Landscape and Imagination, Uniscape, Paris may 2013 The Music Compass

An optical-chronographic-musical instrument celebrating the identity and cosmic placing of landscapes Donatella Mazzoleni

Centro Interdipartimentale UrbanEco, Università di Napoli Federico II Via Tarsia 31 - 80134 Napoli (Italia)

donatella.mazzoleni@unina.it Abstract: The “Music Compass” is an optical-chronographic-musical instrument built through a process of meditation on the identity and cosmic placing of a specific landscape, and then used celebrating its own beauty: it is played through the exercise of look, touch and sounds. It can be built jointly by a working group, to represent a landscape in an archetypal and polysemic way, and, at the end of the path of knowledge and construction, the genius loci can be celebrated in a shared musical meditation. Here we present the theory and the method for the construction of this instrument, and show a prototype of the Music Compass, built in reference to the landscape of the city of Napoli.

1 Introduction Here you have the project and a first prototype of an artistic-didactic tool called “Music Compass”. It is a tool designed to represent the archetypal and poly-semic qualities of places and their landscapes, stimu-lating an intuitive knowledge of space and empathy between human beings and the territories they inhabit, highlighting the various aspects of the beauty of land-scapes, encouraging creative play and the invention of new forms of expression through multisensory per-ception and shared experience.

The Music Compass draws its broadly “secular” inspiration from the “music of the spheres”, that great repository of the Western imagination constituted by Pythagoras, in the VI cent. BC, Plato, V-IV cent. BC, Ptolemy, II cent., Al Kindi, IX cent., and finally Kep-ler, XVII cent. It retraces the specific tradition of the invention of real or imaginary tools intended to repre-sent the musical order of the universe: the tetrachord of ancient Greece, the monochord (Fludd XVII cent.) Fig. 1, and the “cosmic organ” (Kircher 1650) Fig. 2.

Fig. 1. Robert Fludd (Robertus de Fluctibus), The Monochord

(XVII cent).

Fig. 2. Athanasius Kircher, The “Cosmic Organ” (1650). We believe that the imagination of the existence of

a “sound space”, inaudible to the human ear, but in-telligible to the human mind as a harmonical-mathematical proportion, purified of the mystical-religious aspects, is a very powerful source of stimuli for the extension of the multi-sensory experience, in-tuitive knowledge, and the exercise of creative thought.

2 Challenge tackled The design, construction and use of the “Music Com-pass” is at once scientific, artistic and educational, re-quiring commitment and sound knowledge. There may be unexpected developments [at every stage].

The preliminary study is very complex, involving at four levels: level 1) Analysis of the landscape’s “primary subject”:

the physical components of the environment: Earth (plains, hills, mountains, valleys, cliffs, is-lands, …), Water (rivers, lakes, sea), Air (sky), Fire

(the direct and reflected light of the [sun, moon and] stars);

level 2) Historical study of the landscape’s “iconogra-phy”: the palimpsest and synthesis of the figures used to describe the environment during historical time: visual (painting, photography, mapping, films), acoustic (sound, music), multisensory;

level 3) Interpretation of the landscape’s “iconology” (Panofsky 1939, Mazzoleni 2005): deep under-standing of the Weltanschauung expressed by the resident community, of the historical processes impacting on the environment morphology, as well as pursuing a synthesis between objectivity and subjectivity, between different geographical, histor-ical and aesthetic cultures;

level 4) Definition of an analogical correspondence and transposition system not only between physi-cal and visual qualities, but also between these and the site’s sound quality, so as to bring out its spe-cific “musical voice”. Once the Music Compass has been built with sci-

entific, historical and aesthetic rigour, it becomes an “open work” available not just to scholars but to eve-rybody. It becomes in fact a sophisticated and unusual instrument that can intrigue everyone, inviting them to play on it [and with it], while at the same time transmitting a deep subliminal awareness of the infi-nitely complex values of landscape.

3 The Approach The Compass has the structure of a plastic-pictorial work and at the same time of a musical instrument. 3.1 The plastic-pictorial construction The compass is constructed, in relation to a specific site, starting from a kind of map: a visual representa-tion of its landscape, realized as a circular two-dimensional image drawn or painted on a disk mount-ed on a cylindrical hollow drum (this structure will serve as the sounding board in the next step of the construction). Although the image is flat and two-dimensional it is not a plan but is constructed as a spherical perspective of the site (pan-Orama: “all-vision”), centred in a significant vantage point of the site (pan-Optikon, “the point from which you can see everything”). We call it the “Global Orientation Map” (GOM) of the site (Mazzoleni 1998, 2007).

