Abstract
A linguistic approach integrated with a mathematical type of procedure has become increasingly important over the last decades, ultimately arriving at being projected onto other areas of thought, communication and creativity. In music, for example, there has been an appearance of studies based on the idea of “generative grammar”, derived from the theory by the same name developed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s and applied in this case to the relationships between sounds. It is precisely around these two dimensions — language and science, or better, words and numbers — that revolve two lyric operas that I have worked on in recent years: Big Bang Circus (written in 2001 and performed in a world premiere at the Biennale Musica in Venice in 2002) and Il killer di parole (“The Word Killer”), which I began to compose in 2008 and was performed for the first time at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice in 2010. In both of these works what at one time was viewed as two opposite approaches — one scientific, the other humanistic — were instead set face-to-face in order to discover the affinities that would make them appear to be synergistic.
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- 1.
Many other myths also speak about creation having taken place by means of a screaming or shrieking sound: the Word of divinity that rends the silence (En arkè en o logos …).
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Both of these works are part of a cycle of five whose first sketches date back to the 1980s and whose phases of composition and performance began in 1995 and concluded in 2012. The definitive order of the cycle comprises the following five works: Big Bang Circus (2001), Il canto della pelle — Sex Unlimited (2005); Il killer di parole (2008–2010); Apocalypsis cum figuris (2012) and Il giudizio universale (1996) (all concepts, music and librettos by Claudio Ambrosini, except for Big Bang Circus, on the libretto for which Sandro Cappelletto collaborated). The temporal arc spanned by this project therefore goes from the very first moment (Big Bang Circus) to the very last (Il giudizio universale). In the middle, an opera on Eros (Il canto della pelle — Sex Unlimited black), intended as attractive energy, present not only among living beings but also in magnetism, in the chemistry of the elements and so forth, the force capable of producing life, in “limitless ways and shapes”, in the universe. This is followed by an opera about the languages of the world, capable of recounting all these things (Il killer di parole) and thus, of saving these local languages from the growth of more national and international languages (such as English or Chinese). The penultimate of the cycle is a foreshadowing of final judgment, Apocalypsis cum figuris.
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By ludodramma I mean a theatrical form that begins with the light tones of a playful opera and ends with a dark colours of a melodrama.
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In Italy, for example, in addition to the continual absorption of English words, even when there is a perfectly corresponding Italian word, there is also a widespread Italianisation of terms that often come from the field of computer science, with results that are silly if not downright misleading, such as scannare for “to scan” or brifare for “to brief”. In some cases the adoption of one term has lead to the production of others, as in the case of editare (from “to edit”), related words have been produced — particularly regarding its variants of “editor”, “edited by”, etc. — amusing ambiguities with the pre-existing editore, the Italian word that referred, not to the person who edited or revised a text, but to the publisher or publishing house. We now await other such adoptions with bated breath…
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In reality the opera involves six singers, three of whom have a constant role: in addition to the Killer and the Wife, there is the Son (a tenor). The others alternate among several roles: the second soprano plays The Dead Word, the Photograph and the Last Speaking Woman in the Couple; the bass plays The Colleague, The Last Speaking Old Man, and the Last Speaking Man in the Couple. To these are added the chorus, which plays Humanity, The Last Speakers of the Coastlands, The Last Speakers of the Rocky Lands, and the Host of Last Speakers.
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© 2013 Springer-Verlag Italia
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Ambrosini, C. (2013). The Solitude of Last Words. In: Emmer, M. (eds) Imagine Math 2. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-2889-0_3
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