Didattica della Musica

Quando mi è stato chiesto di partecipare a questo incontro ho subito pensato di indagare il possibile legame tra l'opera di Philip Dick, un autore spesso associato al nome di Antonio Caronia e che anch'io ho letto molto, e un tema che mi interessa particolarmente e cioè quello del rapporto tra musica e potere. Non a caso: la musica è sempre presente da qualche parte nelle opere di Dick, un po' come lo sono i gatti, ed arriva persino a meritare l'apparizione nel titolo di un romanzo; si tratta di Scorrete Lacrime, Disse il Poliziotto, titolo che riecheggia quello di "Flow my tears", forse la composizione più conosciuta di John Dowland, compositore rinascimentale inglese. Quello del potere, poi, è un tema addirittura onnipresente e pervasivo nel lavoro di Dick. Lo troviamo a partire dal microcosmo della vita famigliare, tipicamente tra il protagonista e sua moglie o la sua amante, o negli equilibri di un gruppo di amici, come in Un Oscuro Scrutare o più in generale di un gruppo di persone, come ad esempio in Ubik o in Labirinto di Morte, fino a coinvolgere non solo l'intera società spesso ingabbiata in una distopia totalitaria, sia essa di stampo militarista, religioso o consumista, ma anche l'intera esistenza umana, o almeno quella del protagonista, perso tra mondi paralleli, governati da divinità personalzzabilii, come Palmer Eldritch, o ingannato dal velo di illusione intessuto da forme biologiche parassite e aliene per noi inconcepibili, come la Zebra di VALIS.

Any general discourse about the soundscape cannot but begin from John Cage's description of his experience inside the Harvard University's anechoic chamber in 1951: " [I have] heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds " (Cage 1961: 8). In other words, even inside an environment that is acoustically neutral such as an anechoic chamber, a place in which when no sound is emitted an absolute silence should reign, it was still possible to hear something, that is the sounds emitted by the listener's body together with the listening system itself in action. Any experience of silence is therefore functional and emerges by a cognitive process of distinction between a sonic plane, that is each time different, and the plane of its absence. Silence is the result of a way of listening. When we turn to the soundscape, John Cage's experience brings some important consequences. As it has been pointed out (Kelman 2010), in spite of the success in a wide area of studies of using and abusing the term soundscape since it was introduced by Murray Schafer (Schafer 1969), not only a general consensus about a possible standard definition hasn't yet been reached, but it has even been raised the question whether the time has finally come to abandon the term for good (see for example Ingold 2007 and Helmreich 2010). Defining a keyword in human sciences is often more the final result of research than its starting point. No wonder then, if a number of texts includes the word soundscape without referring to a precise definition and leaves the outlining of its semantic field to deduction. Such use of a word seems less the expression of a technical term than the implementation of an apparatus. This is, in the definition by Giorgio Agamben, something which has " the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings " (Agamben 2009: 14). The word soundscape acts in these texts as a device or better a label, when not even a brand, which on one side has the capability of capturing meanings that determine the blurred boundaries of research, while at the same time it identifies a corpus of works, scholars, institutions, which strategically define a disciplinary domain that is inevitably inscribed in a play of power. On the other side, the attempts of defining the soundscape answer to the needs of institutionalization of the term, and for that purpose try to legitimate it by connecting to supportive disciplines with a strong epistemological statute. The well known definition of soundscape by Murray Schafer as " any acoustic field of study " (Schafer, 1993: 7) already points inclusively to the academic world as a topic which apparently encompasses all the studies of acoustic related subjects. If the utility of a definition consists in its ability to exclude the possible misuses of a term by delimitating its semantic domain, we could say that this function is here accomplished by referring to a " field of study " in the first place and secondarily by the word " acoustic ". The possibility of a clear distinction between the appropriate and inappropriate uses of the word is here guaranteed by the discipline related to the term " acoustic " , namely physics. Another example comes from the composer Pauline Oliveros, according which the soundscape is " all of the waveforms faithfully transmitted to our audio cortex by the ear and its mechanisms " (Oliveros 2005: 18). This definition updates, so to speak, Schafer's board of guarantors by adding physiology and leaves the role of managing the connection between the semantic domains of medical and physical sciences to the word " faithfully ". It is not clear though, how the one-dimensional parameter of faithfulness can match the complex transduction operated by the listening system and in what form it is able to account for sound cognition. But the main problem is that not only this definition encompasses everything from a Beethoven's symphony, to the noise of a car passing by, to the cochlear echo caused by them, but it also sacrifices on the altar of the " objective " aura of scientific data the way we use the word soundscape independently fro the topics of sound waves or music.