The GOM is constructed through the sequence of seven actions: 1. Identification of the Point of Departure (centre of

vision) 2. Construction of the Terrestrial Horizon (Earth

Circle) 3. Construction of the Heavenly Horizon (Sky Circle) 4. Identification of the Terrestrial Orientation (natu-

ral and architectural points of reference)

5. Identification of the Heavenly Orientation (the equinoctial East direction)

6. Construction of the path of the Sun (the band covering the sun’s path at the summer and winter solstices, with the equinoctial solar trajectory as medial line)

7. Identification of the Leading Cardinal Point(s) (di-rection(s) of the preferred view(s) of the land-scape). Actions 1 to 6 require a careful historical and geo-

graphical study of the physical characteristics of the territory and its anthropic changes. In order to properly determine the start and finish of this repre-sentative process, actions 1 and 7 require a thorough knowledge of the site’s historical iconography and var-ious cultural representations. 3.2 The sound apparatus The GOM is itself a sort of compass that allows you to navigate, in both the visual and cosmological sense, in the landscape of that particular site. Now further technical and sensory skills have to be added to the object. A mechanical apparatus has to be con-structed round the cylindrical drum , suitable for pro-ducing sounds whose ascending and descending se-quence reflects the solar trajectory.

This apparatus may be constituted in different ways. • The triple “Horizon-Keyboard” Around the disk on which the GOM is depicted, three circular keyboards are built, reproducing the round shape of the sky’s horizon and, by analogy, the differ-ent extents of the sun’s path in the three phases of summer, equinox and winter. These keyboards feature the chromatic sound scale, ascending (from the East to the South) and descending (from the South to the West). In analogy with the measures of the daylight hours, they start with the same basic note in the East and end on the same note in the West, but they have three different extensions (maximum for the “sum-mer” scale, medium for the “equinoctial” scale, mini-mum for the “winter” scale). Thus, they reach the peak in the center (to the South) in three notes of dif-ferent pitch, by analogy with the different angle of the sun above the horizon at noon in the different sea-sons. If one chooses to proceed according to the tem-pered scale encoded in Western music, the excursion of the “summer” keyboard will be an octave and a half (starting from the tonic at the summer solsticial East, 18 semitones for the ascending scale to the cen-tral (South) note which is the diminished fifth in the upper octave, and 18 semitones for the descending scale, ending on the tonic at the summer solsticial West, for a total of 37 keys). The excursion of the “equinoxes” keyboard will be an octave (starting from tonic at the equinoctial East, 12 semitones for the as-

cending scale to the central (South) note which is the tonic in the upper octave, and 12 semitones for the descending scale, ending on the tonic at the equinoc-tial West, for a total of 25 keys). The “winter” key-board will be a half octave (from the tonic at the win-ter solsticial East, 6 semitones for the ascending scale to the central (South) note which is the diminished fifth, and 6 semitones for the descending scale, ending on the tonic at the winter solsticial West, for a total of 13 keys).

The triple “Horizon-Keyboard” will, therefore, oc-cupy a large sector extending clockwise from the summer East to the summer West. For a GOM of a landscape in the latitude of the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere, it would cover roughly the arc ranging from NorthEast through South to North-West. The northern sector of the disk will remain free, since in every season, in the northern hemisphere, the North is characterised by the absence of sunlight and thus by “silence”.

The musical performance in this case will result in the gestures of the arms and fingers following circular paths concentric with the heavenly horizon represent-ed on the GOM. The position of the performer may be in the North, but she or he could also walk round the instrument, or come and go along its circumfer-ence, orienting her/himself in the preferred direction according to the symbolic-musical intentions. The movement of the performer adds an additional com-ponent to the visual-gestural-tactile-sonorous use of the instrument which could take on the form of a dance. • The “Simple Keyboard”. A different version of the music compass can be built using a more straightforward constructive criterion. In this case, the sound apparatus will consist of a single rectilinear keyboard, commanding a set of resonant parallel elements (strings or lamellae), oriented in the North-South direction. The keyboard will feature an ascending scale from the tonic on the left (summer East) to the central note (South), and then descending to the initial tonic on the right (summer West).

The seasonal variation of the solar arc will not be visually indicated by the presence of three keyboards but will remain audible in the use of the keyboard: its whole extent will be used to express the light of sum-mer, and two parts, one smaller than the other, to re-fer to the winter and equinoctial solar trajectories. • The “Intoned Keyboard”. If a portable version of the instrument is required, the number of notes can be reduced. For example, instead of realizing a complete chromatic scale with all the semitones, the scale of just one key could be provided. In this case, the rising part of the scale (from East to South) will be in the major and the descending part (from West to South) in the minor.

3.3 The finished object The complete Music Compass is thus a hybrid object combining: a conceptual diagram, provided for theo-retical speculation; a graphic-pictorial work, for vision; a plastic work, for touch; a sounding instrument, for playing and listening to music. 4 A sample and a prototype Here you have a sample Global Orientation Map and a prototype of a Music Compass related to a specific landscape: the city of Napoli (Italy).

Fig. 3 shows the first step in the plastic pictorial construction of the GOM. Here the Point of Depar-ture (Centre of Vision) is identified in the site of foundation of the first ancient city, Parthenope (VII cent. BC). Starting from this very significant point (panoptikon), as the origin’s Umbilicus Mundi, the Terres-trial Horizon (Earth Circle) is drawn as the limit of the panorama, the three-hundred-sixty degree all round vi-sion. This limit is a circle not in the Euclidean but in a topological sense: a closed curved line, defining the first anthropic image of this land chosen by the an-cient Greek colonizers, i.e. the first landscape of the site. On it, the Terrestrial Orientation is noted by nat-ural and architectural points of reference. Around it, the Euclidean circle of the Heavenly Horizon (Sky Circle) is identified, with the point of the equinoctial East (Heavenly Orientation). The orthogonal diame-ters of the equinoctial East-West and the South-North lines composes the cosmic cross of this landscape. According to the Greek-Mediterranean tradition, this cosmic cross will be the archetypal reference for the city design, connecting it with its terrestrial and heav-enly landscape.

