texts
› Back texts on Lucia Ronchetti
Interview with Jens Cording
in i-n-t-o.de
2-2011
On Rumori da Monumenti
I Assembled a Colourful Musical 'Compilation'
J.C. - Is this your first visit to Johannesburg or have you already been here?
L.R.-This is my first time here and my first stay in Africa. When the warm rain pattered on the wooden roof of my room I knew that I was in a different part of the world.
J.C. - What expectations have you brought with you?
L.R.-I want to begin composing as soon as possible and draft a first version, a sketch, an esquisse. I will try to explore the complex "Machina mundi" of Johannesburg with its labyrinths and its contradictions and investigate all its unexplored sound mines.
J.C. - What is your first impression of Johannesburg?
L.R.-I know Johannesburg from the novels of Ivan Vladislavic, an author who I met a few years ago at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. His books "The Exploded View" and "Portrait With Keys" imparted a wonderful, mythological notion of the complexity and peculiarities of the city. My first impression was a confirmation of what I had read, a positive response by reality to the fictional landscape. When Vladislavic wrote: "For hills, we have mine dumps covered with grass. We do not wait for time and the elements to weather us, we change the scenery ourselves, to suit our moods. Nature is for other people, in other places", I read therein the play between utopia and dystopia which feeds his texts, as it does the work of many artists living here. Johannesburg is a city in which everyone may feel to be an explorer.
J.C. - What is the magnetism, peculiar to this city?
L.R.-I envisage Johannesburg as a polluted, parasitical, overpopulated, multi-ethnic and dangerous city in which there exist a number of sensitive people, who in accompanied solitude create structures for a future happiness and reflect on the ideal of brotherhood. I have the feeling, that people here believe in a better future and are prepared to do something toward it.
J.C. - Did you prepare yourself in some special way for this journey?
L.R.-I read books about Johannesburg especially by authors who live here, for instance the novels by Vladislavic, but also by other very interesting writers like Terry Kurgan, Jo Racliffe, Antie Krog, Jonathan Manning and Bongani Madondo. Aside from that I researched places and streets that repeatedly cropped up in my readings and so gathered impressions from differing perspectives and times and hereby accumulated an almost crushing number of views and ideas. Now I hope to be able to replace this conglomeration of information with my own experiences. Thus, for instance the mention of Sophiatown by Mandela brought me to the wonderful song by Thandi Klaasen; and a few places which Vladislavic describes like the public library reminded me of that great apocalyptic book by Jonathan Manning where he writes about white architecture and racism in South Africa, but also of the work of the young South African artist Bronwyn Lace, who creates fictional art spaces in fictional locations of Johannesburg.
J.C. - What do you want to investigate in this city?
L.R.-I want to explore Johannesburg together with other people and gather the memories on these wanderings. To this purpose I am looking for a sound engineer to capture the sounds of the city and a sociologist who can elucidate to me the social problems that Johannesburg is wrestling with at the moment. Furthermore I will contact local artists like Ismail Farouk or the director Minky Schlesinger; people who possess an eye for the essence of things – an ability which in a city like this is of inestimable worth.
J.C. - Is that why you decided to participate in the "into..." project?
L.R.-I find projects attractive that engross me totally, projects for which one requires a good deal of idealism whose realisation presents me with complex problems. It was a tempting idea to work with the Ensemble Modern and spend a month in a city which had long since fascinated me. It was as if the pieces of a dynamic positive puzzle connected to one another colliding into a meaningful future.
J.C. - Do you know the music of this country and are you interested in it?
L.R.-I listened to a great deal of South African music before I came here, music of various styles and traditions. There appears to be a fruitful interchange between the most interesting musical communities that enrich my knowledge and will most certainly influence my compositional ideas. The fact that these communities exist in such diversity is fascinating.
J.C. - Do you intend to incorporate the country’s traditional music into your work?
L.R.-I'm working on that right now, analysing pieces of some extremely interesting musicians such as Busi Mhlongo (in particular their adaptation of the Zulu based music Mbaqanga) or the group Shiya (who make traditional A-cappella music), and I will definitely transpose something of their music in my compositions. Not in the form of samples or sound objects but rather as constituents of the harmonic development of my piece, possibly as a negative dramaturgic element, as "wounds" in the musical structure.
J.C. - Is there someone you would really like to meet here?
L.R.-All those whom I already made contact with before my trip and who have the time and inclination to show me their city.
J.C. - What experiences are important to you?
L.R.-I want to experience the everyday life of people in this city, get to know their daily rituals and work flow, and I hope in the course of my stay here to learn to decipher the superordinate rhythms of this meta city.
J.C. - What meaning does the historical, cultural, political, religious and social background of the city have for you?
L.R.-When someone like me is born in Rome, a city with an inexhaustible supply of histories and history, the past becomes automatically relevant. The interest in Johannesburg is the concentration of events that have metamorphosed the city in an extremely short space of time. The present is so chock-full that that alone creates a historicity. A dynamic prevails here which is both dangerous and at the same time beautiful and to which reality can no longer keep apace.
J.C. - What is it here that gives you the feeling of being foreign?
L.R.-That it is dangerous to move around in the city on my own.
J.C. - Do you intend to document your impressions of the city in some form?
L.R.-Yes, I want to record the noises of the city, but also extracts from concerts, conversations and performances with the help of a sound engineer familiar with the locality. It should be a kind of auditory journal which will influence my composition without, however, being an explicit part of it.
J.C. - Have you ever been so inspired by a place to write a composition?
L.R.-I recently wrote a piece for German radio (Deutschlandradio Kultur), "Il Castello di Atlante". It is a portrait of Rome through the sound of its doors: doors which vary according to age, size and material, each one of them unique with their own creaks and squeaks. The work was about memories of the past. The stay in Johannesburg, however, will have resonances on my future.
J.C. - Will you be seeking an exchange with the other project participants?
L.R.-Yes. I think our group here is a successful combination of interesting artists, and I’m already looking forward to be acquainted with the other’s projects and to listen to their works.
J.C. - Do you already have a concrete idea of what your composition should be like?
L.R.-I would like to develop a fictional dialogue on the utopia and dystopia of Johannesburg. A reflection of the pessimistic, tragic vision of Marc Augé and Zygmunt Bauman, of cities, that emerge everywhere sometimes in the most inappropriate locations, on »non-lieux«, as Augé dubs them, non-places, shaped by loneliness and fear. Tommaso Campanella wrote his Utopia »La città del sole« (»The City of the Sun«) in 1602, while serving a jail sentence for his radical religious and political convictions. Like Mandela, a man who paid for his utopia with the loss of his freedom, Campanella spent 27 years in jail without giving up his ideals. He described the »City of the Sun« as a place in which life is determined by science and religion and all possessions would be shared. It is a place in which reason and friendship govern. His revolutionary book appeared for the first time in Germany in 1623. Fragments from this philosophical essay will be incorporated into my composition, even if they are just quotations read out by musicians of the Ensemble Modern; in this way it will influence my work with the orchestra as well as the performance. The texture of my piece will bear sound colours characteristic of Johannesburg life – it shall be a creature between two extremes: of a negative and positive reality.
J.C. - How do you find your notes?
L.R.-I am searching for a utopian space in which already existing sounds release an order of sequences. A space, where personal sound memories and intellectual speculations are unified into a common linguistic goal.
