Bartókiana - Abstracts
International Colloquium
Italo Calvino: Lightness and Multiplicity
Leggerezza e Molteplicità
March 28-29
Department of Italian Studies of the University of
Toronto
Le connessioni invisibili:
A Musician’s Reading of Calvino
By Damjana Bratuž
This contribution originated in the smithy of a piano
studio, a realm in which “lo sguardo dell’orecchio”
is developed. It is the site where by being “in
ascolto” one learns to decipher the signs,
the codes, and also that senso that hides
not only in the sounds themselves, “ma in mezzo,
nelle pause.” [Quotations from Un re in
ascolto, 1986 ]
In Calvino’s works the name of Béla Bartók
appears only once, in a jocular statement [Esami, 1955].
However, a Bartók researcher can find a whole
gamut of connections and analogies, beginning with Calvino’s
Introduction to his Fiabe italiane (1956). Here he dismisses
the efforts by Finnish folklorists to establish the
exact historical and geographical origins of folktales.
He attributes their concern to the “comparatist
passion peculiar to the literary culture of the period.”
Indeed, in their concern to discover and analyse the
primogenitura of Hungarian folksongs, Bartók
and Kodàly turned to the Finnish system of classification
and methodology, at a time when ethnomusicology was
still known as “comparative musicology.”
Calvino’s statements regarding variation (tessere-ritessere);
the folktale as a “model of conciseness”;
the healing power of literature through the “antibodies”
it can create; his “discomfort…for the loss
of form in life,” find an uncanny resonance in
Bartók’s similar statements and aesthetics.
In a paper presented during Bartók’s centenary
celebrations (1981) at Indiana University, I had singled
out certain categories which become manifest only when
one listens to the composer’s own recorded performances,
and when one correlates them with those taken from an
oral tradition of musical literature, from Bartók’s
own collections of peasant music. Among these categories
were: the metamorphosis of weight (bagpipe music) into
lightness and levitation; the flexibility and pauses
in the vocal parlando style; the exact, natural
proportions of peasant tunes which Bartók considered
to be “masterpieces in miniature;” the ancient
shamanic echos found in them.
In March 1988, in his review of Six Memos for the Next
Millennium in La Stampa, on the day of the American
publication, Masolino d’Amico described and commented
upon Calvino’s qualità fondamentali
in literature, “re-translating” the terms
into leggerezza, rapidità, precisione, visibilità,
and molteplicità. For a Bartók
researcher, it was like hearing “from the mute
distance of things… un segno, un richiamo,
un ammicco” [Mr. Palomar, 1983]. It was then
that I began to develop a series of seminars based on
the two Harvard lectures by Bartók (1943) and
Calvino (1985)
In this presentation , the five fundamental properties
of Calvino’s lessons are translated/transposed/transcribed
into their musical, Bartókian, manifestations.
Equipment needed: CD player; Overhead projector [OR:
Power Point] |