A Whirlpool of Imaginary Sounds
Despite recent cultural changes, the Early Music movement remains mostly a bastion of ”truth” and ”authenticity” in modern times’ turbulent sea of doubt. Conversely, my project wishes to legitimise a place for falsification, fiction and imagination in the realm of historically informed practice. A forgery is typically associated with a work which is not genuine, intended to deceive and destabilize the foundations of value and meaning in the arts. Inspired by proto-scientific thought, poetry, devices of wonder and games from the 16th and early 17th centuries the Whirlpool of Imaginary Sounds aims to reconsider our past through polyphonic music that never was.In my work, I aspire to discover the liminal space between corpus-based musicking, forgery and period composition by reshaping the role of knowledge, either actual or imaginary, and its systematisation.
Results
On a broader level, the project will demystify the sanctitude of musical text (Forment, 2024, p.9) though the use of algorithmic procedures, period composition, improvisation, and even infamous forgeries
like in the ”good old times” (Corten, 1996; Haskell, 1988, ch.4). I will produce a series of musical open works emulating the informal and participatory nature of the madrigal and other academic and
courtly games of the Mannerism. I will develop activities seeking to give justice to the etymological meaning of ”concert”.
Similarly, the nature of the project shall recontextualise the concepts of failure, authority and hierarchy providing an alternative artistic framework for the new generations of Classical and Early Music performers. Inspired by the success of critical spaces like Sound Arguments 2 and the Intelligent Instruments Lab 3
I wish to invite other critical HIPsters in the magic circle (Huizinga, [1938] 2016) of the
EMuLa affording the freedom to experiment, create and blur the boundaries between the actual and the imaginary. (Bolzoni, 2012; Eco, 1985) Furthermore, I plan to develop and document collective musical practice of polyphonic music with the ensemble Le Vecchie Musiche. The fellow musicians will evaluate and co-create procedures to shape poetry in sound, under the constraints of chance and algorithmic rules. Concerning the academic side of my output, I plan to develop generative models of polyphonic music in the form of digital, analog or hybrid games. Moreover, I am positive that my findings will provide some insights in the current ethical and cultural issues concerning originality, authority and creativity by transhistorically and dialectically approaching our cultural past.
Finally, the quantitative output of my research will manifest in the form of datasets and knowledge bases for Music Information Retrieval tasks, with particular attention to the intrinsic relation between poetry, affects and musical gestures of the Italian madrigal.
