* a work in progress album *
Armida Records 11-100924
artist: LUCA TIRONZELLI narrator | ENRICO BIANCHI piano & composer
JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899 – 1986)
La forma della Spada (Jorge Luis Borges Tre Finzioni, Trittico Borghesiano)
The romantic melodrama’s tradition has guided my work as a composer. I have been looking to the masterpieces of Schumann, Liszt and Strauss as a foundation of my musical reflection on Borges’ text.
Music was thought of as an element that could interact organically with the text of the stories. In other words I attempted to create a musical counterpoint to the complex and layered Borgesian narrative. I wasn’t interested in a simple accompaniment to the text or a musical commentary, but rather in a sort of musical translation or exegesis of the story that could proceed along with the text.
Borges’ stories are organized as perfect mechanisms in which a few starting elements are continuously reiterated and varied, which constitutes a natural musical model that is offered to the composer’s imagination. My main intent was therefore to start from a few elements that developed through variations – sometimes legible, other times more enigmatic – to shape the musical plot.
Functional connections between text and music are not excluded though: for example, music can either make Borges’ numerous textual references explicit, through memories and thematic references, and/or expand the narrative by offering its own version as a “musical point of view.”
Finally, a second purpose was to look for the “mood” that each text aroused in me. The result is a musical color that permeates each story. In La forma della spada the dark tones of cowardice and shame prevail; in Il miracolo segreto is the story of fear and desperation, for which every musical gesture is aimed at transmitting an idea of anxious anticipation of a painful future, sublimated only by the final miraculous moment; in Le rovine circolari, mythical and fantastic tones prevail, that evoke heavy sounds similar to stones opposed to light sounds such as the magical powers and supernatural intentions of the protagonist.
Tre Finzioni, Trittico Borghesiano, offers three stories by Borges, from the collection Finzioni.
The title of this collection is, itself, a Borges’ work manifesto: he constructs various realities, using plausible and credible descriptions, precise fictional accounts, in order to demonstrate that the reality in which we believe we are living, is itself an illusion, a deception, a fiction. Therefore, all our worries and pains are likewise illusions. Such a philosophical assumption is perhaps the very reason for the love/hate contrast that divides Borges’ readers into opposing factions. In fact, not everyone is ready to welcome the uncovering of the deception (within the fiction) as freedom. Most become attached to their own beliefs and perceptions, to their own misery, and perceive the uncovering as an act of violence.
Through his short stories Borges focuses on his investigations into the nature of the self and reality. His intent is to explore, through a rigorously logical and rational narrative, multiple realities, alternative worlds compared to the only reality that we consider objective. Borges shows us that the perceptive act is illusory by nature (but not harmless or devoid of consequences) and so are the categories on which we usually base the validity of our thoughts, such as space and time. The deceptive nature of time is, for example, the central theme of the story Il Miracolo Segreto in which the measurable duration of time dissolves and our consciousness enters a timeless dimension.
As in Escher’s paintings, the use of paradox and the absurd in Borges’ stories push the ordinary mind to the edge of its own perceptive dimension; even impossible worlds then seem to become possible, therefore credible.
From this point of view, Borges’ language can be considered to be hypnotic and performative, capable of inducing altered states in which every reality is only a particular configuration of infinite possible fictions created by our imagination.
The ego itself is radically questioned; once its own solidity and the anguish of discovering that it is an illusion have been overcome (see Le Rovine Circolari) we can rediscover the radical freedom and lightness of being able to take on different identities. Ultimately if we dare to get rid of the ego, we can open up to infinity.
Borges’ Finzioni is ultimately a journey of profound healing from the greatest deception of all: the belief that we are our own ego and the identification with the reality perceived (or rather, constructed) by it.
This liberation could be extended to our own sins and redeem us but it risks to enslave us even more to them if we do not experience it as authentic act that puts an end to every pretense and we rather deform and defile it through lies, as in La Forma della Spada.
The purpose of this Trittico is ultimately to combine the performative, hypnotic and inductive power of language with the evocative power of music to broaden and amplify Borges’ narration. That is, it creates a kind of virtual reality which, starting with the narration, leads the listener (freed from the text) into the literary world of Borges, as if we were entering a painting that comes alive, thanks to music and the experience of the extreme realism of every fiction.
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Recorded at Classical Recording Studio – Perugia (Italy)
Drawing: Skizzo (ig: skizzoland77)
Sound Engineer and Recording Producer: Luca Ricci
Editing: Luca Tironzelli