Thinking back, the collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman was an inspiration to me. In 1976, months after discussing the playwright‘s difficulty in writing operas, Beckett sent a postcards to Feldman.
On the back was a handwritten text of ten lines, eighty-seven words penned in his famously scrawling handwriting. Nothing else, just a short note: ‘Dear Morton Feldman. Verso the piece I promised. It was
good meeting you. Best. Samuel Beckett.’ A year later from that libretto Feldman composed the opera Neither, lasting about an hour. PSLN thus reduced the script to a short poem from Pasolini‘s youth, and the ensemble’s work, the space and its characteristics, making the most of the acoustic possibilities of the environment. A strong echo in the performance venue, for example, permits a ‘cantar lontano‘ where instruments and voices are spatially separated. This is an atmospheric and minimalist approach to composition that places the audience at the centre of the space to experience the ebbs and flows of sound. A project where the relationship between new music, early music and the acoustic environment is articulated in segments that at times evoke abstract madrigals. Over the course of the day, sounds connected to the author will pervade the entire town and, as they resonate, will transform it into an immersive environment. So, Montepulciano will become Pasolini through his voice resounding through her highways and byways.
Radio Lada (radiolada.org) will fill the airwaves with a continuous broadcast of this voice in a network of places such as bars, restaurants, shops, in the streets and squares, interwoven with small sound events spread throughout the town. Fragments of the score will be performed in public, quite literally in the midst of the public. PSLN is dedicated to John Cage on the 110th anniversary of his birth and 30th anniversary of his death. Cage is not only the dedicatee of the undertaking, but his own work provides a feasible architecture work
on a score articulating sound, music and topography.
Alongside Cage and Feldman, other figures hover in the background, most notably that of Luigi Nono for his sublime research that, especially since the 1980s, has investigated sound processing, sound spatialisation and the relationship between instrumental sound, voice and live electronics. In the early 1990s, I borrowed my Theatre of Listening from his Tragedy of Listening (I did not feel tragic enough to dare a direct quote). PSLN could be said to have originated exactly like this: from Pasolini but also from my relationship with these other artists, from whom I have gleaned a certain way of constructing and researching the sound dimension. PSLN will start in the morning with a public conversation about Pasolini to look at his work from different points of view. How should a venture like this end? With a party, of course. A big dance party that pays him homage in a happy throng.