Expressing, Communicating, Sharing and Representing Grief and Sorrow with Organised Sound (Musings in Eight Short Segments)

Abstract

Section I. Marcus Cato and MeIn Ancient Rome Marcus Cato (234-149 BC), commonly surnamed the Censor, or the Wise, would often speak up in the Senate and, whatever the topic under discussion, he would unfailingly start with words such as 'the City of Carthage must be destroyed' ('Carthago delenda est').He was obsessed with the idea that Carthage, the great power competing with Rome for dominance in the Mediterranean, should be annihilated.At some point, the Phoenician city was indeed destroyed by the Romans.It is impossible for me to feel strongly about power struggles that took place in antiquity, but I carry an obsession myself, somewhat like Marcus Cato did, and I know what it feels like having one; however, the one I have is, luckily, harmless.Whatever musical topic is put on the table, I cannot help taking it as an opportunity to observe and check whether it offers any good reasons to review, refine or possibly correct our general idea of what 'music' is.That is probably because, already at the beginning of my professional life, I had to completely revise my own concept of music. 1 There was a lot of revising to do because my early training took place at the Milan conservatory, the atmosphere of which could not have been more exclusively rooted in the Western tradition, to the exclusion of all others.2 Moreover, in Milan I was indoctrinated to believe in that cluster of Romantic leftovers that still lingers in most conservatories: 'great art is immortal', 'its import is intrinsic to the work itself', 'produced by a genius', 'result of a single creative mind', and so on; they are all residual 1 My latest revisitation and revision of the concept are expressed in a recent article: Sorce Keller, Marcello 2010, 'Was ist Musik?Einige Gründe dafür, warum wir die ‹Musik› nicht mehr als ‹Musik› bezeichnen sollten', Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, vol. 30, pp.11-26 [later appeared as 'Che cosa è la musica e perché, forse, non dovremmo più chiamarla "musica"', Musica/Realtà, vol. 1, pp. 33-56]. 2 Puccini, Mascagni, Ponchielli, Berio, Muti, Pollini-only to mention a few-all studied there and make up the pantheon students are supposed to venerate; never mind if they are never told about Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, A. L. Webber, the Trimurti of Indian classical music (Syama Sastri, Tyagaraja, Muttuswamy Dikshitar) or the more recent Ravi Shankar, or the contemporary Bollywood wizard composer A. R. Rahman.

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