ORCHESTRA FUTURO (in progress)
Orchestra Futuro might be a methodology or a publishing project or a record label or an educational project or a hobby involving amateur musicianship, clumsiness, failure, and beauty. Orchestra Futuro treats composition and collective music-making as a laboratory for radical approaches to art-making, working with performances, workshops, song-writing, and memes.
Orchestra Futuro employs deliberate amateurism as a weapon to fight the work ethic, embodying alternative modes of being in the world outside, or after, the capitalist imperatives of reproduction and production. Deliberate amateurism can be seen as an experimental methodology designed to investigate the precious potentiality for otherness embedded in failure and awkwardness: failure as a critique of the status quo, failure as the embodiment of a future more worth living in. This aestheticâs building blocks are mistakes and contexts in which they can beautifully flourish. Through the celebration of failure, Orchestra Futuro aims to conjure and accelerate the transition towards a future in which the work ethic is no more and human activity can blossom unbridled by the need to specialise, professionalize, monetize.It is currently being run by Marcello Enea Newman in collaboration with Federico Antonini.
ORCHESTRA FUTUROMANIFESTO
I.Orchestra Futuro exists to explore the expressive potential of deliberately amateurish art.
II.Orchestra Futuro exists to tear down the barriers to entry to collective music-making.
III.Orchestra Futuro is based on the acknowledgement that the primary purpose of music is the happiness of those who play and appreciate it.
IV.Orchestra Futuro rejects the myth of genius.
V.Orchestra Futuro sees talent and virtuosity as the mere conformity to prescriptive and reductionist parameters of what constitutes a musician.
VI.A musician is whoever wants to be one.
VII.Orchestra Futuro does not allow its musicians to make mistakes intentionally.
VIII.Orchestra Futuro rejects the work ethic, professionalism, specialization. Free time must be free.
IX.Orchestra Futuro celebrates association, friendship, love, pleasure. The present is a desert made of pointless obligations, the future a paradise unknown.
October, 2018
Newman performs Baldessari sings Lewitt, OF#000 (2018)Building on a reading of â60s and â70s conceptual art as methodology, NpBsL is the 11th of a series of homages and reworks of LeWittâs Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969), started by John Baldessariâs 1972 clumsy musical rendition. Among others, Mario Garcia Torresâ mute karaoke video and Toom Tragelâs transcription have contributed to the construction of NpBsLâs perspective.
Tracklist:2.Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
3.Irrational judgements lead to new experience.
5.Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
9.The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.
11.Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions, but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.
21.Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.
24.Perception is subjective.
29.The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.
32.Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.
33.It is difficult to bungle a good idea.
NpBsL is a musical arrangement commissioned to Marcello Enea Newman by Federico Antonini.It was performed for the first time on the Steinway grand piano at Casa Mahler, during the public programme of the Artistâs Books Residency organised by Mahler & LeWitt Studios and Viaindustriae in Spoleto (PG), September 2018.
The booklet (link) is printed in 300 copies and published by Viaindustriae PublishingISBN: 978-88-97753-47-6Erspamer and Marino play Newman, OF#001 (2019)Orchestra Futuroâs second release, Erspamer and Marino play Newman (EaMpN), is a multidisciplinary work at the intersection between experimental pedagogy and classical music. Newman has been teaching guitar to Erspamer and Marino since September and documenting the process through repeated recordings of two short compositions wrote specifically for them. The series of recordings showcase the expressive potential of clumsiness in the beginnersâ performance, which introduces elements of discontinuity in compositions otherwise characterised by repetition. This feature supports the listener in identifying beauty in lack of mastery and potentially opens up the world of published classical music to new categories of musicians and composers. EaMpN is an ode to amateurism and awkwardness, a critique of the work ethic and the intuitive connection in capitalism between success and profit, and preliminary study for the anthem of an alternative, and better world.Raggiungere un accordo maggiore, OF#002 (2019)Orchestra Futuro wants to re-read the theme of the attempt and failure in a performance for three musicians in a methodological and pedagogical key. As a metaphor of the three red balls of Baldessari: one from behind to the other, at regular intervals marked by a metronome, playing a note at the same time, they will try to play *a* major triad (the center of a major chord) without any help if not by listening one to the other, and learning from the mistakes just made. The adversity of working conditions, resizes and questions the professionalism of the musicians themselves. The sequence of dissonant tonal conformations is the main body of the performance.
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