San Fedele Musica - Classicism beyond academia

If my (obtuse and contradictory) reluctance to consider so-called "classical music" as a world reconcilable with my own way of experiencing music has softened to the point of nearly vanishing, I owe much of it to the work of the Centro San Fedele. I speak in the first person, embracing a habit I've just as often fought against (and will keep fighting), only because I believe this achievement shaped me as much as it shaped an entire Milanese generation, one that found in the Auditorium on Via Hoepli a genuine temple where, at last, classicism and a contemporary attitude could meet, rediscovering themselves as kin rather than enemies. It got to the point of no longer regarding the so-called classical repertoire as a sonic universe reserved for a chosen few, to be approached with reverence, without personalizing either the performance (thus reducing musicians to mere "performers") or the listening experience (reduced to mere passive consumption). Going so far as to tear down, without half measures, the seemingly insurmountable barrier separating Beethoven from Cage, Mozart from Schoenberg, Webern from Reich. Turning contrast into nuance, bringing back into the light historical and evolutionary relationships, and connections of influence and inspiration too often forgotten or, worse, ignored. In short, making the "classical" accessible to the contemporary, intelligible and appreciable to those who think linguistically in the sounds of the present or the recent past, showing how it is substance capable of adapting and belonging to an era far removed from the one in which it originated - and thus revealing its true and authentic, magnificent greatness.

On October 5th, the Centro's concert season resumes with the opening night of an emblematic showcase of the innovative — and in some ways revolutionary, at least within a notoriously "static" domestic scene — approach introduced to the city by the Fondazione San Fedele. Specifically, a "double portrait" devoted to Bach and Scarlatti, in which the repertoires of the two eighteenth-century geniuses will be translated into a contemporary language by a wide array of artists, finally free to shed the role of performer and take on that of interpreter. Among them is Francesco Zago, a veteran of Italian (and international) contemporary music who has passed through no fewer than three generations, absorbing their traits and consistently offering ideas capable of defining each one in his own distinctive way. It's a journey that has never closed the door on the most varied experiences, while holding onto one crucial constant: the dissolving of temporal and formal boundaries. If the Yugen project brought Rock-In-Opposition back into the present, and Not A Good Sign enriched the prog vocabulary with meanings tied to today, then in the Zauss project and across his career as a solo guitarist Zago has redrawn, in his own way, the relationship between traditional classicism and contemporary experimentation. All without shying away from adapting his instrumental technique to that purpose, bringing out hidden expressive sides of the electric guitar, going beyond rock conventions and setting himself at a meaningful distance from them.

One of his latest projects involves a "multi-perspective" reworking of Bach's Ciaccona, which he will present at the very opening night of San Fedele Musica's new season, in effective and explicit contrast with the solo harpsichord of Jean Rondeau. We met with Zago to explore, together with him, all the themes sketched out in this presentation — a conversation that manages to touch on (and bring together) music and philosophy, theory and practice, reflection and expression, across the board.

***

Interview with Francesco Zago

First of all, I'd like to ask you about the title of the piece you'll be presenting. You describe it like this: "Bach's Ciaccona is a triumph of limitation and its overcoming: an infinite refraction starting from minimal material and, moreover, entrusted to a solo instrument." Yet in the title of your interpretation you speak of a "perspective" in the singular, as if it were just one of many possible ones, almost a fragment of this infinite refraction. Or as if it were capable of revealing a whole range of different perspectives of listening. Can you go into detail about this fascinating, multifaceted concept of perspective?

The term "perspective" can be understood in various ways. As you rightly suggest, the electric reinterpretation of Bach's Ciaccona is one of many "perspectives," one of many different points of view on a piece so celebrated and so frequently performed within the Western tradition. It's not just an interpretation or a transcription of the text, but its "projection" through a modern lens, while still respecting the original material. At the same time, in this case one could also speak of "perspective" in the sense of "putting into perspective" the piece, offering a clearer image of it, bringing out certain aspects by stretching them out in time and dynamics — highlighting the hidden counterpoint, the harmony alluded to by the original lines. From an even broader viewpoint, pairing Jean Rondeau's harpsichord performance (itself a transcription of the original violin piece) with my electric version amounts to drawing the perspective lines that connect different readings of a single piece of material — across different eras and approaches.

