The Music of the real World

by Merlijn Twaalfhoven

 (sorry.. no pictures yet...)

Once, I made a composition for orchestra where the tuning gradually transformed into the music.

The audience was confused.

They were used to a clear separation of art and the real world.

The separation between performance and intermission, stage and the hall, between a concerthall and the rest of the town.

This separation is actually quit recent.

It’s just a hundred years ago that we builded most concerthalls and museums.

 

RITUALS 

Art used to be part of life, it was part of ritual.

Art used to be something to experience, to participate in.

Since ages we are confronted with things that we cannot explain in a rational way. We created rituals to give a place for mysteries like birth, fertility, love and the change of seasons.

 

But today we don’t need rituals much anymore.

We have our brain to explain the world around us and we rent professionals to express feelings.

We call this art, and art is not reality.

 

Artificial means: not real.

 

ART 

Well. Emotions and feelings ARE real.

Art is a wonderful tool to gain access behind the surface of reality.

Art tells something that cannot be put in words. If you can say it you don’t need to dance it.

Art materializes ambiguity. It finds a form for the subconcious, the not-logical, the paradox.

 

Why separate this from life? Life is made out of emotions, feelings. We are controlled by much more than just our logic, our brains.

 

MUSEUM

Modern art can have all forms, sometimes artists even put ordinary objects in a museum. But if you start adoring an electrical socket or the fire extinguisher, you will make a fool of yourself.

Why is that? Why can’t you adore the very complex and layered reality of a fire extinguisher, its beautiful form and nice red colour?

 

We are not supposed to experience non-standard feelings outside the frame.

A frame is what separates the artwork from it’s environment. It can be also a curtain or an applause.

 

We are shy to express our confusion or sensitivity. Therefore we need a safe place, a cinema or concerthall where it is dark.

When the music is over, we switch back to so-called rational behaviour. An artwork can break a code of behaviour

 

MUSEUM OF THINGS

This is Sverrir Hermannsson from a place in the north of Iceland that cannot be pronounced. He had the courage to adore small things.

 

He created a museum of regular objects.

 

This is probably not art, but the fact that this man collected things all his life touched me more than Leonardo or Cezanne.

 

Sverrir placed the real world in a museum, in order to make us look at it.

Some artists place their work in the world, it might look like this:

 

Alexander Calder

 

This is clearly something that has no function. So it must be art.

But when it’s so easy to label, it will not confuse us. We don’t need to watch when something follows our expectations. Nobody is standing still in this picture, nobody seems to be curious.

 

Olafur Eliasson

 

This artwork made people stay a longtime.

The boundaries with regular life were not clear. The people stayed to experience it, because it was hard to label.

They opened up to perceive its delicacy.

 

I saw a video on youtube:

Joshua Bell, one of the greatest violin players of today, played in the netrance of a subway station in Washington. No one recognizes the beauty of his music.

Even our best artist can’t succeed to break through our expectations, when they are performing outside the frame.

 

I find this very shocking. Have we become totally mechanical? People can’t see the beauty in front of their eyes. Appearantly we only see what we expect. We are blind for the real nature of our surroundings.

We just follow patterns.

 

If you want to change the world, and let’s do that, you need to break through the surface.

Create confusion. Confusion is openness, and only in openness we can make contact.

Contact is what we need to change patterns of behaviour. Not just good words.

 

WORDS

Today we can hear and read many words.

Great words about technology, the future, solutions for big problems.

But I am worried.

Because words alone won’t change anything.

It would be logic and clever for example to stop climate change. But it is not happening.

 

Our cleverness appears to have just a limited influence on the behaviour of people. Feelings, emotions and subconcious motivations decide for us. Our instincts and intuition are in power.

 

Our brain covers it all up.

We make nice rational constructions to seem clever and thoughtful. But we are fooling ourselves and others.

 

NEWS MEDIA

When we have a physical proximity, we transmit complex information like body language, gestures. It’s even said that we communicate subconciously with body odeur.

But when we want to know something from far away, for example about distant cultures, other countries, we watch the news.

We can choose out of hundreds of television channels, internet and newspapers. These media need to fight for our attention. They must reach us with something extraordinary.

They bring us the exceptions, the violence, the bizarre; a constructed reality that is far from what’s really going on.

 

RAMALLAH

When I visited Ramallah for the first time, I was surprised to see children return from school, strawberries for sale and a festival of modern dance announced on posters in the street.

I was so happy! Why? In any small town on Holland I could have seen the same. But the fact that I saw a total different reality of what I expected gave me a very fresh feeling, it was as if I saw reality in all it’s beauty.

 

CYPRUS

Five years ago I had a gig in Greek-Cyprus, just vagely aware of the division of the island. Sitting on a terrace in the divided capital Nicosia I heard the mosque of the Turkish side. This nearness of a different world, a few hundred meters away and separated by mines and barbed wire touched me with a complex mix of beauty and sadness that was hard to describe.

I wanted others to experie nce this too, but those whe were there were used to ihe situation and those whe were not there, well, where not there. I decided to create a concert.

A year later I put 400 musicians on rooftops, balconies and in the streets at two sides of the bufferzone.

Believe me, the music was not that special. But the place and the situation certainly were. Some people told me that the concert was the first time that they spent an hour at the buffer zone, and noticed the proximity of the other side. If gave them a fresh experience of a reality that they thought they knew.

There was a moment in the performance that something went wrong and there was a silence. Hundreds of people were listening to the sound of this place.

This was a wonderful moment, I couldn’t have composed it better.

 

PEACE

Talking to the press, I used words like equality, bridging the gap, uniting in sound and even peace.

But I felt how limited such words were. Peace for me sounds very nice and beautiful. For them it meant just failure, disappointment and hypocrisy.

 

JERUSALEM

A few weeks ago I made a secret project in the occupied Old City of Jerusalem.

Secret because earlier this year several cultural events were forbidden and disturbed in this place full of tensions.

 

Journalists kept asking me: do you unite Israelis and Palestinians? How nice.

I told them I can not create peace, but perception. I can’t bring people together when they are in the middle of a grim conflict. As soon as I label this project a peace project, it will become a symbol for disappointment.

But I can make an opportunity to see, hear and smell each other. I can create some minutes without judgement, without all our luggage of the past.

 

COURAGE

So, we are here today, as united celeverness.

We don’t need more brilliant ideas, we need strategy.

We need to break patterns of behaviour and perception.

The world is beautiful and perfect as it is. We just need to see it.

You are communicators. Please have the courage to create space and to break steriotypes in other peoples minds without filling this openness right away with your own truth.

We don’t need empty symbols.

We need just to break out of our cleverness a bit and let subtle confusion, the music of the real world enter our reality.

 

MERLIJN TWAALFHOVEN, 20 NOV 2009