Future Continents and Artificial Nights
Part 1
“The mind talks stubbornly to us of a future continent, and that everyone has the power to accompany an ever more beautiful Alice in Wonderland”
André Breton, Surrealism and Painting (1928).
The next new:dots concert (coming up November 12th) places at it’s centre Lewis Carroll’s seminal work, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Breton embraced Carroll as a fertile precursor to the surrealist movement, placing him in the company of Mallarmé and Rimbaud; and artists such as Hogarth, Blake and Redon (alongside whom Carroll was credited in the Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1936.)
Image of the catalogue
Salvador Dalí’s illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1969) and Max Ernst’s Alice-inspired lithographs (1970) are direct examples of Carroll’s enduring influence in surrealist circles:
Image 1: Dalí
Image 2: Dalí
Image 3: Ernst
Lewis Carroll’s Wunderhorn
For my part of the programme on 12th, I bring together works that celebrate this heritage. It is a heritage that spans the diversity of Satie’s Parade, Duchamp’s Exercices de musique en creux pour sourds, Marinetti and Russolo’s Le bruit, Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète, Varèse’s L’Astronome and John Cage (listen to Cage’s Music for Marcel Duchamp here:).
For this concert, it was a great pleasure to arrange Soupir, from Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913) for Octandre; setting it beside the interior, nocturnal world of Scelsi’s Ygghur I (1961- from his Trilogy: The Three Ages of Man -Triphon, Dithome, Ygghur) and a new work of my own, Artificial Night.
Seemingly incongruous anecdotes about the last Count d’Ayala Valva – Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi – populate writings on him: a mystic, married at Buckingham Palace, who forbade the release of public images of himself, published a book of surrealist poetry, travelled extensively in India and Tibet, and left a vast quantity of unordered music, writing and drawings piled in drawers when he died in 1988. His music, however, is a beautiful contemplation of coherence, sonority and duration. In 1953, Scelsi said:
“[the creative faculty] is the faculty of arresting motion, crystallizing an instant of durée, to extract it oneself – and of projecting this instant by the effort of an entire being in a verbal, sonorous or plastic medium”
(as quoted in Sciannameo and Pellegrini’s 2013 publication Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi)
One of my favourite Scelsi works is the series of pieces for female voice Sauh I-IV (listen to Sauh III here). Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island brilliantly places the music of Scelsi alongside Brian Eno’s Lizard Point and Tim Hodkinson’s Fragor
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Part 2
Eugene Atget, L'Eclipse
In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington conducted the first experiment attempting to prove Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He travelled to the Gulf of Guinea, and sent another team to Sobral, Brazil, in order to map the position of stars visible during the May 29th total solar eclipse. Expeditions to distant continents with advantageous eclipse-viewing conditions subsequently became a feature of the decade, echoes of which are visible in the final scenes of Joseph Cornell’s oneiric film collage, Rose Hobart (1936). This climate of enthusiasm was not restricted to science; in 1926 Man Ray revealingly published Eugene Atget’s photograph L'Eclipse on the cover of the journal La Révolution Surréaliste).
Strange and suggestive, eclipses are (to re-imagine Breton’s self-description) “simple receptacles of so many echoes”. The title for my piece for Octandre, written during the summer of 2015, comes from an analogy drawn to silent film, by the surrealist poet Robert Desnos:
“Modern love flows straight from the cinema, and by that I do not mean only from the spectacle on the screen, but from the auditorium itself, from its artificial night.”
Critic Adrian Martin comments:
“What a beautiful and telling image: the cinema experience as an immersion in an ‘artificial night’, a strange, unearthly, liminal zone suspended midway between fantasy and reality, dreams and rationality, night and day…”
(In: Lloyd, Michael (ed.) Surrealism: Revolution by Night, National Gallery of Australia, 1993).
Still from Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante
Jean Vigo’s final film L’Atalante (1934) beautifully combines this surrealist sensibility, humour and social conscience
Underwater scene from L’Atalante
Lisa Illean is an Australian composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, currently residing in Scotland. Her set inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland will form part of Curiouser on 12th November at The Asylum, Peckham, performed by the Octandre Ensemble. More info and tickets HERE