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Rosenberg's Revised Timetables 1993 a Jon Rose Project |
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featuring Laboratorio Di Musica & Immagine In an age of Trump, fake news, and alternative facts, we have indeed arrived at the seemingly random and multiple versions of events that inhabit the torrent of information with which we are currently overwhelmed. Central to the Revised Timetables Project is the idea of how history manufactures itself and becomes warped by its writers (the winners). What transformations are possible when someone without power or influence decides to re-negotiate the annals of history to suit his or her requirement. It's satisfying and a whole lot of fun to try the re-write, but in many respects, what ever the balance of emotive with the rational, the powerful with the powerless, we seemed destined to continue with the same status quo that permeates the skin of our species. And so let's wrestle the clock back 25 years: The Laboratory di Musica & Immagine was one of the most extraordinary paradigms of what it means to house and express music within a community. I have in the interceding years never come across such a vibrant and engaged group - combining music, politics, and social cohesion. Graduating (or thrown out) from Europe's oldest University (Bologna), a few students surveyed their options of unemployment and estrangement and decided to form their own collective with outcomes such as an education program for the unemployed, an orchestra (professional and amateur members) that performed for silent movies, various contemporary music ensembles, a feminist rock band, and a traditional street Bande. It was a pleasure and delight to work with them all - Stefano Zorzanello and Paolo Angeli were some of the stand out musicians who went on to achieve fine careers in music. On my arrival in Bologna airport in 1993 ( for the the start of TIMETABLES project) I walked out of the terminal to be greeted by the Bande playing full tilt - such surreal parody of protocol for such a non celebrity! Another time at a concert in Rimini, I turned around in the middle of a solo to be confronted by the whole band playing violins like some alternate take from a mafia movie. (I don't know how they got some 15 violin cases on stage without me noticing, as normally an alarm bell goes off in my head when there is a violin within 50 meters). The original notes to performance at Bologna Sala Gorky on the 13th February 1993 and corresponding CD production in 1995. The multi-media composition is based on a text written by Jon Rose which functions like the old 'Annales', extrapolating year by year, from 1893 to 1983, the most significant events (in the opinion of the author) that happened in a consistent inconsequential way. Although not always audible - the text is spoken, sung, whispered by 4 speakers, providing a 'cantus firmus' throughout the performance. Within the score (shown on a video screen) are many icons which signify acoustical and musical events and improvised structures. False communication procedures, the circularity, contradiction, and numbing excess of information, are a parody of our function in the age of actual information pollution. These elements are engaged in an irrepressible satire, a nonsense or double sense, the serious or the cheap quotation. Another basic thread running though TIMETABLES is the refutation of the fundamental belief in western culture that history is a necessary progression, a linear development. In the years of TIMETABLES, the events follow with the repetition of a mantra - no evolution happens, no improvement of the known tendencies in human behaviour and self-management, inter ethnic wars, cultural imperialism, western hypocrisy, scientific process, human disasters, spectacular machines (read Artificial Intelligence and smart algorithms)...all role along like mindless alliteration. The insistent information on Italian Anarchists (where are they when you need them?) and World Championship boxing matches help to keep the listener punch drunk as the metaphors flicker past. ©jon rose 2018. |
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