Terra Aria on viola da gamba

Giovanni Sollima is one of my favorite contemporary cellists and composers, sometimes called postminimalist but also Jimy Hendrix of the cello. Very unorthodox in the way he is using the instrument, while being extraordinary composer and cello virtuoso in the same time. It’s not common to experience such amount of talent paired with the power of emotional expression and extraordinary connection with the audience rarely seen in contemporary music.

I felt in love with Sollima’s Terra Aria immediately, listening to it over and over again. I didn’t think that this piece can surprise me even more, until I heard Terra Aria played by Guido Ponzini — this unique sound of raw strings and passages which only viola da gamba can give. The sound I learned to love thanks to Jordi Savall who revived Musica Antiqua in our times. The older music which somehow is closer to my heart than classical compositions. I was wondering why I feel this way about baroque music, and maybe it’s thanks to this still present focus on melodic, popular dances of this time and emotional expression of the people. Soon melodic was to be replaced by harmonics and theory of composition which distanced itself from the “folklore”. It seems that I appreciate the beauty of a passage over the beauty of a chord. I enjoy to follow endlessly revealing progressions, over the “harmony” of sounds played together. Harmonics brought a hegemony of certain aesthetic of sound constraining artistic expression of classical music, which only later romantic composers seem to be able to transgress. Maybe that’s the reason why Sollima, who is connected with the melody and emotions, sounds so interesting on an “outdated” instrument designed for another era, of another type of musical explorations.

I remember watching Tous les Matins du Monde for the first time. The film which has such a touching story interpreted out of a few facts, out of the music which one baroque master of viola da gamba, Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, composed out of grief after the death of his beloved wife. And suddenly, at the end, you know that the film is not about these people and their suffering and longing. It’s about the pure beauty of music, which is transcending every single human story, regardless of how heartbreaking it might be. Here Les Folies d’Espagne by young Marin Marais.

I only wish young Depardieu actually knew how to play. Here is Jordi Savall himself:

The visual based on Guido Ponzini’s performance was emerging slowly out of all the techniques I’ve learned before. It is mapping intensity of sound frequencies in the audible spectrum onto polar coordinate system. The center of the screen is becoming the center of dispersion based on feedback loop and pixel displacement utilizing endless interpolation and slow fade out. I am using natural light dispersion spectrum again, but this time starting circular source of entropy from the very center of the screen. This way I was able to avoid the “eclipse” effect which I was exploring before. I also added some Perlin noise as an additional factor of pixel displacement. This provides more organic movement, a bit like if it was a jelly fish in another feedback loop of underwater flow and contractions. Actually noise factor is not following screen proportions which is making the visual symmetric only in one axis — subtle but important. It seems that the Perlin noise factor, next to this pleasant movement, introduced also a kind of segmentation which tend to stabilize uniform color over the whole segment. If the noise bumps are frequent, it is closer to the aesthetics of impressionist painting, it would make an interesting video filter:

This segmentation is more visible when seeing the visual from a distance. But it disappears when the eye sees more fine gradients on the radial lines shaped by frequencies. Micro-gradients which are contrastive enough in own color transitions to remind techniques closer to typical painting. I enjoy this effect which seems very untypical for generative art usually sticking to geometric forms coming from mathematical abstractions.

And actually this entropic irregularity is what I would like to explore in my own work, which is always connected with my philosophical believes regarding evolution as a meta-theory of not only biology, but also cultural phenomena. The tension between these forces which keep homeostasis of the system, and the forces of mutation, change, disruption, which tear apart this conservative equilibrium, but also produce liberty in variety of forms, and some of these phenomena are suddenly better fit to the environment of their existence. Some of them are pretty enough so that we can perceive them as beauty.

Here is the original video for Terra Aria by Guido Ponzini.