When classical music stops being classical

In a way, we could say classical music has always been connected to the social elites, inasmuch as it’s them who have had power, money and namely leisure time to accurately cultivate themselves in disciplines that are not directly connected with survival, such as literature or painting. Maybe that’s the reason why still today the words ‘classical music’ could inspire a certain feeling of intricacy, boredom or demureness.

But that argument is not valid anymore. Maybe the only advantage of living in a mass society is the fact that we have enough technological resources and a portion of free time that allow us to venture in this bad supposedly inaccessible world of classical music.

Aware of that, some well-known figures of the classical music world are nowadays trying to deny that premise. In the audiovisual field, we especially acclaim the task done in 1996 by the British conductor Sir Simon Denis Rattle, who wrote and presented ‘Leaving Home’, a seven episode arts documentary awarded with a British Academy of Film and Television Award (BAFTA) for Best Arts Programme.

In each of the seven episodes, Rattle conducts the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and combines the chief musical developments of the 20^th century that it is playing with explanations about the historical background and suggesing images. Only knowing about the politically and socially convulse context of the 20^th century can the viewer understand why and how this ‘odd’ music came out.

In fact, the adjective ‘classical’ is almost opposite to the message that ‘Leaving Home’ wants to transmit. The ‘standard’ classical music of the 18^th and 19^th centuries (Mozart, Hadyn, Beethoven) is actually the vanishing point for the music composed in the last century or, at least, the basis from which these last composers depart. Rhythm, melody, texture and dynamics were almost forced to change in a world that was also creating new running patterns. The music from the last century is perhaps a way to understand the turning point of the 20^th century history or, at least, one of the best things it has brought.   

Marina Hernández

A history of human culture

Once upon a time 30.000 years ago, there were some human in a cave of southern France, who devoted their time to art. The documentary Cave of forgotten dreams captures the more ancient creation of humanity housed in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave. The really profound essence of the pictures lies in the perception, because this art transcends the visual. The director Werner Herzog highlights the importance of sensorial implications to sense the aura of the energetic, mobile and audible paintings of Chauvert’s cave. The documentary becomes a travel to the Palaeolithic’s art nature. After all, the cave turns to time capsule with which it is possible to communicate.   

Since Chauvet’s discovery in 1994, the entrance has been constrained to preserve integral the paintings away from overexposure. Herzog gains exclusive permission to film inside the cave, which can be arising as a gap between two irreconcilable imaginaries. However, the director suggests a variety of parallelisms between the cave’s representations and the contemporaries. In this way, the cave walls are almost like a form of proto-cinema: when the light is projected on the images generates the animation of the paintings and consequently it creates the sensation of movement.

The paintings are stirred and acquire a different life. Besides, the image of Fred Astaire dancing with his shadow establishes an extravagantly communicative bridge between Hollywood dances and the images of the cave. The past-present relationship is terminated because of these pictorial images such remote emerges a sense of familiarity.

Hergoz found this cave as the dawn of human intelligence and sensitivity. The documentary enhances the artistic value and, above all, the beauty of the paintings, driving-related prejudices primitivism. Jean Clottes, one of the scientists studying the cave, explains that the concept “homo sapiens” (“men who know”) is inadequate to describe the human species and he considers the most successful concept “homo spiritualis” (“spiritual being”).

Even on the premise that a reconstruction of the past is impossible, the goal of Cave of forgotten dreams is to delve into the stories of the past. The imagination is the mechanism for this retrocession: through the sensations transmitted by the cave, historical scenes can be reconstructed. The art is a language par excellence emotionally able to tell what happened. And the virtue of art is that leaves a room for the imagination in which we can incorporate our baggage and interpretations. So, although the exact content of the cave could have been disappeared as its members, it still remains the capacity to speculate on the meaning of the paintings. And this, finally, helps in recovering the quintessence of this space.

Inhabiting the inhospitable

Ask yourself what proportion of time in your life have you been walking on asphalt and what proportion of time have you been treading a green or sandy ground. If you think you’ve spent more time walking on asphalt, you should probably watch Human Planet.

Announced in 2007 and first released on TV last 2011, this 8-part television documentary series was produced by the BBC with co-production from Discovery and BBC Worldwide. It won 2 BAFTA Television Craft awards among 7 nominations.

Human Planet basically shows how still today some people are really connected to nature conditions to survive. To demonstrate that, the production teams based at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol and BBC Wales recorded 70 stories around inhospitable lands of 40 countries in which humans still inhabit.

All the material was divided following a criterion of environment type. That means each of the eight chapters are recorded in different places on Earth, but the life of people living in those locations depends extremely on one of these topics: oceans, deserts, arctic, jungles, mountains, grasslands, rivers and cities. You might be surprised there’s a ‘cities’ episode: its function is to create a contrast with the seven chapters that precede it.

