comissioned: comissioned:

program note

A video opera, the result of actions carried out by Teresa Pereda in the Patagonian ice fields (2011).

The work consists of an overture and five acts, organized around close relationships of correspondence between image and sound. This compositional structure is designed to emerge, in its full dimension, during the direct experience of the image and live music.

Te nombro azul (I name you blue) is an integral part of the project Recolección / Restitución. Citas por América (Collection / Restitution. Dates in America), which originated in 2007 and is developed from itineraries planned throughout the American continent. To date, this corpus has passed through Ushuaia (Argentina), Amazonas (Brazil), Uyuni (Bolivia), and the Patagonian Ice Fields (Argentina).

Artists Teresa Pereda, Charly Nijensohn, and Juan Pablo Ferlat participated, along with a team of five high-mountain rescuers specializing in ice. During the two-week expedition, 10 visits to the glacier were made, with their respective records. Andrés Casal, guide and ice rescuer, (Señor del paso blanco) is one of the protagonists of the video, carrying the ball of wool, receiving soil and spinning the wool threads. Teresa Pereda (Caminante de cuatro tierras) carries and rolls the ball of wool, delivering ice and soil. The ball of wool (Pequeño animal) was made with 10 kg of Patagonian wool and brought specifically to the glacier. The soil collected by Pereda in four geographical areas of Argentina (coast, pampas, Andes, and desert) was also brought specifically to the location.

Location: 73 4’ 0” West / 50 29’ 6” South

Audiovisual systematization:

Relationships and correspondences between image and sound.

Dramatic curve of the fourth act.

The sound source changes its identity according to the visual material to which it refers. Images and sound correspond in an almost mechanical event.

Below is a careful translation into clear, high-level English, preserving the conceptual density, terminology, and argumentative structure. I have not simplified ideas, only clarified syntax where Spanish allows ambiguity that English does not.

Relations of Correspondence

image-to-sound and sound-to-image

In “Te nombro Azul”, the cosmogenetic moment of the skein grants a central, originary character. Within it, concentration takes the form of a germinal geometry of processes. It becomes an ideogram, a site of immanence for temporality.

The sign in motion (Sachrichtungen, the Kleinian concept of the temporal direction of language) superimposes—by opposition to the concept of the mobility of the gaze—a music that is superficially fixed. By contrast, the intrinsic movements of wool, the droplet, and the ice star are correlated with layers of ornamentation on a minimal timbral scale, functioning simultaneously as warp and weft. The intention is to highlight the vibrations established between them. This vibration of the image is symbolic but also kinetic, capable of organizing the dual vibratory energy that links to sound.

First, ornamentation of the minimal movement of foliage and waterfall through complex timbres of superimposed repetitions. Second, the ornamentation of ornamentation itself, through contrary motion between the rallentando of time and the saturation of color. Maximum instrumental activity, minimal visual scale.

This is not a concordance or a transposition of the musical field into the kinetic-pictorial one, but rather an arboreal branching between fields.

Droplet

Sounds are instituted alongside images, evoking spatial objects; yet in comparison to them, they are vibrations too ephemeral and light for their atoms to synthesize into matter.

Travelers

This is a material that fuses with its reception, explaining its displacement through the act of receiving, creating a chronotopic knot of travel within its own space-time. This in-between place necessarily implies, in a second instance, not the metamorphosis of the landscape but of the traveler—slow and imperceptible, over the course of movement. Through this process, attention becomes diagonal. At this point, it is necessary to identify the stems of connection between the space of the image and the musical gesture in order to study their heterogeneous connectivity.

Glacier

“Te nombro Azul” extends the documentary register in order to transform itself into a travel narrative. In this way, its content is not the enumeration of a logbook, of conquests or adventures, but rather the double material translocation of a process of identity and displacement, characteristic of the history of our continent. For this reason, a reciprocal relationship is sought, leaving aside the consequences of representing the power of ambiguity. It is not a matter of reinforcing attention with another stimulus, but of completing it and rendering it more complex through polysemy. There is no emphasis, but counterpoint.

The temporal sequence is resolved in synchrony with the musical event. This is evident in the Fourth Acts, where form emerges from a technique of joint formation of forces within temporal becoming.

Music | Image

Nature has served as a model across the entire extension from perception to matter. This operation is properly technological: first mimetic, then genetic. From the walks through sixteenth-century gardens—where machines by Louis Castel (the ocular harpsichord) or devices such as Athanasius Kircher’s Phonurgia nova could be enjoyed—the Renaissance garden, a mimesis of paradise and at the same time an intellectual creation, offers one of the greatest expressions of an image in motion.

Tracing the evolution of artistic styles, one can observe the emergence of the synesthetic concept as a dialectic between correspondences of the senses. For example, the convergence of opposites in the Romantic era becomes evident with the appearance of the program as a system of musical representation in Hector Berlioz (La Marche des Pèlerins), mediated by metaphor and triggering embryonic formal actions such as smooth or suspended time, extended temporal lengths, and especially the procedure of strophic variation from which the Wagnerian leitmotif would later emerge.

These deviations—also present in Schubert, Liszt, and Chopin—accelerated the dissolution of the tonal system, alongside the predominance of repetition and contrasting discursive emphasis, erected during the Baroque. It would seem that the inclusion of other perceptual modes within musical representation compensates total energy, generating a conglomerate less hierarchized by one mode or another.

The integration of the “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) in Richard Wagner’s opera in turn prefigures the emergence of the cinematic concept. While during the silent film era theaters resonated with numerous musicians and orchestras, scientists of the 1930s endeavored to decipher the interaction of the senses. Low sounds turned red into brown; high sounds transformed it into orange and yellow. These correlations—already explored by Alexander Scriabin’s color organ (Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, Op. 60)—were not the product of speculative interest but of a transcendental one.

The same drive guides Eisenstein to outline a dialectical approach to film form that amplifies parameters toward representational effects proper to dramatic action, constructed through sequential rhythm, direction, and trajectory in shot composition. Perhaps in the music Prokofiev composed for the twenty-one segments of Alexander Nevsky, one can apply the phrase with which the director himself explains his aims:

“Musical and visual imagination is not in reality measurable through strictly representational elements. If one speaks of deep and genuine relations and proportions between music and image, it can only be with reference to the relations between their fundamental movements—that is, between their compositional and structural elements (…)” (Eisenstein, 1942)

According to Erik Kandel, the concept of cinema is based on a polyphonic impression composed of two voices: a film made of total darkness in the interstitial moment between frame and frame, and of light and color “as transmitted by the eyes together with a collectively and ancestrally generated perception, activated by the content of images” (Kluge, 2011).

Dream and wakefulness together. With the addition of the sonic dimension, the cinematic principle becomes the fact of the image as place, collective memory, and the phonation of the sign as action.

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