Gallery Exhibit Archives: April 2017 - Rocco Di Pietro and Romulo Vazquez

Jung states that the ‘feeling toned-complex’ is always a question of a wish and our resistance to it. ”Our life is spent in struggles for the realization of our wishes: All our actions proceed from the wish that something should or should not come to pass.”

‘Cyborg’ is the fourth panel of a five movement cello Symphony in progress since 2009. Our hero the soloist has passed through and survived three previous environments. The first two are dreamscapes Jung might have analysed. The Symphony actually starts with a ‘Finale’, a kind of ‘end of the world’ Overture. The soloist then moves on to another Overture-‘The Dome’ the second movement from a dream of ‘The Duomo’ cathedral in Florence, and lands on his journey in the middle of a ‘Prayer’, the third movement with Female Chorus.

But nothing has prepared him for the onslaught of the fourth movement- ‘Cyborg’ in which his utter destruction is sought by the orchestra. At first the Cyborg mocks him, then tries to drown him in two ’Floods’, mocks him again and growing restless tries to kill him by drying him out in two ‘Deserts’ parched and struggling for thirst.

 After two ‘Taschiste white outs’ these attempts still do not work as the soloist refuses to die infuriating the Cyborg. The soloist even mocks the Cyborg in return by playing several ‘Odalisques’ and when some of the orchestra players are interested, the Cyborg is furious as the orchestra attempts to shoot the cellist any number of times. Finally frustrated the orchestra simply stomps him out with more than twenty-five anger tutti’s.

The soloist now wounded and dying, expires after one last massive blow out from the orchestra, but is resurrected in the ‘Lilith Coda’ returning to life to go on and play the fifth and final movement, an Aria called; “Lilith Landscapes with Wave.

The actual music of the Cyborg-which is half machine and half human-reflects this complex duality, by being a  patchwork of two works. 1) ‘Una Macchinetta Infernale’ (Infernal Machine) (After Pirandello) and 2) ‘String Quartet-Art of Imaginal listening’.

The back bone of the piece is the 1978 duo for cello, piano and tape (Macchinetta) written for Frances Marie Uitti and Yvar Mikhasoff whose duo toured Europe with the work in 1981.Although I never actually heard a performance and was only present at rehearsals from 1979-80 in Buffalo, they premiered the work at The De Ijsbreker in Amsterdam Holland on  a program with Davidovsky, Feldman, Brown, Wolff, Cage and Carter and ended the tour at the American Academy in Rome.

This work then is the Cyborg’s machine self and returns in its new orchestration three times to grind the soloist down.

The other work, the human part of the Cyborg is the “String Quartet-Art of Imaginal Listening”, another work I have never heard, this time because it has never been played, important for this essay because we are talking about wishes and all our efforts to make them come true as we work furiously towards oblivion. A fitting metaphor for’ Imaginal Listening’ itself, since the work furiously exists in my mind (the music has always already existed, again in part) and parts of it may or may not be played. the result is a protest against oblivion.

These works are stitched together in a complex patch work that requires three string orchestras with their own placement and sometimes independent tempi.

Eventually the Cyborg’s conflict and inability to kill the soloist causes a ‘Defection’ in which the Cyborg splits in two, half the orchestra joining the human part of the machine by incorporating a Devil’s Gallop from Beriloz’s ‘Faust’, on top of machine gun volleys from the other half of the orchestra. In fact, the ghost of Berlioz haunts the entire Symphony.

Rocco Di Pietro
March 20th, 2017
Columbus, OH