is an act of de-fetishisation, a refusal to serve the classical text to the public as a ‘reassuring cultural product’.