I read that, in presenting the piece, you describe its logical-mathematical compositional foundation as one of its first and foremost characteristics. On this point, you seem to have laid out a "scientific" examination (not coincidentally, to quote you again, you write of "observing, as through a sonic microscope, every single development"). Where and when did the idea of this "vivisection" of Bach's work come from? What relationship do you see between the compositional and performance techniques you adopted to play it and its original musical language?

Bach's music holds a mystery, since it reconciles extremely precise numerical and mathematical structures with expressive pathos — two aspects that seem irreconcilable to us moderns. I don't think any composer has ever managed so successfully to unite this form of numerological, Pythagorean "asceticism" with the power of "affects" and feeling. That's why his music lends itself both to an immediate, visceral reading and to a meticulous, only seemingly cold, "scientific" analysis. As in medieval and Renaissance numerology, in Bach the number is never an empty mathematical figure, but a symbol of a higher perfection. In the case of the Ciaccona, each of the variations explores one of the countless melodic and harmonic transformations that the initial theme can undergo. That's why I spoke of "refraction": as if through a crystal, Bach projects a minimal thematic material to produce a phantasmagoria of sounds, developments, architectures. To our modern eyes, still steeped in nineteenth-century Romanticism, such an operation seems extremely distant — reason and feeling appear irreducible to one another. For Bach and the composers of his time, this dichotomy would not have seemed like a dichotomy at all. My version of the Ciaccona attempts to multiply this richness even further, exploiting today's sonorities and technology: "observing it under a microscope" means grasping its infinite nuances — or "folds," to use the notion on which Deleuze bases his analysis of Baroque culture and Leibniz's philosophy — that would otherwise be invisible, amplifying them (concretely) and underlining them, freezing them in time through the technique of repetition and micro-variation.

Continuing on this point, in describing your approach to this contemporary reworking, you describe the "Ciaccona" as "an exercise in extreme compositional discipline, given the constraints imposed by the form relative to the proportions of the result," in which "the numerical, even algorithmic and 'automatic' structure of its music does not exclude — indeed, it generates — an extreme tension in the 'affects.'" Something that, read at first glance, almost sounds like a paradox — yet that may well be exactly where its keystone lies. Can you expand, from your point of view, on this relationship between form and reception? How can a work grounded in a "logical," "mathematical-algorithmic" form manage to convey "affects"? And do you believe there's a clean separation between the compositional/performative level and the level of the listener's reception?

As I suggested earlier, I think it's impossible today to fully recover the unity of reason and "affects" — in very rough terms, Romanticism excluded reason and exalted feeling and irrationality, while much twentieth-century figurative art and music staked everything on structure, effectively erasing pathos. That's why today form is in open collision with reception: form is no longer intelligible to audiences, and in order to enjoy a piece some kind of "explanation" is required — whereas no explanation is needed to appreciate the Goldberg Variations or the Art of Fugue, to name just two compositions with an iron mathematical structure. So today's "classical" music rarely manages to touch the listener's "sensibility," while those who recover simplicity get accused of being traditionalists or, worse, reactionaries.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of art proposed by Heidegger, who spoke — specifically about poetry — of a form of anticipation (born of the artist's pre-understanding) of the traits of the era in which the work develops, even before it becomes an (at that point obvious) consequence of them. Following this line of thought and generalizing it, we might say that any work born and developed within a given historical period has in some way taken on its traits in a preliminary fashion, but also that those traits are destined to belong to that specific era. Applying this idea to music, in your reworking of Bach I read an authentic (and as such rare) operation of "actualization": a re-presentation of a work written in a timeless language in its purest state (the "classical" musical one) in instrumental and performative guises that fully belong to the present. What's your take on this? How do you read your own operation in relation to what the "Ciaccona" represents in its pure state of being?

No cultural product reaches us "pure" — it is always filtered through the "pre-understanding" that Heidegger spoke of, and that Gadamer would later take up precisely with regard to the theme of interpretation. My operation, more or less consciously, takes up a past so rich in interpretive history (Bach's Ciaccona, like the music of Purcell or Dowland) and looks at it through today's eyes, from today's situation — in terms of technology and reception — without any philological illusion. My question isn't: "What would Bach have written had he lived today?" but rather: "What would Bach have written had he had today's instruments available in his own time?" Obviously it's a question we can't answer. The proposal put to me by Antonio Pileggi and San Fedele is an attempt to approach, with irremediably different ears, a world whose "purity" is closed off to us, while still being able to appreciate its richness. In more concrete terms, it's about bringing closer an audience that sees "tradition" as the exclusive domain of scholars, and highlighting its possible resonances with the logic and sensibility of the present.

