Eraldo Bernocchi & Rita Marcotulli in concert
Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome
Ph. Livio Sapio
Artworks: Devendra Banhart, Sphynx Interiors, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Mazzoli
Mars and the Artist (after Cy Twombly), 2011, and Veil of Orpheus (Cy Twombly’s), 2012, composed by Harold Budd and dedicated to Cy Twombly, resonated in the space of the Fondazione Nicola del Roscio again on the occasion of the second edition of the project Un/veiled last June 2024 through the unprecedented collaboration of the musicians Eraldo Bernocchi and Rita Marcotulli.
The artists tried to establish a musical dialogue with the two pieces according to their respective languages and sensitivities in a process of double inspiration, driven partly by the works of Cy Twombly to whom the tunes are dedicated, and partly by the echo of the reverberating notes of Harold Budd’s compositions.
Let’s meet Eraldo Bernocchi and Rita Marcotulli almost a year apart, in the midst of a collaborative journey that preceded and followed their live performance for Un/veiled. Let’s enter into the most intimate aspects of the creative process to realize how much the encounter with Cy Twombly's work can be found on a common creative ground that moves on the border between many things and is generated on the way, takes shape at the crossroads of different cultures, between the past and the present, returning this complexity with immediacy, and produces an “effect”, as Roland Barthes noted in his writing on Cy Twombly, where to find a “certain force that comes from chance” (Roland Barthes, The Wisdom of Art, 1979).
In the delicate balance between determination and chance, and in the improvisation, flow worlds rich in studies, encounters, and experiences that across a transverse gaze enter into dialogue with Cy Twombly’s creative process. Let’s find out how through the words of Eraldo Bernocchi and Rita Marcotulli.
EGR (Elena Giulia Rossi) – Eraldo, before your collaboration with Rita Marcotulli, you composed the soundtracks for the documentary film Cy Dear entitled Like a Fire That Consumes All Before It (2018) and for the short film about Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg's journey to Morocco in 1952 (Cy Twombly: A Journey to Morocco, 1952-1953 (2023) published in this same section In Perspective).
Can you tell us what this work meant to you in terms of your dialogue with Cy Twombly, but also about your relationship with Harold Budd whose pieces dedicated to the artist were central to this experience for Un/veiled?
EB (Eraldo Bernocchi) – Together with Nicola Del Roscio and the Cy Twombly Foundation, I had the privilege of getting in touch with the most intimate and confidential side of Cy Twombly's life and creative process, an aspect that few have been able to observe so closely. It was a deep immersion in his universe, a silent yet very powerful dialogue with his work and his way of being.
My experience with Cy Twombly was unique because I experienced it from the inside. This immersion had a direct impact on the soundtrack of the film. Sound thus became a bridge between the visible and the invisible, between what Twombly left on the canvas and what he kept within himself. I tried to work on the relationship between sound and silence, seeking a balance between evocation and subtraction.
Eraldo Bernocchi
Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome
Ph. Livio Sapio
Similarly, collaborating with Harold Budd was a transformative experience. The value of the creative exchange I had with him remains indelible in my memory, not only because of the depth of his music but because of the sensitive and refined approach that characterized his every artistic gesture and at the same time light-hearted and amused. Working with Budd meant entering an intangible dimension of sound where the notes spread like distant echoes, dissolving into the air as gently as they were born.
EGR – Let’s come to this incredible moment of exchange and collaboration. What did the involvement in the Un/veiled project mean?
RM (Rita Marcotulli) – When Eraldo proposed this project to me, I was thrilled. I like working with electronic music. We worked on two Harold Budd’s pieces dedicated to Cy Twombly [Mars and the Artist (after Cy Twomby), 2011; Veil of Orpheus (Cy Twombly's), 2012]. Rather than reinterpret the pieces, that is to play them ourselves all over again, we decided to play the pieces with him, which means over his music. And I must say that it was a beautiful, inspiring work.
EB – Rita's idea of playing over the pieces, rather than reinterpreting them, was a successful idea. Those two compositions, in their minimal and typical Harold’s simplicity, are actually unrepeatable. I played live and recorded two records with Harold. Every time I'm faced with someone sitting down at the piano or keyboard and trying to resonate a Budd’s piece, it's a bit like trying to play Jimmy Hendrix - pass me the comparison - you can learn it perfectly, but that touch will never be there. The idea that Rita had is, in my opinion, of enormous respect.
