Massimo Bartolini: Hagoromo

Date:

September 15, 2022

Location:

Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art, Prato, Italy

Event Web Site:

As part of the large exhibition dedicated to the Tuscan artist Massimo Bartolini, curated by Luca Cerizza with Elena Magini, he has collaborated with me on a musical installation called In Là.

Massimo’s installation consists of scaffolding which is transformed into organ bars. The scaffolding-organ runs through 7 rooms of the museum with a total of 36 pipes – 5 to each room, with 6 in one room (Room 3). None of the notes are duplicated. The range of these organ pipes covers three octaves, from the very lowest C to B natural (below middle C). The bottom octave consists of wooden pipes (stopped), the middle octave of metal pipes (stopped) and the top octave with open metal pipes. Stopped pipes are slightly softer than open ones, but in reality, wooden pipes are quite loud anyway. The pipes are driven by a kind of music-box mechanism with switches that trigger each note.The physical situation is such that the music as whole cannot be experienced in its entirety. A listener moves from room to room, travelling through different measures of music in sequence. The only vantage point from which one can experience the entire piece would be from a position high above the whole space, or from a flying drone. Interestingly, in musical terms, this is not unlike some experimental/conceptual works I made in the early 1970s where, in principle, it is impossible for a listener to ever experience the whole work and only the composer knows the totality.

At first sight the musical notation for the piece looks like an orchestral score where the top lines (Room 1) might be the flutes, Room 2 the bassoons, Room 3 the French horns and so on, down to the bottom line (Room 7) being the cellos and double basses. However, we have an unusual situation here, where the score differs from the normal practice and is more like a graph.

As in a traditional orchestral score, the notation designates two “directions” of sound. One we can call horizontal, where we move forward in time bar by bar, with bar 1 at the beginning and bar 12 being the last one. The other we can call vertical, which shows all the sounds – the seven rooms – happening at the same time so all seven rooms in each column would be heard together, and at the same dynamic level (but of course in different spaces).

With each room there are two lines of music with the lower line having the deepest notes. I have only used the lowest octave (indicated by the sign “8va”) in rooms 1, 3, 5, and 7, so that those in between – rooms 2, 4, and 6 – would not be overwhelmed. If every bar had the lowest notes, then the sound would get very muddy, dense and uniform. And in each bar, there are gaps, allowing sounds from adjacent rooms, and even further perhaps, to be heard like echoes from each space.

30 years ago, James Lingwood from Artangel had set in motion a very different, though comparable, collaboration between sculptor and composer when Juan Muñoz and I worked on A Man in a Room, Gambling, and which resulted in a profound and lasting friendship. Given that it was James who also brought Massimo and I together for this project, it is already clear that the consequences will be the same.

The exhibition runs from September 16 to January 8 2023

In Là score page 1
In Là score page 2
Massimo, part of maquette
GB_Prato real space
GB_Massimo

Gavin Bryars