Staying on this subject, a further broad and delicate scenario opens up: that of the relationship between academicism and modernity/contemporaneity. What keeps me most distant and uninterested in the so-called "academic" approach to certain classical art is precisely its persistence in a backward-looking operation — that of (presumably) keeping "alive" a heritage like classical music by "protecting" it (to me: depriving it) of the guise that instrumental and performative contemporaneity would naturally give it. In short: anchoring it to whatever its performance status was at the historical moment of its birth. An operation like "Chaconne Perspective" does exactly the opposite. Do you think this is the most authentic way to experience, in 2015, a potentially "infinite" work like this one, as you yourself define it?

Perhaps it's not the most authentic way — and many will certainly think it isn't at all, and that the past should remain untouched — but it's certainly among the most interesting and courageous. As I said before, every work from the past is enriched by its own history, by the future it has encountered since its creation. This concert does even more: it places the "traditional" interpretation, entrusted to Jean Rondeau's enormous talent, alongside an absolutely unorthodox reworking that nonetheless has nothing sacrilegious about it. In other words, it brings two different but complementary visions into collision: it's from this dialectic that something new can emerge, sparking the audience's interest, or at the very least shaking off their indifference — rather than from a single, univocal vision of the piece.

The dominance that the "academic" world (which perpetuates this kind of approach) has gained over time on so-called classical musical heritage lies, in my opinion, at the root of the absurd gap that exists today between "classical music" and everything that isn't considered as such. You, on the other hand, have always been committed, at least outwardly, to dissolving this gap, showing through operations like this one (but also, for instance, in the Steve Reich performance you brought to San Fedele last year — completely different in repertoire, almost opposite in approach and trajectory, yet not so dissimilar in meaning) just how much that gap is nothing more than a mere commonplace. And, above all, definitively rehabilitating the figure and role of the performer and their sensibility, sacrificed to the point of erasure within the academic system. Do you believe in overcoming the subject-object dualism in the relationship between composer and work? Do you consider yourself more a performer or an interpreter?

For years now I've found myself in the uncomfortable position of the "hybrid." Depending on the context I'm working in and the skills required of me, I am a performer, an interpreter, a composer. For me it's entirely natural to dissolve this divide... for the simple reason that, from my point of view, this divide doesn't exist. Without a doubt, San Fedele's projects are among those in which I feel most at ease, precisely because of the underlying ambiguity of my approach.

Your relationship with Auditorium San Fedele represents one of the most important meeting points with regard to this aufhebung of the classical repertoire. It's almost as if, in recent years, the Auditorium has become the temple par excellence where classical art and contemporary sound research meet, tearing away the veil of Maya that separates them and finally (re)discovering just how much they have in common. Do you actually feel part of this kind of relationship? What does the experience of Centro San Fedele mean to you, and how has the intersection between their path and yours taken shape?

Auditorium San Fedele is giving me the chance to explore this very direction: rediscovering the past with the tools of the present. First with the Off Topic Ensemble conducted by Renato Rivolta, then in my solo performances of Purcell and Reich, and finally Bach: Antonio Pileggi has proven invaluable in providing and developing ideas that are, to say the least, bold by today's standards, and I'm really glad to be part of such a distinctive journey. Chaconne Perspective is a demanding challenge, one I took on gladly - though not without some trepidation: venturing into unexplored territory is as fascinating as it is risky. I truly hope this experience will continue in the future and grow with further chapters.

One last question to close things off: what projects are you currently working on? In which directions do you think your artistic path might move in the coming days, months, years?

Right now I'm finishing work on the fifth album by Yugen, the ensemble I founded in 2005, which represents another attempt to bring together different languages - rock and contemporary music. In the meantime, I'm touring my solo performance, "ESP - Electric Solo Performance," and collaborating with the electric ensemble Repertorio Zero.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google