My persistent quest
for Bolero
Exhibitions
· Fondazione Volume! - Rome
Sound Installation
Podcast interview on
VOLUME! Spotify channel
· Fondazione Volume! - Rome
Sound Installation
Podcast interview on
VOLUME! Spotify channel
On November 22, 1928, at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, the first public performance of Maurice Ravel's Boléro was staged, a ballet music destined to become one of the most famous, studied and cited musical compositions of the twentieth century. The distinctive feature of Boléro is its extreme essentiality: all about fifteen minutes of its duration are occupied by only two themes, hypnotically repeated on an obsessive and primitive rhythmic base.
Polisonum reads in Ravel's composition and in its characteristic repetitiveness, the possibility of investigating the relationship between auditory organs and brain, memory and organization of sounds. He examines some cases of amusia, that is, the inability to understand, perform and perceive music, and re-elaborates the Bolero by altering its harmonic sense and rhythmic structure. The installation "My persistent quest for Bolero" is conceived as a dialogic device in which two different perceptions intertwine creating a third listening field unknown to both. The result is a sound space, a place of conflict and meeting that questions the user on his perception of reality and on the mechanisms of social and individual life due to the multiple perceptions of music.
Polisonum reads in Ravel's composition and in its characteristic repetitiveness, the possibility of investigating the relationship between auditory organs and brain, memory and organization of sounds. He examines some cases of amusia, that is, the inability to understand, perform and perceive music, and re-elaborates the Bolero by altering its harmonic sense and rhythmic structure. The installation "My persistent quest for Bolero" is conceived as a dialogic device in which two different perceptions intertwine creating a third listening field unknown to both. The result is a sound space, a place of conflict and meeting that questions the user on his perception of reality and on the mechanisms of social and individual life due to the multiple perceptions of music.
Year: 2020
