In every line – lies the past of a gesture, the present of the action taking place in the instant when the tip of a pencil glides across the page, and the future that opens up to the countless events and infinite possibilities accompanying that gesture.

It conceals the creation of a line that comes to life and the poet’s breath that gives birth to that succession of words.

In every sound – lies the mystery of what has already been at the very moment it reaches our ears, suspended between imagination and the infinity of possible futures.

The energy of Cy Twombly’s mark, poetry and sound guided the creation of the previous episodes of In Perspective. Hearing by chance the sound project by two field recordists, Pablo Diserens and Ludwig Berger, Tracing Basalt in the Onsernone Valley, was the starting point for beginning to reflect, together with the poet Dean Rader, on the works of Cy Twombly, his relationship with poetry—in particular with the verses of Wallace Stevens—and with sound.

In the artist’s works every mark seems to evoke a sound; every line written on the canvas speaks to us of the rhythm of breath, of the sound of syllables which, as Olson taught a young Cy Twombly at Black Mountain College, lead the poet to the spontaneous choice of words, beyond metre and any predetermined structure.

What if we could not only see those marks, those lines traced on the canvas, but could also hear their sounds?

This episode, dedicated to sound in the works of Cy Twombly and the practice of field recording, stems from a conversation I had with the musician and composer Teho Teardo about Cy Twombly’s works, in particular the Augusta drawings series, from conversations with Francesco Adinolfi, author of the previous podcasts on Pierre Henry and Morton Feldman within In Perspective, on the various reasons linking them to the artist, and from reflections arising from the series of letters I exchanged with Dean Rader for the episode Imagining soundscapes: from Rome to San Francisco and back.

Teho Teardo, through his text conceived as a score, leads the reader into the hotel room in Augusta, Georgia, where, whilst serving in the military in 1953, the artist would move on weekends to sketch the contours of his naked body in the dark and, in the silence of the night, rediscover the freedom of the line that was lost during the day in the repetitive gestures of a cryptographer. Those sounds evoked in Teardo’s text bring us back to the practice of field recording, which the musician often employs in his compositions, and to the words of Francesco Adinolfi, who in his podcast guides us to discover the sounds hidden amongst the marks and lines of some of Cy Twombly’s works, before leading the listener to explore the origins and evolution of the practice of field recording and its countless variations.

In every line, in every sound, lie the illusion, the frustration and the expectation of a new beginning, without which the creative act could not come to life.

In every line, in every sound, lie our constant search for answers, the awareness of our imperfection, that indeterminacy which drives our lives and every creative act.

Eleonora Di Erasmo

(Managing Director of the Cy Twombly Foundation, and curator of the In Perspective online project)

An English translation of the text is available here.

Discover more about the sounds hidden amongst the marks and lines of some of Cy Twombly’s works, and explore the origins and evolution of the practice of field recording as well as its countless variations.

The podcast is in Italian. An English translation of the full podcast is downloadable here.

For an immersive experience the use of earbuds is recommended.

Teho Teardo, composer, musician, and sound designer, has scored numerous films by directors such as Marco Bellocchio, Paolo Sorrentino, Daniele Vicari, Gabriele Salvatores, receiving awards such as the David di Donatello, the Ennio Morricone Award, Premio Rota and the Irish Theatre Award.
He collaborates with international artists including Blixa Bargeld, Enda Walsh, Stuart Staples, Erik Friedlander, Keeley Forsyth and has developed multidisciplinary projects with photographer Charles Fréger and the Feltrinelli Foundation.

Francesco Adinolfi is a music journalist and radio host. He is in charge of the “Ultrasuoni” section of "Alias", the cultural supplement of the Italian newspaper “il manifesto". Over the years he has hosted numerous radio shows on Radio Rai, including “Stereonotte”, “Ultrasuoni Cocktail”, “Popcorner”, “Beat Connection” and “Beat Club”. Since 2021, he has been hosting “Ultrapop” on Radio 24. He was editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine "Ciao 2001" and a regular contributor to various national and international newspapers and magazines, including “Il Mattino”, “L’Espresso”, “Melody Maker” and “Sounds”.

He has taught university courses at the Sociology Department of Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" and served as a music consultant for various TV shows such as “Il caso Scafroglia” and “Per un pugno di libri”. Among his various publications, he authored “Suoni dal ghetto” (Costa & Nolan, 1989), the first essay on hip hop culture ever published in Italy and “Mondo Exotica” (Einaudi, 2000/Marsilio, 2021), an updated essay on Exotica in all sounds and forms. The English edition of “Mondo Exotica” (Duke University Press, 2008) has been awarded the 2009 “ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research”.