EGR – You have two very different paths however with many things in common. Among them it is not difficult to perceive very strong interdisciplinary momentum and curiosity. Rita, in several interviews you talked about how important it was for you to breathe the atmosphere of the cinema at home. Eraldo, also for you the world of visual arts is constantly present and in various forms, cinema, television, not least the collaboration with Petulia Mattioli, I’m referring to the beautiful audio-visual performance together with Nils Petter Molvær for the first edition of Un/veiled. Do you create relationships of synesthesia with images, if you let me pass this term improperly adopted from medical language?
EB – Certainly I do. For me it is a matter of daily life. I've been linked for more than 30 years to a video artist and graphic designer, so I come in contact with dozens of images daily and basically almost everything I make musically starts from images. Images are “a synesthesia”. Elena, you attended the concert that took place during the first edition of Un/veiled at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in Rome, the one with Nils Petter Molvær and the three real-time video projections by Petulia Mattioli. Playing that concert, I remembered something Nils told me in 2007, when we played together at Teatro Dal Verme in Milan: "as musicians we should have some screens near the monitors on the stage, so that we can see what is happening behind us and we can get even more in touch with what is happening during the performance around us." It absolutely creates what you are talking about, that is a synesthesia.
RM – I agree. For me, synesthesia is mainly between images and music so that neither of them prevails over the other. For example, in the pieces I have composed as homage to cinema, I have always tried to avoid looking at stories and to use movements instead, a flow that works well with music.
I also really enjoy improvising on images, as I have done accompanying silent movies, even though I didn't really know the plot. The image suggests a movement, a rhythm that you wouldn't have otherwise. The improvisation each time is different, what remains constant is the mutual exchange between image and music. The same happens when I work with dance and movement. It is an incredible source of stimulus and exchange of different movements. You are led to play in a different way. Sometimes dancers, counting steps, create figures that last thirteen and a half measures, a number of beats that does not exist in music. However, for that very reason you have to be able to make something working on that tempo. There are always extra ingredients that stimulate creativity.
Rita Marcotulli
Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome
Ph. Livio Sapio
EGR – Now, I am not asking you about the importance of collaborating on a project. You have both said it several times in interviews and it is glaringly obvious listening to you live. I would ask you, then, something more specific, starting from the desire that Eraldo expressed in a recent interview for Alibi online to "push yourselves even further and work on more complex rhythms, go deeper." What does 'going deeper' mean in music?
EB – We always have the drive to go beyond what we accomplish. The performance at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio worked very well, but it was also useful for us to understand how to evolve the project. That means going deeper. For example, I have ideas about two or three pieces that I would like to be more rhythmic, even unexpected. All of a sudden you get to create a piece that is still very physical. These are ideas that we started experimenting with. We partly used them, partly we left them out or developed further. ‘Going deeper’ in my opinion means this.
RM – This happens when you do improvisation. We actually improvised during the performance. Clearly listening back, at least from my point of view, there are moments when you realize what you would like to change. I love polyrhythms, so clearly our collaboration on the project is still a work in progress. This was a first approach, we realized that there is potential and that we can still experiment and work further on the project.
EGR – Let's take one of the cards from the Oblique Strategies deck that Brian Eno made with the painter Peter Schmidt (first published in 1975). We read: Do We need Holes? "a hole on the map, a void to be willingly and eagerly explored. Or, in acoustic terms, a musical hole to be filled; the silence that is the condition or absence of music before it exists."
EB – Absolutely, yes, it is fundamental. In fact, I am more and more into the idea that much more value should be given to silence, especially now. But at any level, not just musical....
RM – As Fellini said, "and yet I believe that if there was a little silence, if we all were a little silent, maybe something could be understood"... Because then it is in the silence that you actually listen. If you keep silent in front of infinity, for example, that's where you listen, that's where something comes to you.
EB – Exactly, I absolutely agree. However, not necessarily, in my opinion, silence is a hole to be filled. It would also be nice for it to remain so sometimes.
RM – For example, there is the pause in music in which Miles Davis was a master from the point of view of the music I compose, because you need a moment of reflection in order to express another concept. I agree with Brian Eno, silence is essential. It is like a painting, a blank canvas. Silence is a source, absurdly, of inspiration to create.
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1959
[Lexington, Virginia]
Oil based house paint, pencil, wax crayon on canvas
60 x 74 in.