The stunning quality of the recording, accompanied by the photography work of Timothy Allen, is not all the impression that remains after watching them. The series has an anthropological message that makes you wonder not only why do these group of people still exist and why nature is inherent to their habits and culture, but also why we are not that connected to nature anymore, why our current society mistreats, ignores and overexploits it the way it does, if the basic vital functions of any human in the planet depend on it, and that includes us.

Marina Hernández 

Hopefully!

According to Greek legend, Pandora is the first woman on earth. The legend says that she receives a present from the gods and she was told never to open. Incited by her curiosity, Pandora opened it and all evil contained in the box spread over the earth. There was one thing that lay at the bottom: hope. Although it took time to scientists to accept that human beings come from Africa, we all know that it is humanity’s origin. If I were to locate Pandora’s box in somewhere on earth, I will definitely chose Africa. Because hope and  the beginning are actually there.

From savannas to dense forest, all landscapes of Africa are full of rich diversity. Africa is the habitat to many singular species and there is a curious relation to discover between animals and vegetation. Absolutely, in this place there are wildlife vestiges and the remains of human nature. Africa - Eye to eye with the unknown is a new David Attenborough’s series (2013) filmed over four years around the entire continent. The documentary is a travel to places like the mysterious circles in the Kalahari, giant-gentle giraffes fights, monkeys and snakes inhabit in the dark, the African micro-world and the maternity of shoebills in Zambia. Besides, Attenborough comes face-to-face with a baby rhino along this adventure.

The series are rather an exploration of multiplicity African experience. From the Atlas Mountains to the Cape of Good Hope, Kalahari and Namib deserts and from the jungles of the Congo to Atlantic Ocean. All of these film aims to strike a balance between what people know and what people ignore about a significant part of Africa’s history and stories. Despite of the connection that is obviously linking the whole world, there is a worrying disengagement of knowledge about Africa. Related to this, the final programme is about environmental problems affecting Africa’s natural world and it also demonstrates the work of conservationists across the continent.    

Africa is a clearly concern about the current circumstances of the country and, finally, about the conflict between civilization and wildlife all over the world. However, the film is above all a combination of human life’s origin and hope: along the animal populations emerges the assortment of freedom and wild that Africa is full of.  

99 minutes of silence

We would surely agree on the fact that communication does not strictly depend on words -in fact the Scientifics assure that only the 10% of it consists on verbal language. However, I bet you would not be that convinced that it is possible to find a strong message in a 99 minutes documentary film in which no one says a single word. But it actually is.

Samsara is a no narrative documentary directed by Ron Fricke and produced by Mark Magidson. It was first premiered last 2011 at the Toronto International Film Festival. It took Fricke and Magidson five years time to travel over 25 countries around the world and film suggestive landscapes, rituals, people and places of our present time. It actually has a connection with the title of the work: the Sanskrit word ‘samsara’ means ‘world’ or ‘cyclic existence’, but it is often used to describe worldwide activities.

The official website of the film describes it more accurately: “Expanding on the themes they developed in Baraka (1992) and Chronos (1985), Samsara explores the wonders of our world from the mundane to the miraculous, looking into the unfathomable reaches of man’s spirituality and the human experience. Neither a traditional documentary nor a travelogue, Samsara takes the form of a nonverbal, guided meditation”. Indeed, that is literally reading an image.

A thousand workers chain, buddhist monks, a dump, a Hindu dancer, the fake islands in Dubai, an abandoned house, the subway, street dancers. They all seem random motifs, but the more you enter in it the more you start to find an order. It is actually the viewers who end up improvising a script with their own thoughts that fight with the silence so as to create a personal message.

Some will say it’s not easy to watch, and they might have their comprehensible reasons. Certainly, entertaining, playful or funny would not be the words to describe it. The slow rhythm, combined with the ethereal music by Michael Stearns, Lisa Gerrard and Marcello de Francisci, occasionally create a perturbing feeling. But after watching it you will consider that sometimes active uneasiness can be more worthy than passive amusement.

Marina Hernández 

Genius found their moment

There are 196 countries in the world. But the most problematic and common question is “How many people are in the globe?” The official current world population for mid-year 2013 is estimated at 7,095,217,980. And all this vivid numbers are sharing the same Earth today. The documentary Life in a Day gambles with this apparent evidence to lots of captured moments reported by millions of people filming itself on a single day: July 24, 2010. The result is a big plain suggestion: the planet is a landscape framework of human interconnections. Definitely, it is not a movie; it is rather a human geographic investigation.

Life in a Day travels around a day-to-day routine but made by human involvements: people awake late and people waking up, washing their faces and drinking Indian tea. While a young boy is working in a flower market in Old Delhi, an American teenager is shaving his face for first time. Little normal and ordinary moments are mixed along Australia, England, Zambia, Indonesia, Filipinas, Egypt… stages settle down under all the same stars. “Sometimes the banal details can be the most telling, and the most familiar and touching to view,” said the film director.

