Lucia Ronchetti

For the upcoming edition of the Biennale Musica in Venice, OndaRock will be following the concert schedule, featuring leading names: from Brian Eno to Autechre, by way of Kali Malone, John Zorn, Loraine James, Robert Henke and many others. To help us make sense of such a rich and varied edition, we decided to interview the artistic director, Lucia Ronchetti, whose background is in some ways quite distant from the sonic amalgam built for this edition.

Lucia, the first question inevitably concerns your path at the Biennale. This will be your third year leading Biennale Musica. How did you "arrive" at this point?

I'm very pleased with the results of the previous two festivals, which drew a large, new and enthusiastic audience, made up of professionals and interested listeners of all ages, with a significant presence of international organizers, artists and critics. This response encourages me to continue working on thematic programming for each festival, even though it means constantly starting from scratch in terms of organizational and artistic experience: given the extremely specific themes and the involvement of different types of artists, composers and performers in each festival, every time we find ourselves facing a new adventure, full of complexities, questions and hypotheses to work through, which must be handled with the utmost care and attention in order to create the best possible conditions for every artist invited. We certainly now have a curious audience ready to immerse itself in new and fascinating sonic events, and I imagine that this year, too, it won't be disappointed, given the exceptional quality of the artists involved.

Can you describe the sonic journey of the first two years of your "direction" of the Biennale?

The first festival, Choruses, in 2021, focused on a cappella vocal music, a tradition of writing for voices without instrumental accompaniment that links the present day to the earliest experiments carried out at San Marco by the composers of the famous Venetian School, students of Adrian Willaert, Maestro di Cappella and driving force behind the most important compositional workshop that history remembers, in the second half of the 1500s, inside the basilica. This international circle of great musical talents was able to pursue its research thanks to the stability of the musical institutions of San Marco, which had already established, as far back as the late 14th century, the Cantores Sancti Marci, today's Cappella Marciana, the first recognized permanent choir. Alongside these Venetian Renaissance works, great contemporary vocal frescoes were performed: by Christina Kubisch and Valentin Silvestrov with the Cappella Marciana choir, by David Lang with the Theatre of Voices, and by Georges Aperghis and Luca Francesconi with the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart.

Working with unaccompanied voice, the Venetian Renaissance School absorbed the oldest traditions of communal singing, orally passed down since antiquity, synthesizing them into a written, fully realized form through continuous experimentation. Even today, highly complex forms of a cappella vocal music survive within oral traditions, such as the Zulu vocal style Isicathamiya or Sardinian canto a tenore, and solo forms such as the xöömej of Tuvan tradition, which testify to the complexity of unaccompanied vocal practice across different cultures and eras. Starting from this deep connection between today's virtuosic writing for vocal ensembles and the various traditions of vocal treatment, a series of vocalists from different musical cultures, such as Jennifer Walshe, Joy Frempong and Zuli, were invited to present the solo voice as a complete and self-sufficient expressive instrument of compositional invention.

The second festival, Out of Stage, in 2022, was dedicated to all forms of music theatre featuring experimental aspects in their conception, instrumentation, use of new technologies and conceptualization of space. Here too, the origins of experimental opera took place in Venice, and many commissioned works referenced the legendary Teatro San Cassiano, inaugurated in Venice in 1637 and now long gone, and the great composers who worked on the first opera productions open to the public, such as Claudio Monteverdi. Within the festival's various sections, instrumental theatre and the theatricalization of the concert ritual, in terms of new dramaturgical experimentation, involved the Iranian composer and performer Mehdi Jalali, the Black American activist Yvette Janine Jackson, and contemporary classics of this form such as Giorgio Battistelli, Carola Bauckholt and Georges Aperghis, while on the front of contemporary oratorio reflection, Helena Tulve, the Estonian composer and heir to Arvo Pärt's mystical minimalism, created a sacred performance for the Basilica di San Marco based on medieval fragments discovered in Venice by the late great musicologist Giulio Cattin, and a group of Native American composers presented a collective choral drama, Native American Inspirations, with world premieres by the Mohican composer Brent Michael Davids, offering a great variety and complexity of trends and research.

What boundaries have you decided to set for this third edition of yours?

This third festival, titled Micro-Music, is dedicated to electronic and digital sound and is an investigation into the new era of listening, through an analysis of the continuous evolution of sound reproduction media and the ever-broader access to the myriad of sound materials, recordings and new digital productions available online. The programme reflects an open vision of contemporary musical production in the field of electronics, with no preclusions regarding the means or stylistic background of the musicians, and no distinction between written music, music elaborated in the studio, or music improvised using digital media.

The widespread reach of the internet, and the amplified possibility of engaging - through sound documents and virtual performances - with the most remote past, while also envisioning futuristic compositional horizons through small personal studios built from a laptop and minimal tools for capturing and processing sound, has generated an immense creative field, far more democratic and open than in the past. Just as in Venice everyone walks through the city at the same pace along its calli and bridges, so that one cannot tell the social status of the people passing by, so too have the new sound technologies created the possibility for many emerging creatives to self-produce their work and showcase it in the kaleidoscopic theatre of the internet. It would be impossible to give an exhaustive picture of this new reality, but through testimonies, listening sessions and close readings of recent materials, one can discover wonderful sonic flowers blooming in apparent cultural deserts, and attempt to build a musical programme that is as non-Eurocentric as possible.

