Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

With her characteristic, almost sacerdotal grace born of her total commitment to art, Caterina Barbieri has the capacity to tap into sparks of insight to traverse hitherto unexplored realms of knowledge and emotion.
Possessed of a unique set of theoretical skills, she moves with ease and with striking confidence through the spaces and times of music, turning them into lived experience. The theme of The Star Within is inspired by the sentence taken from the writings of Clarice Lispector that stands as an epigraph to the entire programme, yet immediately evokes other inner stars.
Music is unique among the arts in as much as it is the only art form that can lay claim to travel through time with the light, immaterial – and imaginal – apparatus of sound.
Guest artists at the 69th International Festival of Contemporary Music include not only Meredith Monk and Laurie Spiegel, but also Johann Sebastian Bach, more alive than the living.

Within the theme of cosmic music there are echoes of sidereal space, contemporary asceticism, the connection with science, nature, philosophy and the boundless wanderings of the spirit. Barbieri recounts how she conceived this title and the cascade of complex and luminous proposals in her programme while observing the dawn in the sky over Venice, in that moment just before sunrise when the last star sings to announce the coming of day.
And it is precisely the vastness of the cosmos, in all its infinity, that is transformed into sound and vibration in the Biennale Musica that Caterina Barbieri has imagined. Music is a journey into the essence. It is a sowing of seeds in a field where space is the soil and time the plough. A bearing of fruit that connects Being to the distance of the celestial horizons, as to every infinitesimal particle of matter. It is this dimension that she took into account when planning her first Biennale Musica as Artistic Director, conceiving the moment of listening as a total experience in which the city of Venice is transformed into a soundscape as important as the acoustic art that is welcomed and hosted here.

And so we have the procession of barchini advancing along the canals, culminating in a concert by Chuquimamani-Condori at the Gaggiandre, restoring to music its ritual value. And we have the generative works of FUJI|||||||||||TA, in which sound and water interact, dialoguing with each other through organ pipes to celebrate the eternal renewal of the very soul of the Serenissima with waves of a dual nature.
Here is William Basinski with his tape loops for multiple grand pianos, percussion, vaporetto engines and electronics. Here is The Expanding Universe, Laurie Spiegel’s pioneering work that explores the link between sound and cosmogony. The same Spiegel is the creator of Kepler’s Harmony of the Worlds, which literally floats in space, as recorded on the Voyager Golden Record, the golden disc sent aboard the Voyager probe in 1977 commemorating the best that we, as beings, have been able to express.

Caterina Barbieri immediately made it clear that her Biennale Musica would break down the barriers of time, place and style, creating spaces for deep listening and spiritual connection, where frequencies from the future could be captured thanks to astromancy through the medium of sound. In the context of such a complex and surprising vision, the Biennale College Musica has assumed even greater importance in view of the development of autonomous compositional and performative tools on the part of the young musicians who are called upon to explore the potential of generative music.
The 69th International Festival of Contemporary Music, put together with the utmost care and dedication by its new Director, thus becomes a portal of knowledge, meditation and transcendence. The ultimate meaning of a journey into the sounds of everything that exists.