© Cy Twombly Foundation
EGR – John Cage has been hovering in our conversation for a while now, an important meeting for Twombly as well, who between 1951 and 1952 attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a private college (founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice) to be projected into a holistic, trans-disciplinary vision of the arts and thought. Are the silence, the white space, the breath of the canvas, the emergence of things from subtraction, so important throughout Twombly's journey, present in your encounter with the score before composing a piece? I also think of Gilles Deleuze when, in one of his famous lectures on painting, in describing the blank canvas as a space 'full of things,' he reflected, "The problem will be to remove these invisible things which, however, have already occupied the canvas."
RM – Yes, absolutely, when you compose.
EB – My creative process is quite destructive in the sense that I layer a lot of things. Eventually I listen to them and start removing them: I play them once, tweak the sound, remove again, and in the end only a few things remain, because I like increasingly minimal compositions. I therefore need to do a subtractive work.
EGR – In December 1963, when Twombly had long been in Rome, John Cage greeted the New Year in a one-minute speech on Japanese radio. In the reflections that followed this speech, he reasoned about the arts, their ever more radical approach to life, the disappearance of the distinction between space and time, but also the annihilation of the distinction from the self and the other. The great space that travelling and encountering with others occupy in the creative process unites your work with that of Cy Twombly. Can you capture cultural diversities that enrich you when you travel nowadays? What meaning do they have in your work as musicians and composers?
RM – Yes, in my opinion it is absolutely essential. If contamination had not existed, a jazz language, which originated in America but first came from European harmony, would not have been born. There is no single reality, everything is very relative. You can only grow from new ethnicities, new ways of seeing, but also from the musical point of view. From the theoretical and technical point of view of music, for example, Indian music comes to mind. The difference between Jazz and Indian music is based on a structural concept. Whereas in Jazz we usually improvise on a harmonic turn, in Indian music improvisation occurs only on one mode of the scale and is based mostly on rhythmic and polyrhythmic decomposition. It comes to a completely different concept than the way we think of beats.
EB – I agree with Rita. It is essential to pay attention to other cultures and collaborate with different people. This is what enriches you and allows you to continue to evolve.
EGR – We have talked about the journey, the confrontation with cultural diversity. Let’s come now to the concept of “roots”. Among the reasons given in the statement submitted to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in order to obtain a fellowship that would take him between 1952 and 1953 with Robert Rauschenberg to Italy, North Africa and Spain, Cy Twombly says, "what I am trying to establish is that modern art is not dislocated, but something with roots, tradition and continuity." What are your roots and relationship to tradition?
RM – The root is important. It is our identity. It is enriched and transformed through experiences, knowledge, life. This is the same in visual arts. The creative process evolves with knowledge. You have to start from the basics to better understand the path that has been taken, to discover and find other paths. I mean, where are we now? It is obvious that once you discover the root and the tradition, both stimulate you to do new things from which to start. In my case I start from classical music, through which I discovered all harmony. Without roots you cannot build. You cannot improvise without knowing the chords. The process of improvisation comes later.
Finally, there is also the root of being human, that is, as an Italian, I feel Mediterranean, but at the same time a citizen of the world. I lived, both in France and in Sweden for six years, just to get in touch with different cultures, and this formed me a lot.
EB – As Twombly said, it is the cultural roots that exist within us, that make you aware of the continuity present in your creative process. Some of what I have done has become in my brain a mini-tradition that has served me to understand what should not be done and to try to improve myself in other respects. Reconnecting with Rita, I am Italian, but I remain a crossroads of cultures. In Italy we are a mix of everything, overlooking the Mediterranean, this root is there and you can hear it in our music.
RM – You necessarily have to go back to the roots to get to chart new paths. Contamination is changeable and leads to the creation of ever-changing worlds. The more you know about the past, the greater is the knowledge of our present.
Eraldo Bernocchi's live arrangement and notation stream
Courtesy the artist
Elena Giulia Rossi lives and works in Rome as a researcher, Professor of Theories of Multimedia Arts, and Editorial Director of the online editorial platform Arshake. Reinvening Technology. After living, studying and working in Chicago for three years (1999-2002), she returned to Italy to further the research in contemporary art, where her interests have led into transversal and transdisciplinary areas, at the crossroads of biology, technology and science. These paths have been interwoven with her work experiences, between practice and theory, with museums, galleries, magazines and newspapers, with the online platform Arshake (www.arshake.com) and with her teaching activities at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
She is the author of Archeonet. Viaggio nella storia della net/web art e suo ingresso nei musei tradizionali (Lalli Editore, Siena, 2003) and Mind the Gap. La vita tra bioarte, arte ecologica e post internet (Postmedia, Milan, 2020).