Antonio Canova (1757-1822),

Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix (1805-1808),

white marble, now at the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

Timeless charm and new beauty.

Sonata no. 5 for piano.

         1. Slow Sound. This formula, apparently slightly more than a shameless advertising claim, in reality holds the secret of a beauty embodied in slowness, that of a beauty which actualizes in the exclusive pleasure of taking one’s time, delaying and procrastinating elevated not as end goals, although this in itself would be a reason not totally objectionable, but to guarantee higher enjoyment and reflection (“verecunda cunctatio” as referred to by rhetorician Quintilian[i], who joined deferment and beauty; conversely Kundera called it ”art de prolonger le suspense”)[ii]. Ansaldi and others argue that listening requires “paying attention” assigning “mental tension and commitment” to an occupation that others would call physical (rather than mental), but most of all disengaged and gratifying.

         2. It is strange that current mentality has crushed the innocent “passive contemplation” (“passive absorption,” as Goodman put it)[iii], making of it an action almost reprehensible and sidelining it from the virtuous circuit of “legitimate” aesthetic experience. Slow Sound means re-evaluating the “passive physiological phenomenon” (Ansaldi)[iv] to the full detriment of “critical elaboration” theorized by Adorno and by structuralist criticism. To be more exact, it means placing the former next to the latter, making of passive and relaxed listening – which neuropsychology defines limbic, that is to say, entrusted to the midbrain, to that part of the brain more directly involved with the pleasure-reward mechanism[v] – a sensory reward and counterpart of the other, the so-called active and critical listening. Who says that aesthetic attitude must be, empowered by Goodman’s words, “restless, searching, testing”[vi] and cannot, reversely, be pacific and lazy and fall prey to the typical enchantment which amazement and pleasure always bring with them? Why must the aesthetic act connect, according to some, more with duty than pleasure?

         3. Among the ever tightening and suffocating meshes of its invisible net, that of foreshortened time, which, as a rule, sets ambitious yet frustrating goals, returning to making its way and to making itself ever more detectable, with its promise of a happiness newly within reach, is the cyphered language of flânerie[vii], of the book (rigorously made of paper) which is savored as vintage wine, of the old black and white movie that we return to watch for the nth time, of the stroll without a purpose, well described by Walser (Der Spaziergang)[viii], by Benjamin but – most of all – by Baudelaire in their writings. It is back in style to listen to music with the same slowness with which, in the Paris of Louis Philippe, they used to “stroll with a turtle on a leash” (“promener sa tortue”)[ix]. We are again appreciating Schubert and his “celestial lengths” (Schumann), the Parsifal and its “sublime slowness” (Gregorovius)[x]. We sample music enraptured, with our hearts beating fast for the thrill, even when we have listened to the same piece multiple times uninterruptedly.

         4. The “obsession for foreshortened time” measures, explains Crivelli, “l’accélération du rythme des sociétés”[xi]. Far from any form of stress and urban noise, of hostile haste and removal of human time in favor of social time, also far from any convulsive agitation and without construct, “slow sound” exercises its hypnotic charm on listeners tried by stress, boredom, fatigue, by a pathological excess of work, by the senseless frenzy of a routine which remarkably depresses the quality of life and struggles to conciliate itself with the requirements of a deep-rooted humanism in the very ancient civilization of values and thought that gave us birthdays. The rhythm of life that “slow sound” avoids like the plague is that which identifies itself with “rapid change” (“changement rapide”), as described by Balandier[xii], and with the economizing needs – of time and money, but also of knowledge – dictated by a civilization of advanced tertiary, due to which appearing becomes an obligation, while being represents a mere option, added value but no longer indispensable and no longer important as long ago.

         5. A sound opportunely “loosened” is that which reintegrates the human being – princeps creaturarum[xiii] – to the top position in Werthetik, the ethics of values[xiv], allowing that work, social obligations, the glamour of mundane appointments and presentialism exercises are relegated to the background. Listening passively means leaving free to act a secret flow of consciousness, enlivening flow, able to give energy rather than stealing it; it means going back to make the time of history coincide with that of the tale, sacred time, theorized by Eliad[xv] and by Guénon[xvi], with profane time. Listening slowly, reading slowly, and seeing creation through new eyes, compassionate and participating slowness, being able to seize the secret breath of nature beyond the distractor elements which would want to keep us from doing that: this is what Slow Sound sets out to do, this is the goal that Sonata no. 5 for piano elects as its own overriding purpose.

         6. If Adorno had underlined how the ranting promises of the Enlightenment were historically retracted by facts and by a generalized “regression of awareness,”[xvii] Sonata no. 5 provides a retraction to such retraction, restoring those promises that a time after all still innocent had placed to safeguard current morals and that today have been lost together with the latter. In other words: if on one hand Adorno is right, on the other it must be said that the Eighteenth century, the Time of Enlightenment, still owned and defended through all possible means ethics of progress, given that the latter regularly allied itself with the apologetics of preachers, with the foresight of sovereigns, and with a vision generally anthropocentric of human activities; while today such values have been lost in the name of a vision mildly utilitarian of acting that gives room to more casual pragmatism and chases the mirage of an alternative virtual reality, not only and solely complementary, to that which our senses – whose limit must constitute a guarantee of justice, and certainly not the pretext for a senseless challenge brought to man and to his innate weaknesses – case by case experiment.