Fig. 4-15 show the construction of the GOM.

Fig. 3. Donatella Mazzoleni, The Music Compass relating to the landscape of the city of Napoli (Italy).

The basic diagram deriving from the seven actions.

Fig. 4. View to the East: the rising sun at the equinox (photo Mazzoleni).

Fig. 5. View to the East: the explosive volcano (Philipp Hackert The Vesuvio eruption 1779).

Fig. 6. Donatella Mazzoleni, The GOM of Napoli (Italy).

View to the East: archetype of the rising Fire.

Fig. 7. View to the West: extinguished volcanoes in the Campi Flegrei area (Tommaso Ruiz, The Pozzuoli Bay, 1749).

Fig. 8. Vision to the West: extinguished volcanoes in the coast and islands (Tommaso Ruiz, The Pozzuoli Bay, 1749).

Fig. 9. Donatella Mazzoleni, The GOM of Napoli (Italy).

View to the West: archetype of the welcoming Earth.

Fig. 10. View to the North: the top of the hills (Donatella Mazzoleni, The St Elmo Castle from the sea)

Fig. 11. View to the North: the hills and the winds (Didier Barra (1590 - ?), Napoli from the sea.

Fig. 12. Donatella Mazzoleni, The GOM of Napoli (Italy).

View to the North: archetype of the breathing Air.

Fig. 13. View to the Sputh: the sea and the Capri island, the mythologic petrified body of the Siren Parthenope

(photo Mazzoleni).

Fig. 14. The myth of the origins the challenge of Odysseus and the the death of the Siren.

Fig. 15. Donatella Mazzoleni, The GOM of Napoli (Italy). View to the South: the Water of the Origins.

Identification of the Leading Cardinal Points. Fig. 16-17 show the construction of the keyboard.

Fig. 16. Donatella Mazzoleni, The Music Compass of Napo-li (Italy). Version with the triple Horizon-Keyboard.

4 Conclusion The Music Compass is a visual-tactile-kinetic-sonorous tool of artistic, scientific and educational value.

Its construction requires a thorough study of the as-tronomical and geographical location of the landscape, its morphology, the organization of the primary materi-als (Earth, Water, Air, Fire), and the stratification of the signs of human presence. And in addition, a complete knowledge of the iconography of the landscape, i.e. the graphic images, maps, paintings and so on with which the site has been represented by its inhabitants and by travelers in different periods of history. Finally, it re-

quires critical and polysemic interpretation. For its use, which is multi-sensorial (visual-tactile-

choreutical-musical), it is necessary to activate a syncretic sensitivity. The user must be able to undertake without preconceptions a free and playful experience, with no other aim than the suspension of thought and entry into a global meditative exercise generating a state of rêverie.

When the term “music” is related to this tool of syncretic knowledge of the landscape it not only has the modern meaning of the “art of sound” but also regains the original meaning of the ancient Greek word mousiké: the total art of the nine Muses, divine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (goddess not only of memory but also of forgetfulness): the “art of the harmony between all forms of human expression”.

Fig. 17. Donatella Mazzoleni, The Music Compass of Napo-li. Versions with the Simple and the Intoned Keyboard. In conclusion, the Music Compass is proposed as

an innovative tool for inducing a deep awareness of the global values of landscape, for cultivating and dis-seminating them by means of joyful practices, and for nurturing creative thinking.

Refer ence s : Fludd R (Robertus de Fluctibus), early XVII cent. Utriusque

Cosmi, maiores scilicet et minores, metaphysica, physica atque technica Historia. London.

Kircher A, 1650. Musurgia universalis, sive ars magna con-soni et dissoni.

Panofsky E, 1939. Studies in Iconology. Oxford University Press.

Mazzoleni D, 1998. An instrument for the holistic repre-sentation of envirnmental identity: the “Symbolic-phisical orientation map”/Uno strumento di rappresen-tazione olistica dell’identità ambientale: la “Mappa di orientamento fisico-simbolico”. In Mazzoleni D (ed), Nature Architecture Diversity/Natura Architettura Di-versità. Napoli.

Mazzoleni D, 2005. Il valore iconologico. [The iconological Value] In: Mazzoleni D, Sepe M (ed) Rischio sismico, paesaggio, architettura. Napoli. [Seismic Risk, Landsca-pe, Architecture].

Mazzoleni D, 2007. Disegnare città all’interno dei paesaggi. Un metodo di lavoro e due casi studio. [Designing Cit-ies inside Landscapes. A work methodology and two case studies]. In: Lucci R (ed) L’architettura dei paesaggi urbani. Roma, pp 31-39 [Urban landscapes Architectu-re].