Boccioni and Pratella and Stockhausen - men of the future (part 3)
In 1910 Uberto Boccioni attended a Futurist event at Milan’s Teatro Lirico in Salon d’ Automne and wanted to apply Marinetti’s thinking to painting. Futurist painters wanted to create an art that expressed the “whirling world of steel, pride, fever, and speed.” They invoked the “invigorating current of science” and the new way of viewing phenomena made possible by scientific research. Boccioni favored a kind of painting in which Simultaneity was the fluidization of form that would evoke the inner rhythms of the individual rather than kinetic actions. He used intuition to penetrate the inner life of matter much like Expressionist painters often wished to crystallize the inner life of a moment or scene. Futurist artists however wished to define an “absolute motion.” They found the conception of Simultaneity from the Dadaists as the “psychological space of duration where vision, knowledge and memory converge.” The early works of Boccioni gave example of this as a sort of convergence between Expressionism and Cubism. Instead of portraying all the physical elements and view of an object as in Cubism the artist was showing the object in different stages of motion at the same time. For example Boccioni’s picture Mourning exhibited a woman in all her states of mourning in a different pictorial space on the same axis. The Futurists tried to use simultaneity in a way that expressed the world beyond the ordered limitation of the unaided human body’s perception. They expressed the motion of the world as it exists beyond our daily corporeal perception.
The Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella wrote the following summarization of technology and simultaneity in his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music. He gives clear example of how Futurism was essentially an abandonment of bodily perceptions in favor of the larger perceptions that the machine allowed.
“Contain in music all the new attitudes of nature that are always tamed by man in different ways by virtue of his incessant scientific discoveries. Give musical animation to crowds, great industrial shipyards, trains, transatlantic steamers, battle ships, automobiles, and aeroplanes. Add the domination of the machine and the victorious reign of Electricity to the great ventral motive of a music poem.”
Stockhausen’s view of time (specifically the perception of past, present, and future) is also much like the Futurists’ ideas. He uses the technology discovered through atomic theory to define a new way of thinking about the world. Serialism is essentially a way of thinking as intervals between elements. Instead of thinking in terms of black and white for example, a serialist would think in different degrees of grays. In the 1950’s Serialist expression would have been an obvious mode of artistic thinking of the generation which found that all things were merely composites of smaller elements which could be chemically rearranged to create something completely different. Stockhausen wishes to take this thinking further in expressing a serialistic view of time. Like the Futurists, Stockhausen affirms that the relation between the future and the past are illusions of our human brain. “I don’t want to remember everything that has happened to me in earlier lives – I couldn’t move anymore. It’s a good limitation for this life; nevertheless [the past] is an illusion because I am absolutely sure that the moment I give away this brain… I will have my full memory.” To Stockhausen the past and future are both illusions of the human brain. If a Serialist way of thinking tells us that black is white with a different arrangement of elements, then it also makes us consider that the past is the future with a different arrangement of the same elements.
Time itself cannot be perceived universally by all beings, and like all aspects of form it is perceived according to the body. For example the short life span of certain microorganisms might perceive a second or microsecond as a long time. If we were free of our bodies our perception of time would be quite different. Stockhausen often talks about man’s perception of time and rhythm and attempts to free the limitations of our body from its perception. “Certain parts of my work approach nine to twelve pulses per second, around the alpha wave region, which is very important for telepathy and telekinesis – a very interesting zone where we lose our ability to make distinctions between rhythm and pitch.” There is also a zone between pitch and timbre where Stockhausen tends to compose his music and there are entire melodies in Aries that are gradually rhythmically diminished to a microsecond. The composer is always stretching the perception of the listener and encourages a separation between physical listening and perception. “We are dealing with longer and longer duration for slow movements. Slow rhythms and meters; and when we go beyond eight seconds, then we lost memory, we cannot remember well enough if it is eleven seconds or twelve seconds. We have no developed sense for that. The memory is then weak, and that is very good, very interesting….” Stockhausen’s electronic composing allows him create permutations of his musical elements that are otherwise imperceptible to the naked and natural ear. There are entire melodies in Aries, for example that are gradually rhythmically diminished to a microsecond.
The Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella wrote the following summarization of technology and simultaneity in his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music. He gives clear example of how Futurism was essentially an abandonment of bodily perceptions in favor of the larger perceptions that the machine allowed.
“Contain in music all the new attitudes of nature that are always tamed by man in different ways by virtue of his incessant scientific discoveries. Give musical animation to crowds, great industrial shipyards, trains, transatlantic steamers, battle ships, automobiles, and aeroplanes. Add the domination of the machine and the victorious reign of Electricity to the great ventral motive of a music poem.”
Stockhausen’s view of time (specifically the perception of past, present, and future) is also much like the Futurists’ ideas. He uses the technology discovered through atomic theory to define a new way of thinking about the world. Serialism is essentially a way of thinking as intervals between elements. Instead of thinking in terms of black and white for example, a serialist would think in different degrees of grays. In the 1950’s Serialist expression would have been an obvious mode of artistic thinking of the generation which found that all things were merely composites of smaller elements which could be chemically rearranged to create something completely different. Stockhausen wishes to take this thinking further in expressing a serialistic view of time. Like the Futurists, Stockhausen affirms that the relation between the future and the past are illusions of our human brain. “I don’t want to remember everything that has happened to me in earlier lives – I couldn’t move anymore. It’s a good limitation for this life; nevertheless [the past] is an illusion because I am absolutely sure that the moment I give away this brain… I will have my full memory.” To Stockhausen the past and future are both illusions of the human brain. If a Serialist way of thinking tells us that black is white with a different arrangement of elements, then it also makes us consider that the past is the future with a different arrangement of the same elements.
Time itself cannot be perceived universally by all beings, and like all aspects of form it is perceived according to the body. For example the short life span of certain microorganisms might perceive a second or microsecond as a long time. If we were free of our bodies our perception of time would be quite different. Stockhausen often talks about man’s perception of time and rhythm and attempts to free the limitations of our body from its perception. “Certain parts of my work approach nine to twelve pulses per second, around the alpha wave region, which is very important for telepathy and telekinesis – a very interesting zone where we lose our ability to make distinctions between rhythm and pitch.” There is also a zone between pitch and timbre where Stockhausen tends to compose his music and there are entire melodies in Aries that are gradually rhythmically diminished to a microsecond. The composer is always stretching the perception of the listener and encourages a separation between physical listening and perception. “We are dealing with longer and longer duration for slow movements. Slow rhythms and meters; and when we go beyond eight seconds, then we lost memory, we cannot remember well enough if it is eleven seconds or twelve seconds. We have no developed sense for that. The memory is then weak, and that is very good, very interesting….” Stockhausen’s electronic composing allows him create permutations of his musical elements that are otherwise imperceptible to the naked and natural ear. There are entire melodies in Aries, for example that are gradually rhythmically diminished to a microsecond.
Labels: boccioni, body, dolf, futurism, futurist, Karlheinz Stockhausen, mourning, perceptions of time, pratella
posted by dolf at 16:45
2 comments
links to this post