         7. In the 1700s even radical materialists D’Holbach[xviii] and Lamettrie[xix] admitted the existence of a vital, animistic principle capable of conferring a sense to existence. Today technocracy, the prevailing of a technicism as an end in itself, which has unfortunately propagated to art, to its products, to its key players, does not give room to the notion of end which instead the idea of progress, widespread in the Eighteenth century so stigmatized by Adorno, vivaciously advocated (it is not by chance that right during that time, that of the enlightened principate, Freemasonry – a bond mostly of ideals even before business – met the apical and most glorious moment of its development, and it is not by chance that composers such as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven joined it with a happy spirit). Slow Sound means placing the human being at the center of creation once again. Not a neo-Ptolemaic regurgitation, but rather the expression of a widespread need for renewal, of which Sonata no. 5 intends to bring an aspect to light, maybe the main one, that of duration combined with the intrinsic value of the product. A response to the “touch-and-go” established in excessively hasty times in which “everything goes.”

         8. We have not, here, introduced an absolutely relevant variable, that represented by nature, that is to say by the biological foundation of the phenotype which summarizes, condensing them in the form of an adjustment to the mandates of civilization, experiences made and conquests operated by our ancestors. Nature is also the environment by which we are surrounded and almost enveloped. Nature is the ecosystem with which art and culture must come to terms, always having a bearing on it indirectly and in mediated form, but thus no less decisive. The divide gap between nature and art began to be felt with Seventeenth-Century Mannerism and with the pomp of Arcadia, ending up accentuating itself during the last glimpse of the Seventeen Hundreds, when Proto-Romantic idealism came to, if not compensating, at least attenuating the transformation of the economy from mercantilist to capitalistic and industrial, a transformation taken on by the Industrial Revolution.

         9. Neoclassicism, which reached its apex at the time of the Regency and lasted for approximately one century until the July Monarchy, is this residue of poetry whose task is to sugarcoat a reality whose appearance is by now gray and factual, the latter having left very little to imagination and fantasia of poets and prose writers. Even today technique is dominant in every aspect of life, whether civil, cultural or scientific. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was nothing but the result of a technique uprooted from the anthropological fundamentals of general doing, of Cartesianal thinking, that is, more specifically, in a “clear and distinct” way. Today remains the nude technique under the form of Handwerklichkeit, while the humanitas (also from humus, and not only from homo, as pointed out by Hundertwasser) of the art and culture has been removed since art and culture are now considered useless frills, hindrances to progress and life’s comforts. Artists have experienced sin[xx].

         10. Canova’s Paolina Borghese, in which the artist re-interpreted Phidias and Praxiteles in his own key, introduces into the vivid flow of a historical time the icon of a metahistorical, atemporal ideal, which is not part of lived history but, at the most, of that which has been imagined and hoped: his is the solemn “entry into a dimension devoid of time and space” (G.C. Argan)[xxi]. The sculptor himself does not speak of “invention” but of “sublime execution”[xxii]. The poetics of the sublime goes through and innervates all Eighteenth Century production and transfuses its sap into the art of a civilization of transition which dramatically pre-announces the following one, that of the Nineteenth Century, of machines and profit. By recovering the classic ideal, art takes on, nowadays, the heavy burdensome task of attenuating the tremendous impact that the supremacy of technique has on all of man’s activities, none excluded. It is not videogames or role-play games which allows us to halt the ferocious wheel of time, “das Rad der Zeit”, as defined by Wackenroder[xxiii]. Only beautiful art – classic art – can do so. Sonata no. 5 represents a recall to the propaedeutic function of beauty, a function to which Schiller returns persistently in his Letters on the aesthetic education of man, to its profoundly educational worth, to the unexpressed potential of the individual (whom the supremacy of technique will ever more prevent from expressing itself, whenever such supremacy is not constrained). Sonata no. 5 summarizes the requirements of the so-called monumental art. An adjective which derives, as everyone knows, from the Latin verb monere, which means admonishing, training and educating.

         11. Slow Sound is the cry of pain of a beauty guiltily relegated to the closet, destined to end up among the junk of a civilization of affluence that for too long has elected efficiency – a synonym of realizable yield, which we could describe, by quantifying, as the ratio between investments made and revenue – at the only and sole discriminating principle of doing. On such bases, it is clear: art will become perfectly useless. It shall not be so if quality music, painting and literature will be able to become monumental, at the same time visible and exquisite, recalling their audience to their responsibilities. In this sense monumental art is at the same time natural, or naturalistic, as it includes ontic fundamentals which allow the individual to think and act and to integrate himself with society to safeguard common values and sentiments, respectful of himself and of the environment which surrounds him: only classic art, explains Hauser, certainly not a conservative, “equates to the triumph of naturalism and rationalism”[xxiv].

         12. Sonata no. 5 is, in this sense, a true hymn to nature and to Kantian “praktische Vernunft,” as it contains equally represented the feverish pride of Prometheus and the mellow knowledge of Athena (in Greek myth, the latter transmits to the former the knowledge that would allow humankind to take the way of progress and civilization)[xxv], the “physiological” ambition of man and his practical-conversational knowledge. While it – Sonata no. 5 – demands that its listener abandon profane time which seduces and suffocates, it inputs him into the flow of a sacred time[xxvi] which elevates and uplifts to the pomp of an Edenic and pre-human beatitude. Artistic creation is – lest we forget – a process which is always dialectic and open; it is never unidirectional. Only relaxed listening and a sound truly and in every meaning slow and meditated have the ability to make the listener take the path which will lead him to unlimited pleasure and enrichment.

                                                                           Carlo Alessandro Landini