2023-04-16 20:10:29
A year ago, the Austrian multi-instrumentalist, musicologist, professor and composer René Clemencic died in a hospital in Vienna, where he was born on February 27, 1928: but the Austrian capital is only one of the many metropolises (Paris and Berlin in primis), which, since as a young man, he attended as a polyglot artist and scholar (German, French, Italian spoken to perfection) with multiple interests, from mathematics to philosophy, up to the approach to the clavichord, of which he became a virtuoso at the age of just nineteen. As far as Italy is concerned, notoriety arrives above all between 1975 and 1976 when Clemencic begins to publish with the Arles label Harmonia Mundi, well distributed also in our country, where the record company, driven by the revolutionary ethnomusicological activities of the last two decades, bears witness to the proximity existing between ancient and popular music: in fact, in those years, Harmonia was reissued, making them known all over the world, both Songs of beggars in Italy (1966) by the Lucan storyteller Matteo Salvatore and the collective Hello beautiful (1965), show curated by Roberto Leydi with Giovanna Daffini, Sandra Mantovani, Caterina Bueno, Giovanna Marini, Michele L. Straniero, Ivan Della Mea and the Padano Group of Piadena.
For Harmonia the coeval two LPs The Pleasures of the Renaissance e René Clemencec and his flutes are the expressive result of an active research for almost a decade, formalized in 1969 with the foundation of the Clemencic Consort, a group with three singers and over forty orchestral players (depending on the needs of the repertoires), from all over the world: not only performers , but also philologists, as well as discoverers of treasures believed lost, in the history of music ranging from the early Middle Ages to the late Baroque. For René it is not just a question of artistic-musical enhancements, but of a new, so to speak, political and cultural attitude towards certain eras towards which academicism (especially of a religious matrix, both Catholic and Protestant) tends to circumscribe or disregard the playful, collegial, transgressive aspects: throughout the twentieth century, in fact, the concert tradition rests essentially on the (pre)concept of divine sonorities in terms of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, excluding or even censoring the joyful, festive, vulgar, obscene character of a music gradually loved by the lower classes, by the nascent bourgeoisie, by the enlightened courts. In this regard, Clemencic notes Puritanism and Cecilianism (that is, the official movement of pre-conciliar Catholic religious music) which in the last hundred years have determined an austere and mystical vision, not at all jovial, open or secularizing of past musical cultures, in contradiction between the ‘other, with the eighteenth century libertine, democratic, encyclopedist even in music as shown by the clear cases of the Italian opera buffa, the genius of Mozart and even the philosopher Rousseau as a composer.
427 SONGS
Even with regard to sacred music, Clemencic has a pragmatic-realist vision: rediscovering i Songs of Santa Maria written during the reign of Alfonso X the Wise (1241-1284) king of Castile, in the Galician-Portuguese language, he discovers that the miniatures juxtaposed with the texts of the 427 songs – hitherto interpreted only by voices – represent players with an incredible variety of instruments wind, string, percussion, also used for popular festivals. Of the songs Clemencic therefore offers several versions both in recital and on vinyl, at the end of the seventies, where he metaphorically stages inspiration, physicality, warmth, communication: in short, Clemencic recovers a work long chastised by mortifying readings, revitalizing the idea of the art of the past as a free bodily expression, even when the episodes of the young Virgin Mary are told. In Italy Clemenic therefore becomes, for a moment, famous precisely in clearing the ancient flute, as if to make it within everyone’s reach (at least in listening): already with the “classic” one (dolce e traverso), since the end of the Sixties, he witnesses a pop use of flutism, thanks to three different situations: study and practice in middle schools, the indirect dissemination on TV of a soloist like Severino Gazzelloni, rock fashion with progressive, where Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull excels , able to quote Bach in the midst of basses, drums, electric guitars. Clemencic also – with a prestigious collection of no less than twenty-four recorders or flutes, wood or horn, used in the second album – intrigues folk rock, above all British, Irish, Breton with a Celtic air which, in parallel, is already giving excellent results on the level of the union between tradition and novelty: it is thanks to the Consort’s records and concerts, never allowed itself to media flattery (the only partial exception is the soundtrack for the film Moliere by Ariane Mnouchkine from the original compositions), that the revival movement, all over the world, will widen international consensus, where the greatest beneficiaries are perhaps the Chieftains, a Dublin sextet, also very popular after the soundtrack for the Kubrickian Barry Lyndon (1976).
THE MASTERPIECE
And precisely 1976 is the year of Clemencic’s masterpiece, the record Fauvel’s novel, where the “coarse grain” of the sound is perceived, making the boundaries between early music, pop, rock, folk, jazz and neo-avant-garde contemporary music even more blurred. The Fauvel’s novel is a French satirical poem from the early fourteenth century, where the story of the donkey Fauvel (acronym of the seven deadly sins) puts power, i.e. the politics and religion of the time, in the sedan, condemning in music both the corruption and the immorality of customs. The text is known to musicologists because in one of the manuscripts, in addition to the many miniatures, monodic and polyphonic pieces are mixed, attributable to the composer Philippe de Vitry. «Clemencic’s record – Professor Vincenzo Borghetti explains very well in the fundamental essay Purity and transgression: the sound of the Middle Ages from the 1950s to today are The Semicircle. Comparative Poetry Magazine – preserves the structure of the manuscript and inserts the compositions in the narration of the verses of the poem, entrusting it to a reciter who accompanies the hurdy-gurdy. The voice is that of René Zosso, a performer who ranges from traditional to medieval music to electro-acoustic avant-garde music, whose style of singing recitation closely resembles that of De André and other Italian singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s. .
In a paradigmatic way, the Middle Ages imagined by Clemencic sounds much more radical and innovative than the one previously heard: «Medieval music is not in the foreground; there is above all the body of medieval men, a body that is not only perceptible in the ‘grain’ of voices and sounds, but a body that is flaunted through its sound manifestations. The embarrassing low notes of the waterspout, the obscene flatulence of the bagpipes, the ‘live’ reproduction of cackles are concrete examples of those sounds that the culture of ‘classical’ sound and of civilized living has deems unpresentable for centuries, and which are now here literally slammed in the listener’s face. The disc of Fauvel’s novel by Clemencic is therefore one of the most effective musical realizations of the theories on the medieval grotesque and on the positive value of the body and its most ‘immodest’ expressions (…)».
And it almost seems that Clemencic wants to implement the same method acquired by the historian Mikhail Bakhtin in the book on Rabelais (1970): both will open the door to a freer (and liberated) vision of a historical period completed in narrative by a novel like The Name of The rose (1980) by Umberto Eco or in the dissemination of recent programs by Alessandro Barbero.
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