Samnites, sound and situations

For the second consecutive year, Antonio Forte has been in residence with us in Collemacchia, Italy. The project that he is developing involves him in deep place-based research, into the Samnite culture.

Antonio is recording, composing and making sound that comes together in public performance-lectures.

In his blog, he says ”Pietre di più. Note di più.

More stones. More notes. While thinking about the time I spent at Pietrabbondante, staring at the stones found in the walls there, I could not help but marvel at the non-uniformity of the shapes. They seemed to be improvisations, frozen in time; polygons placed without any previous forethought, but everyone perfectly aligned in their relationship to those others directly tangent. Purposeful purposelessness. No two stones were the same, yet they all worked together to achieve a certain harmony that has lasted millennia. I’ve been so inspired by these robust structures, and what they have come to symbolize for me, that I’ve started to transcribe the shapes into just that: multiple harmonies based on tangential, unique shapes.

I began with a single image I had taken of the polygonal stone walls. Each polygon represents one repeated melodic “cell.” That is, as ones eyes trace the edges of a stone, each corner will be a different pitch, and the distance between two corners will determine the rhythmic value of each pitch. To figure this all out I traced each of the polygons and began superimposing the individual shapes onto the Circle of Fifths (a music symbol/tool used in both music theory and practice: basically, all twelve tones of the modern Western musical scale spaced evenly around a circle, like the twelve numbers of a clock, or the twelve colors on an artist’s color wheel).”

This work is a fascinating fusion of music, mathematics and place, leading to pieces that may for example be composed for string quartet, but will be loosely notated and with accompanying written instructions.

Images
Top: work in progress, Antonio Forte, 2024
Middle: Antonio Forte performing new work, The Museum of Loss and Renewal, Collemacchia, Italy, 2024
Bottom: work in progress, Antonio Forte, 2024