The movie criss-crosses loves, fears and things people have in their pockets. There are a few that have coins in their pockets, a man has a gun and an old woman has miniature flags, a lot of curious things, telephones and other technologies… And there is a man with anything in his pocket. What about love? There is someone who love dirt or dirty river smell, another one likes grass, there are men who loves women and women who loves men, someone love the Lord and another one loves doing about 150 miles an hour down a motorway in a good car.

And there is a young girl who loves the word ‘mamihlapinatapa’. Behind this feelings, kids and adults are afraid of any kind of monsters, ghosts or witches, zombies, noises, dogs, lions or Alá and nothing else… There are people who are afraid of growing up or losing a place they like. An old man said that politics scare him more than anything and he wonders if we’re going to have another war. Another one is only scared of himself. There’s someone who has no fear.

Life in a Day shows us, above all, a clear evidence: everyone has something to tell, things to show. Also this experiment gives the chance to the spectator to value current stories that everyone wants to hear and touch. The producers of this film received, the 24^th of July, more than 5,000 hours of footage distributed in more than 80,000 videos from 192 different countries. This is what happens when someone gives the possibility to express to normal people: the extraordinary from the ordinary.

It’s time to continue my journey.

What’s beyond the classical

Usually all we know about an artist is the material he produces. Fortunately, the notorious jazz pianist Bill Evans recorded this conversation with his brother, the music teacher Harry Evans, in which they both divulge and discuss about the creative and self-teaching process in jazz music, and that lets us get a deep message about the philosophy hidden beyond the harmonies.

But, what is jazz? Bill Evans thinks people tend to have misconceptions about it. He defends the idea that jazz is not really a music style, as it is generally considered. He explains that in the XVII century there was a great development of improvisation, but there were no technological means to record it, so the only way to make it remain was musical notation. This technique progressively gained significance, and improvisation ended up being a lost art very seldom practiced by composers.

And jazz resurrected that process. The circumstances in which improvisation revived –the black America of the first 20^th century– made associate the jazz concept with the music style that was developing it, but jazz is really “a process of making one minute’s music in one minute’s time”. Namely, a composer of classical music can take three months to compose one minute’s song, whereas in jazz the creative process is spontaneous.

Evans brothers are very suggestive when they talk about the lack of restrictions in jazz improvisation. No matter how far the musician gets from the original harmonic structure, Bill Evans insists on the fact that there’s no freedom without being in reference to the rules. To be far from something, there must exist something that has to be understood, assimilated and respected.

Only when the theory is deeply understood and combined with an exhaustive practice, it goes to the subconscious part of the brain, and the conscious portion can concentrate in the instantaneous creative process. If you think about it, that is actually similar to learning how to drive a car. At first you have to put your five senses in how you’re driving, but after some months you can talk or listen to the radio while you’re driving.

The Evans are talking about jazz music creation, but if you want they’re also talking about the relation between tradition and innovation, the power of hard training and what freedom is. Their message is deeply inspirational applicable to other disciplines and that’s what make it powerful. That’s actually what makes music powerful. 

Marina Hernández

The emotional intelligence of menstruation

Every month the reproductive system of women is preparing for pregnancy. It starts when the ovum travels throw the fallopian tube toward the uterus. At the same time, the endometrium is formed in the uterus and it becomes full of blood and nutritive fluids. If the female cellule is not fertilized it dissolves in the tube. Since the endometrium is no longer needed it too dissolves away and it flows out of the body throw and opening in the hymen. This is called the menstruation, the natural process of ovum’s life that empowers women to being mothers.

Until very recently, there has not been a movie neither a book about menstruation and this open silent has been very disorienting for woman. In this way, the potent symbol of menstruation is turned to a problematic, impure, harmful and a little bit disgusting red mark. “The moon inside you” is a documentary by Diana Fabiánová about the ignorance and the knowledge in relation to menstrual. The candid voice of reporter could be all women speaking in a deeper attitude about femininity. The main propose is to break down with the scientist, religious, political and social taboos that had avoided women to sincerely appreciate the menstrual cycle.

When Diana was a girl, she learned that a man should never know when she was menstruating. Time passed and she realized that she wants to make sense of the period time, which has nothing about dirt or shame. There are millions of women discretely menstruating because of the “occultation culture” that coats this simple biological function. The same power of female blood that once served to connect women with their sacred is now the source of their isolation. In spite of this, there are still vestiges of a sacred knowledge about menstruation, including tales.

In these sorties, the young woman reaches biological maturity when it exceeds the fear of blood. And this is the point: it is essential encourage women to become aware of their latent power. In sum, “The moon inside you” is a 75 minutes trip to the roots of women as a moon which is not always the same; it is sometimes full and sometimes waning. So, it seems a relaxing trip to the women themselves in order to feel the moon inside them.