"Massimiliano Viel (“Quello che riconosciamo”) si sofferma su come nella cultura della globalizzazione l’essere umano sia tendenzialmente docile ai cambiamenti e ciò, secondo lo studioso, in quanto il soggetto fatica ad accorgersi di essi preso com’è dal concentrarsi sulla figura e non sullo sfondo che muta con gli individui. «Siamo pronti ad abbracciare abitudini che mai avremmo accolto se avessimo avuto la possibilità di scegliere, perché costretti dalla deriva dei riconoscimenti, ben pilotata da chi controlla la statistica di ciò a cui siamo esposti» (p. 236). Viel sostiene che le strategie di liberazione si trovano a dover seguire il percorso dei riconoscimenti opponendosi a quelle identità; non è sufficiente essere disponibili all’altro, è necessario neutralizzare «la potenza oggettivante dei processi coercitivi di formazione identitaria e di soggettivazione […] Bisogna dunque recuperare la responsabilità verso le nostre operazioni di distinzione guidandole verso obiettivi che siamo alternativi a quanto ci propongono i media e, se possibile, attuare strategie di sovversione percettiva» (p. 237)."
Dalla recensione di Gioacchino Toni
[ https://www.carmillaonline.com/2016/08/30/nemico-immaginario-postumano-soggettivazione-emancipatoria-nuove-forme-dominio/]

È di qualche settimana fa l'annuncio di un concerto dedicato a celebrare il compleanno di Alan Turing con l'esecuzione da parte della London Symphony Orchestra di alcune composizioni scritte da Iamus, un'applicazione per computer realizzata dall'Università di Malaga. Pur non trattandosi certo di una novità, dato che i primi programmi per la composizione automatizzata risalgono almeno al 1956 e compositori come Gottfried Michael Koenig, Iannis Xenakis e persino John Cage ne hanno fatto un uso sistematico, l'annuncio può certamente essere considerato come il sintomo di quanto la scrittura musicale sia cambiata nel corso dei suoi mille e duecento anni di storia (almeno per quanto riguarda la sua introduzione nella tradizione europea).

The traditional distinction between sensory and linguistic thought often appears to be instrumental to the humanist apparatus that is involved in the human subjugation, both conceptual and physical, of non-human animals. Specifically, by adhering to the claim that humans cannot but think linguistically, the distinction is addressed as a necessarily constitutive one.
In opposition to this, we propose that sensory thought in humans is not only possible but even usual, as is the case of unsophisticated listening of instrumental music. We suggest that the distinction between types of thought is not a constitutive one, but it’s rather at the service of the humanistic paradigm of animal segregation.
For that reason, we propose a framework for dealing with sensory thought that, starting from a constructive narration of listening, can account for linguistic thought as its specialization.
Finally, we aim to lead back thinking to the status of an intersubjective practice that diversifies itself according to the complications of embodied patterns of distinctions. As a consequence, the restored continuity between human and non-human animals opens to the idea of a post-human subject, while still maintaining its possible specificity.

"Listening Patterns" is dedicated to facing the great diversity of discourses on listening in today's literature and to proposing a possible key of interpretation. The book develops the analysis of listening, in its most general sense, in three parts with the aim of presenting a versatile model which can be used in a wide variety of applications.
After setting the discussion on the experience of listening as an eminently epistemological problem, the first part focuses on the examination of theories of listening in terms of the points of view expressed by the grammatical elements and metaphors involved.
The second part develops the proposal of a circular and constructive narrative of listening departing from the experience of distinction conveyed by the idea of discontinuity on the one side, and the experience of recognition conveyed by the idea of the pattern on the other side.
The third part is devoted to subjecting the proposed listening narrative to the analysis of sound phenomena by listening (aesthesic analysis) with examples taken from Ligeti and Romitelli, and to the didactics and practice of composition of musical works and audiovisual installations.