Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Stefano Pocci <>]

This is very sad news Andrew. Thanks for sharing it here and for your 
beautiful text.

I did not know Mario in person, but in 2012 when I asked him to write a 
small dedication for a John Cage project, he kindly accepted and while 
talking over the phone with him about John among other things, it 
clearly emerged the aura of a great personality.
He was a great pianist, he loved poetry (he would frequently cite poets 
of all times) and he liked to write some of his books as a dialog 
between pupils and teachers, all of whom reflected him in a different way.
I have never been to his house in Cetona near Siena, but I've got the 
feeling it must have been a Leonardo Da Vinci studio, if Leonardo had 
had interest in music.
In our last contact, he sounded genuinely thrilled as a young person 
could be, about his upcoming installation of a giant aeolian harp in 
Venice, on top of Borges' labyrinth of Fondazione Cini. He was really 
excited about the project and all the matters it entailed.
This reminds me of his huge project he envisioned for a valley near 
Cetona with multiple aeolian harps placed in a natural amphitheater of 
rock. You can find it on his site, which opens with a Cage quotation:

http://www.mariobertoncini.com/

Finally, I'd like to share his memory of Cage he wrote for the issue of 
the magazine I published in 2012 to celebrate John's 100th birthday.
Mario sent it in Italian, but I had to translate it in English too and 
he approved my rendition:

1968, a year with a frown and deprived of eros in which even 
mystification seemed necessary, did not stimulate to construct aeolian 
harps. It was at this time that I started to work on Cage’s Cartridge 
Music: one of the less studied but most valid works of the composer, the 
first piece to free music from secular prejudices.
By finding el Levante por el Poniente for the sake of Cage, I stumbled 
upon the Abruzzese guitar, a loom whose metal wires cut a pasta also 
loved by the fans of the New – nostalgic and gentle – forgetful of the 
ancient rags, of the ancient discipline.
In the hunt for sounds not audible otherwise (Cage), I subjected the 
object to electronic vexations unknown to the Abruzzesi housewives and 
unable to offer me an ‘Auditorium-like’ sonority.
One day – for Ossian? For Goethe? - for sure homaging Cage, I exposed 
the object to the wind, on the balcony. An extraordinary emotion: thanks 
to an exaggerated amplification, I really obtained the first aeolian 
sounds of the New Music.
(Mario Bertoncini)


Stefano


On 1/20/2019 7:57 PM, AHF wrote:
> Mario Bertoncini died early yesterday, January 19, in Siena, Italy.
>
> Mario was hugely influential to my music, introducing me and my classmates at 
> McGill in 1975 to the idea of music design — essentially, if you really want 
> to make new music, why start with existing instruments? — make them. But 
> then, even the idea of “instrument” falls short, for once you have devised 
> and built something entirely new to make music with, where does the discovery 
> end and the composition start? Should they even be different things? We 
> eventually substituted for “instrument” the words “sound source”, which sat 
> better with “music design” —  idea, design, construction, discovery (through 
> a kind of pure improvisation), and performance all being the same 
> composition, having one name. (These sound sources were not a “tool” for 
> sounding something else.)
>
> Mario’s sound sources are beautiful to look at. He could quote Dante in the 
> original endlessly. His performances of Chopin and of Terry Riley’s Keyboard 
> Studies amazed.
>
> If you know of him, it might be through his being in Gruppo di 
> Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.
>
> There is another thing to tell you about Mario: he developed a method for 
> teaching improvisation, to which I was exposed, also in 1975. Since at the 
> beginning of that semester we students had not yet built anything, and we 
> were scheduled to meet regularly anyway, and Mario had to do something with 
> us, he taught us how to improvise. It was a skill we would need once we had 
> something ready to play. First, he would rant on, passionately and effusively 
> poetically, about all that was wrong with “the official avant-garde” — the 
> predictable gestures, the annoying conceits of dynamics and form, the 
> pitch-centricity, the yearning for newness battered by the desire to impress, 
> the hierarchy of leaders (divided by nationalities and sorted by fame), etc. 
> etc. Then, once we were terrified, he would demand that we start playing. No 
> further instructions (no father instructions). Each time we did, he would 
> stand by until someone in the room did something, anything, that offended his 
> sensibilities. “STOP THAT SHIT.” “You crush my soul.” “Must we hear that 
> again? Hasn’t the official avant-garde already done that enough that even my 
> dead grandmother would recognizes it” (These are not exact quotes, but you 
> get the idea.) The first try we lasted maybe 3 seconds before Mario saved us 
> from ourselves. Little by little, we would survive longer and longer. Because 
> of his unswerving vigilance, we never played a bad note (other the the last 
> one, the one that caused him to immediately capture and snuff out the 
> horror). By term's end, we might even pull off an acceptable 14 minutes of 
> improvisation without intervention. I do recall at least once reaching our 
> own ending. Not bad, considering there were about 15 classically trained 
> young hotheads in the room who initially barely knew one another.
>
> Mario was a huge soul, a huge artist, a mentor, a friend.
>
> Andrew Culver


--

Stefano

"Like a pizza in the rain, no one wants to take you home, but I love you just the 
same."