You come from a background that isn't exactly that of the contemporary “electronic” scene featured here. How does one approach this field?

As a composer, I have devoted many years to music theatre and opera projects commissioned by major European institutions - a demanding field that absorbs time and energy and leaves little room to experiment with other possibilities. But as a listener and as an artistic director, I am immersed, like everyone else, in the world of reproduced music, recorded with technically astonishing means and listened to through sophisticated headphones or futuristic sound systems - cathedrals of listening from which an artificial sound of unheard-of beauty emerges. To put together this programme, I spoke with many experienced electronic-music listeners in order to understand the horizons of this field, characterised by a creative vitality that continually generates new genres and definitions. Listening to the great Berlin digital-music festivals, such as CTM, Transmediale, Atonal and Strom, and sharing my impressions with genre enthusiasts within the Biennale staff, helped me a great deal, because fascination and revelation always lurk at the human hinges where different worlds meet and communicate. In a musical world that is artificially compartmentalised, it's important to meet people who have always observed musical production from parallel vantage points, such as the artistic director of CTM Berlin, Remco Schuurbiers, the artistic director of Sonic Acts Amsterdam, Lucas Van der Velden, and the director of Ars Electronica, Gerfried Stocker - three wise, Socratic figures of electronic music who will be in Venice to present some projects and share their views on music-making today.

The line-up features some very contemporary names, from Kali Malone to Autechre, by way of Henke. What made you invite them?

These names stand out for the compositional quality, originality and timeliness of their work. It doesn't matter that they don't write scores: their music is the result of a constant, almost monastic practice, a complex and virtuosic performative research that leads them to master instruments, sound sources and the creation of sonic space, conveying an endless mastery in their compositional research with the same sense of urgency and necessity found in some of the great composers from the more “official” side of electronic research also present at the festival, such as Brigitta Muntendorf, Francesca Verunelli and Johanna Bailie - and I think witnessing their performances is a great privilege.

The name that stands out above all is that of Brian Eno, on his first ever tour, moreover at La Fenice. How did you manage to convince him?

I have the impression that no one can convince Brian Eno to do anything, and that whatever he does is always his own choice, inscrutable, perhaps even driven by surprise and curiosity. I imagine he was pleasantly surprised by the invitation coming from a world as ancient, ritualistic and foundational as that of the Venice Biennale, a world that contrasts with the extreme acrobatics and infectious joy of his musical and compositional research. The venue chosen for Brian Eno's project, the Teatro La Fenice, with its spectacular deaths and astonishing resurrections, its extraordinary beauty and its position within the city, is a beacon of musical culture that continues to shape history through the intelligent, sophisticated direction of Fortunato Ortombina, and for me it is the ideal destination for the opening events of Biennale Musica, to welcome and celebrate the Golden Lions of Music - and so, now, Brian Eno, following Kaija Saariaho and Giorgio Battistelli.

For Brian Eno's manager, Ray Hearn, the problem with La Fenice was its limited capacity, and they immediately proposed two concerts - much to my alarm - but as soon as tickets went on sale online, everything sold out within minutes, and I understood their reasoning. Now, looking ahead to the near future, I hope that a positive dialogue, an unprecedented synergy, can be established between this hyper-historicised architecture of listening and the mind behind the idea that the infinite repertoires of recorded music of all eras and all genres can create a brand new, explosive compositional palette - a bridge between the acoustic past and the digitisation of the past - which must find its realisation in the few days that Brian Eno, together with Melanie Pappenheim, Peter Serafinowicz, Leo Abrahams, Peter Chilvers and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic conducted by Kristjan Järvi, will spend at La Fenice: it's a huge gamble that creates a wonderful sense of suspense.

Which concert are you most looking forward to?

I expect surprising results from many of the events on the programme, but I believe that, more than any other, the final concert on 29 October, entrusted to Nicolas Becker and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, will give the audience a performance that could become legendary. The two acclaimed sound designers, creators of the sound design for globally successful film productions such as Sound of Metal (Nicolas Becker) and Candyman (Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe), have created a new genre through their work of research and sonic invention, and will be performing live together for the very first time: a live musical dialogue between the sophisticated, reflective French artist and the magnetic personality of the Black American sound artist, composer and visual artist, for an electronic concert with no boundaries and no labels, with the audience standing, free to approach them and influence their improvisational pathos. I believe it will be a beautiful and meaningful conclusion to the festival.

2024 will be your last year at the helm of Biennale Musica - can you give us any hints already?

The 2024 festival, Absolute Music, will focus on music as a non-verbalised language, as a self-referential, absolute language. The programme will feature major works of written music, as the most refined attempt to transcribe acoustic sound flows into a hyper-complex symbolic code, but also unwritten music, speculative improvised music. The festival will show the state of the art of this alchemical, striking discipline, the laboratory of the most rigorous and inventive composers and performers, who produce scores, programmes, codes and live performances of music with no extra-musical reference whatsoever. The festival will be a grand form of “Ricercare” which, alongside concerts of various kinds, will also feature talks, round tables and music lectures exploring the many mysteries, questions and hypotheses surrounding music as an absolute language. Pure music - the dream of Romanticism and the mirage chased by every musician in history - will find its spaces in both historic and contemporary Venice, involving, I hope, the large audiences of recent years, so as to hand over to the next artistic director a vital and important festival.

Ride the wave of great music

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