Caterina Barbieri’s Biennale updates contemporary music

Contemporary (classical) music has always been linked to an academic, closed and conservative world. This is one of the reasons why it has always been difficult for music lovers tout court to be able to interact with so-called classical music and with a certain type of events. Caterina Barbierithe new director of Venice Music Biennale (11-25 October) has tried in this first edition as curator to break down this wall of elitism to transform the new edition of the International Festival of Contemporary Music and open up to a younger audience. The goal is a more open and informal situation, or, as she stated “in a platform that becomes a participatory act and a transformative experience” while maintaining the avant-garde element.

The Star Inside

In the program put together by Barbieri, a large space is dedicated to the experimentation of languages: minimal electronics of course – a genre from which the curator comes – but also extraordinary singing performances (above all Meredith Monk and the choir Graindelavoix), chamber post-punk, Japanese avant-pop, dub and drum and bass, techno-house, contaminated Middle Eastern music (Abdullah Miniaw) and guitar ensembles.

The other novelty of this 69th edition was certainly the diversity of the forms of representation: in addition to classical concerts, there are immersive installations, site-specific performances, DJ sets, concerts in secret islands whose line-up is unknown and also informal spaces (LSD Center) where the various artists involved (including Basinsky And Moritz Von Oswald) organize musical selections, talks and listening sessions to expand musical experience and knowledge. All, as always, around Venice and with a particular concentration in the Arsenale area where the Architecture Biennale is still underway.

The title of the exhibition this year is La Stella Inside which talks about music as an energy field, “like an internal star that connects memory, body and future” according to the curator’s statement. The “star” evoked by the title refers to cosmic music, not so much as a genre but as an attitude “Music is a living organism, which crosses time and space, constantly changing. Like Venice, which is always the same and always different” declared the 35-year-old curator.

Between reinterpretations and generational meetings

In the five days that Rockol was in Venice we saw various performances, all of which were on average very stimulating.
Among the various common threads that are characterizing this exhibition, on the one hand there is the reinterpretation / updating of great works of the past and then the meeting between various generations and genres. As regards the first route we saw the guitar ensemble of Dither Quartet which revived Laurie Spiegel’s seminal The Expanding Universe from 1980, a milestone of electronic music, where the effects and melodic lines produced by machines were here performed by strings and hands in a rather remarkable sort of math rock. But also the Austrian musician Fennesz who revived his album “Venice” (2004), a cornerstone of digital music and above all of glitch aesthetics, resonated with more advanced instruments, but which equally reproduce the sounds and echoes of the city, from the water to the bells to the noise of the crowd: a sort of restoration of a painting with modern instruments, where however the voice of David Sylvian who in “Transit” sang of the decadence of Europe was missing.

Among the generational meetings, the meeting between was highly anticipated Suzanne Cianimythological figure of electronic music (79 years old) and Darren J. Cunningham, aka Actress (49 years old), a collision of two apparently divergent sensibilities between the atmospheres of Ciani’s modular synthesis and the industrial expressiveness and asymmetrical grooves of Actress. A hybridization that is not easy to listen to but very fascinating which has projected us towards new frontiers of live music. The other meeting on the clubbing side is the only one that took place outside the island of Venice, in Forte Marghera, for the young girl’s DJ sets Mia Koden and the veteran Carl Craig: the first was truly a very pleasant discovery thanks to a sound journey that started from dub and reggae, then arriving at dubstep and a sort of latin drum&bass enriched by highly suggestive glitch elements and mixed perfectly. We’ll hear more from her soon.

But there were other very unusual performances compared to the classic programming of the Biennale Musica, such as that of the Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti (which coincidentally we will also be able to see again at the end of the month in Turin at the C2C): a trio set with electric guitar and drums that is difficult to classify between rigorous compositional structures and furious improvisation, with the cello played with hands, pedals and bow, and a truly sublime voice, often a natural extension of the instrument. Also worth mentioning is the bizarre Japanese retro-futuristic pop of Asa-Chang & Junray between oriental folk, sampling and dadaist play.

The Golden Lion to Meredith Monk

A separate chapter should be dedicated to the New Yorker Meredith Monk (pictured with Caterina Barbieri) present at the Biennale both with the installation Songs of Ascension Shrine and with a show summarizing six decades of her career starting from her first appearance at the Biennale in 1975. At the Malibran Theater the New York composer and artist accompanied by Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffin, historic members of her vocal ensemble, demonstrated how at 82 years of age she is still a great performer capable of creative intuitions and surprising vocal extensions in which echo, resonances and breaths represent a fundamental part. The ECM artist with a minute and overflowing stage presence still knows how to have fun and entertain, and therefore the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement awarded by Caterina Barbieri is more than deserved for having “revolutionized music and the art of performance with an approach that has expanded the potential of the human voice, transforming it into an unprecedented vehicle of sound exploration”.