Ships, by Brian Eno (commissioned by the Venice Biennale) ?????
Performers: Baltic Sea Philharmonic and Brian Eno (vocals). Direction and orchestration: Kristjan Järvi. Place and date: Teatro La Fenice (21/X/2023)
The Leone d’Oro awarded each year by the Biennale Música is a recognition of the career of a composer whose work stands out internationally for its quality and capacity for innovation and its identity. Last year it was awarded to Giorgio Battistelli, and the previous year to Kaija Saariaho, who recently passed away. We can evaluate the work of these and other authors and the degree of success of the jury in different ways, but the truth is that they have stood out in the musical production of the 20th century.
This year the award went to the British Brian Eno (1948), a pop-rock figure who admits having originally drawn from John Cage or Morton Feldmann, although conceptually his work is very far from them and pursues almost opposite objectives: contact and the echo of the public, the dialogue with society, the new for its own sake, the simplicity in the discourse and the interest in the word, and the speculation with electroacoustic means, starting from the interest in the sound itself and its mechanical modifications.
Eno points out that he is not a musician, since he lacks academic training, and he likes to define himself more as a painter of sound, but instead of using hand, palette and brush, he uses synthesizers and media from that field, arriving at proposals with identity and validity that serve the market more than the traditional concept of art. The current art/market alliance seems indisputable, sometimes resulting in the ephemeral and speculative, with special interest in the timbre and the spectacular. In his words, he seeks to influence the spirit of the listener. One of his products is “ambient music”, and in his historicist justifications he alludes to Satie… anyway.
In this Biennale he premiered Ships, an old sound installation by Eno (his interest in the ephemeral is clear) with several songs and now orchestration by Kristjan Järvi, who, conducting, acted as an athlete and recalled the ancient Hare Krishna, with an orchestra without chairs or music stands. , with dim light and moving on scene. In this insistence of Eno on the new, Järvi forgot that the effects of instrumental summation to reach the culmination were already used artfully by Ravel, although he said that his Bolero was not music.
A proposal of this Biennale focused on electroacoustic media and artificial intelligence, in the field of feelings and sensations, of the pure ephemeral spectacle that leads us to think about where we are going, where the work of the conservatory, of ideas, remains, of reflection, replaced by effects, speculation, engineering, marketing. We have a good example in Sónar, a project that began with interest, sponsored by the administrations but that raises questions about its dependence on the market and its artistic nature.