Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

The return to pure form, devoid of references to texts, images or links to other languages, is for Lucia Ronchetti the cornerstone of Absolute Music, which is under her direction.

Absolute Music is the felicitous Wagnerian definition that over time has taken on a meaning quite opposite to that intended by the great musician in 1846. And if for Richard Wagner the mere thought of being able to separate signifier and signified, form and content, is a heresy, in the sense assumed as the premise of the 68th International Festival of Contemporary Music, music is absolute insofar as it is sound detached from every other connection, image, or memory.

Anyone – if Euterpe is distracted – can produce a sound that will find the possibility for representation, but only the Absolute unleashes the will to plumb its most extreme and profound mystery, an aulòs with nothing to support a translation from one language to another. And so – with Euterpe, the muse, urging us on – we ascend the scale of sounds and explore it in all its purity, with the wisdom of the expert, the attention of the connoisseur, and above all the passion of the listener.

Music, Ronchetti tells us – turning Wagner on his head – is an art that is enclosed within itself, in direct relationship with the spirit, that needs nothing but the truth of those who compose, perform and enjoy it. Stripped of similitudes, associations, content, narratives, only the essential, the absolute, remains. Among the arts, it is the only one capable of floating in the ether, of breaching the categories of space and time.

Invisible, like all that is sacred.
Hieratic fixed star of humanity.
Meditative instrument of elevation and purification.

Ronchetti’’s four-year term comes to an end with a programme of the highest level, which is distinguished by the sophistication of the chosen sections – POLYPHONIES, ASSOLO, LISTENING/HEARING, SOUND STRUCTURES, ABSOLUTE JAZZ, COUNTERPOINTS, SOLO ELECTRONICS, PURE VOICES, MUSICA RESERVATA – whose underlying binding element is nothing other than absolute music.

In this incredible journey to the very limits of music, Jazz improvisation finds assonances in sixteenth-century Venice with the practice of counterpoint in the mind; still in Venice, in the places of pain and suffering, at the hospitals of the Derelitti, the Incurabili, the Mendicanti and the Pietà, we discover pure instrumental music flourishing; and again in Venice, in the Basilica di San Marco, in a temporal co-presence, no fewer than three Stabat Mater are set alongside one another.

The important in-depth RICERCARE research section is made possible thanks to the Historical Archive of La Biennale di Venezia – ASAC, at whose Library the young musicologists of the Biennale College Musica have been called to moderate conversations with the protagonists of the Festival in meetings open to the public. And just as the performance of music requires a recording medium to bear witness to the here and now of a performance, in the same way this invaluable catalogue embodies the essence and commitment of the entire Biennale for the success of the 68th International Festival of Contemporary Music.