Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

Music is the cradle of the Spirit, and sound is the imprint that binds the soul to the body. But what exactly is this sound? Here lies the crux of the matter: it is a vibration, the memory of which we must rediscover by returning to a state of pure listening, the most authentically childlike state in which seriousness and play – the convergence of consciousness and imagination – belong to the same instant. They are one and the same beginning.

The 70th International Festival of Contemporary Music, directed by Caterina Barbieri, takes A Child of Sound to reconsider the origins of our listening. Music precedes even language and takes us back to a primal state of listening and wonder.

A child’s mode of listening carries with it a form of trust and openness towards the world that can be reawakened by art. In a similar manner, music is a process of transformation and catharsis that is able to transform the world’s pain into a shared, sensory experience. Before sound there is silence, understood as a space in which something is yet to happen. It is that threshold where, to borrow a notion from Martin Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, the work does not merely represent what exists, but opens up a world. It is perhaps here that birth and creation part ways and, at the same time, come together again.

To be born is to come into the world; to create is to introduce into the world something new, a new possibility. And whilst birth is part of the natural course of things, creation interrupts that course for an instant and alters its direction. In this sense, the child represents not only what has come first, but also what is still to come. A child’s listening has not yet established a definitive hierarchy between noise and music, consonance and dissonance; it is thus an “open” listening—receptive to what is unexpected and capable of surprise.

To return to that childlike state therefore means to recover a lost openness, the capacity to encounter the world before habit has rendered it predictable.

Every artistic discipline possesses its own threshold of what is possible; and thought itself, when it again becomes poiesis, occupies the space that precedes form and makes possible the emergence of that which we do not yet know how to name.

In music that threshold is silence. It is only in this suspension that something new can emerge; and everything begins when, for an instant, one pauses. Creation, then, consists of confronting the resistance of the material, without hesitation and with the delight of an inclination unconstrained by what is already known.

The material itself creates a limit, and it is precisely this limit that renders the form possible. Sound, the body, space, time, instruments and technologies all play their part in the creation of the work and determine its possibilities. Music is intimately bound up with this condition: it comes into being and disappears at the very same moment; it exists in time and yet leaves traces that can endure beyond it. This is one of its deepest forms of restanza – active remaining – by means of which it continues to exert its influence after the sound has faded away. It may take the form of an interference, a memory or a transformation of the listening experience.

Every true artistic exploration carries this risk. We cannot know in advance what, of all that emerges, will prove able to endure, nor which present forms will speak to a time that is not yet our own. And so Caterina Barbieri, with the intuition of a title that already, in its powerful imagery, encompasses and unfolds the scope and aims of the entire programme of her Biennale Musica, reveals to us at one and the same time the path towards an openness to listening as well as towards the artistic exploration and research pursued by the artists she has invited.

With the powerful metaphor of the listening child, she reminds us that contemporaneity cannot be reduced to simply belonging to our own time. To be contemporary means to search for what is not yet fully visible in the present, to listen to what has not yet found a voice. From this perspective even anarchy may regain its original meaning, understood as a suspension of the established order, the freedom necessary for an unexpected form to emerge.

A Child of Sound, then, is the moment in which the sound is still fresh, the listener has not yet decided what to expect, and the music can finally reveal itself.