The listening body — Interview with Clara Iannotta

Exactly ten years after the premier of Intent on Resurrection — Spring or Some Such Thing, which was the first time Clara Iannotta's work was shown at the Festival d'Automne, the 2024 edition dedicates a Portrait to the Romanian-born composer. This Portrait will take us on a journey through her recent works. After studying flute, writing and composition in Rome, Milan, Paris and Boston, Clara Iannotta teaches at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, and is the artistic director of the Bludenz Festival, in Austria, from 2014 to 2024. A Villa Medici Fellow, winner of the Ernst von Siemens Composer's Prize, and member of the Academy of Arts In Berlin, the music that Clara Iannotta writes is an eminently physical one, and which is inseparable from her own biography. By means of specially-prepared instruments, the emergence, transition and decomposition of subtle and dense sounds oscillates between different categories: movement and stillness, surface and depth, the obvious and the latent, bringing us the image and its marine reflection.

 

 

Your work pays the utmost attention to sound and its unique qualities. What is your conception of sound? What types of relationships do you envisage between sound and music?

I need talk about my childhood if I am to answer your question. My father was an architect. Instead of giving me toys, he taught me how to build them. Whenever one of them was broken, he showed me either how to repair it or how to put different materials together and turn it into something else. I had to understand these materials and how they worked. I began to realize that I was copying what I had seen elsewhere. Little by little, I invented my own toys, using everything that I found around me. The object's function mattered less to me than the potential of what it could become. I then continued this approach when I started making music. For me, the sound was disconnected from the instrument and came from an idea or a sound image. Even today, as a composition teacher, I tell my students not to start off with the instrument itself. For what reason? The answer is that the constraints of the instrument limit the imagination. They are idiomatic constraints – what the instrument can or cannot do – but also personal ones, and I have no desire for them. So I try to imagine the sound in a totally abstract way. Then, as soon as I know exactly what I want, I take into account the instrument itself. And if the instrument alone is not sufficient, I use everything within my grasp to represent, physically, and with no compromise, the sound image that I have in my mind. Is it sound? Is it music? Experience enables me to imagine more and more complex sounds, but it is impossible for me to describe them at first. I play around with metaphors and bring the sound closer to the concept. This concept, once I have managed to seize upon it, is then expressed in words. This, in turn, gives me sound ideas that I would not otherwise have had if I had started from sound. Sound, as I look at it, and I use this verb intentionally, is music.

 

The titles of your works borrow from the Irish poet Dorothy Molloy …

I first came across the work of Dorothy Molloy when I moved to Berlin in 2013. I was 29 years old at the time, and after my studies in Paris, I found myself, for the very first time, without any institution to protect me from possible and necessary failure. I started having panic attacks, fueled by an acute awareness of my own mortality. As soon as I felt afraid, I began reading literature about the object of this fear. So I read several authors that dealt with the subject of their own deaths. My partner was familiar with the work of Dorothy Molloy and encouraged me to read her poems. Dorothy Molloy died of cancer in 2004. Her collections focus almost exclusively, in an ironic, humorous way, on the decomposition of her body. I also noticed that whenever I read her poems, the same image always came to mind, that of a dust-filled room. You cannot see anything, not even your own body. But as we become accustomed to this space, and inhabit it, the dust is no longer a wall. Instead, it appears to be made up of small grains. My first piece for the Festival d'Automne, Intent on Resurrection – Spring or Some Such Thing, which I made in 2014, was about this dust. I spent years writing this dust, my dust. I am still not ready to take leave of Dorothy Molloy's verses. I continue to read them and, pay homage to them through my music.

 

What about the elements of light and the visual in your music?

During the first year of my studies, I read the lectures given by Luciano Berio American at American universities, Un ricordo al futuro. One phrase, in particular, took me by surprise, in which Berio says that music is made for watching and theatre for listening. But how can we watch music? A few years later, I met Mark Andre in Royaumont, and his music opened my eyes. At first, all I heard was white noise. But his scores indicated to me that there was much more than this to be listened to. It is the same as when you read a book for hours: when you look up, you cannot see what is in front of you until the eyes shift their focus. Another event which had a big impact on me was when my mother underwent major surgery, and then slowly began to speak again. But it was still difficult to understand her, and nobody wanted to ask her to repeat herself over and over again. By using just our ears, we were totally lost. What had changed was that the experience of listening had become a physical experience, carried out using our whole body. We had to watch. I wondered how I could create music that could be watched, thereby enabling us to understand it. At that point, my music became small in size, whispered, like an enormous world that you needed to come close to.

In recent years, this visual aspect, which was quite conceptual at the time, has become increasingly real. I started working with a light designer, made installations at Villa Medici and have collaborated with Peter Tscherkassky, an Austrian experimental video artist. The technique he uses in Outer Space is truly wonderful, consisting of rapid, glitch-like changes in black and white. I watched this movie without sound and came to the conclusion that there was no need for sound. It is already a sound experience in itself, for there is rhythm, and a musical experience of light. I then started to think of light as a point of articulation or joint. I began to see it as music for the eyes, on another sonic level, and which brings with it perception of a different kind. I have been making use of these visual elements ever since.

 

 

Interview by Laurent Feneyrou and translation by Jonathan Waite, march 2024