MUSIC
a brief history of the Western musical thought
emanuel dimas de melo pimenta

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The aesthetic journey of Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta in thought-music

I met Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta in a special place, a place where extraordinary encounters can happen: the Monte Verità in Ascona, in the Switzerland of Mediterranean climate, a magical place, full of vibrations and resonances, of strange magnetism and energy of the History. Were the eighties. In Locarno, Rinaldo Bianda organized an extraordinary festival of video art. The seminars were held at the Monte Verità's hotel in Bauhaus style. There were Pierre Restany, Gianni Toti, Nam June Paik, Julian Beck, Laurie Anderson, René Berger, Harald Szeemann, Dany Bloch, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Bill Viola, Orlan, Robert Cahen, Mario Botta, Vittorio Fagone, Michel Chion, Pierre Levy, Philippe Quéau, Angiola Churchill, Fabio Mauri, Mario Sasso, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Peter Weibel, Charles Quartucci Plessi, Studio Azzurro, Krypton, I Magazzini ... Extraordinary those years! Men meet each other through their languages. Languages exchange and mingle in that strange activity that is typical of the human being: art. Art is not meant to produce anything of useful, but it opens the human to the perception that there is a difference between bios* and zoe*. Poetry, art, music, dance, theater, performance, were the languages which together marked the life of the great years of freedom of thought, of the creative energy of light before the darkness of the single thought and the banality of conformism. In the spirit of Monte Verità I met, in such wonderful babel, a young Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta. I was impressed with his manner of speaking, moving, a cosmopolitan artist full of enthusiasm, but also a rigorous researcher, an explorer of the most advanced technology, able to open himself to music, poetry, architecture, art, or performance. We talked about Joseph Beuys I had just knew. Emanuel, a traveler of poetic knowledge. Thirty years have passed, we kept in touch, he updates me about his works. I have in my library his book Virtual Architecture - Virtual Environments and Architecture, of 1991, a book-design thought in a musical key. Finally, a new surprise! A book about music. A history of music conceived as a journey through music. A true artist is bored in front of history manuals, as Nietzsche thought. An artist is author of the history, he lives the history as subject, he does not support to be object. Here, then, we have this "brief history of the musical thought". Yes, because music is thought in action. To our generation - Emanuel and I were born in the late fifties - music was the soundtrack of our lives, and life was a wonderful experience of images, from black and white movies to the electronic and digital images. Now, music and movies are downloaded on YouTube... nothing bad, but it is, like everything, anesthetized in the large supermarket of aura. The artistic research of the last thirty years has made me realize some important things. Underlying everything, there is the consciousness of the exchange between language and experience, the experimentation of forms and possible worlds, the critical consciousness of the present that can be changed, the look at the past as a narrative for the present and a project for the future. Only difference produces consciousness. I understand, for example, that research on electronic and digital imaging technology is not direct daughter of the movie, but yes of the music. One should know the role of Cage and Schaeffer with the concept of "soundscape" that, as revealed by Pimenta, was discovered by Petrarch in his Letter from the Windy Hill. In this brief history of the musical thought, one travels, like an adventure trip, into a true aesthetics of music. The role of music as a generator of culture and thought bound to life was already present in modern philosophical consciousness with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The author constructs a grid of thought on concepts and artistic experiences relinking a seemingly distant past with a present which, however, became distant, invisible. Have Pythagoras, Giordano Bruno, the new physics of Heisenberg and Niels Bohr some relation with music? Find out by reading, like a novel, these pages! Is there a relation between Mozart and Beethoven? Yes, they met! The concept of "indeterminacy" of Cage and Tudor, the creative experience at Black Mountain College, Merce Cunningham, are all closely linked by a common thread that brings us back to Duchamp and Artaud. Frank Zappa studied Edgard Varèse. We will discover then how Debussy, Ravel, Satie and Russolo are related to each other. Buckminster Fuller said that it was pointless to fight against reality, one should invent something that would make the present obsolete! It is this, in fact, the deep, accurate, ironic and creative work of the artist! The seventies, with that wonderful soundtrack, taught our generation that Brazilian music, Ravi Shankar, Luciano Berio, Iannis Xenakis, Lou Reed, Phillip Glass, Egberto Gismonti, are all related, and in the same way that philosophy, science, architecture, visual arts, literature, film, music, performance are too. They are the soul of a great river that generates the creative spirit. As John Cage said, "music is enlightenment, discovery". Because music in the Internet age, of YouTube, Google, Amazon, of the globalized aesthetic and of the single thought of communication, is thought, is difference, and there still is the possibility of a modern Enlightenment. The rest you can find in the pages of this book. Thank you Emanuel!

Dario Evola Ph.D
Professor of Aesthetics, Academy of Fine Arts of Rome

* Zoe is a word emerged from Greek that indicates the condition of natural life; while bios, also of Greek origin, indicates a specific life.