Visit to the Lowe Art Museum / Beyond the Sounds of Silence: Latin American Artists
Beyond the Sounds of Silence: Latin American Artists
https://www.lowe.miami.edu/exhibitions/current-upcoming/beyond-sound-of-silence/index.html
Link to the exhibit
https://sway.office.com/tKeeUNKBbuBkvHx4?ref=Link
In the beginning was sound. Not only is hearing the first sense to awaken in humans and the last to be extinguished, but “oscillation, resonance, rhythmicity and coherence are properties of the brain” and structure the consciousness that organizes the changing image of reality.[1] Even beyond the spectrum of what is audible to our species, sound is primordial.[2] Everything that exists, whether in the dark immensity of the waters or in the sidereal universe, vibrates and resonates at a certain frequency.[3] In the depths of the seas, acoustic energy crosses long distances by traveling through a sound channel called SOFAR, which allows marine creatures to communicate.[4]
Pythagoras had already imagined the music produced by the rotation of the planets millennia before the Voyager 1 and 2 recordings and other NASA spacecraft demonstrated that our universe is not silent.[5] This Greek philosopher, who organized knowledge into the four “mathemata”—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music—and who honored Orpheus because he was able to move the kingdom of Hades with his lyre, believed that if we do not hear the sound coming from the circular motion of the stars it is because we live immersed in their sonority. And certainly, the waves that pass through the “thin, electrically charged gas pervading the near-vacuum of outer space”
Questions
1. According to Pitagoras, why don't we hear the sound coming from the circular motion of the stars?
(min.6, sound of chililitli or gong)
"And certainly, the waves that pass through the “thin, electrically charged gas pervading the near-vacuum of outer space” have been transformed into sounds that contain the music of other worlds.[6] Nezahualcóyotl, built a pyramid dedicated to the Tloque Nahuaque, the invisible or unknown God. At the highest level of the pyramid, he invoked his presence using an instrument called “chililitli,” a copper disc that was sounded four times a day calling the king to prayer, and which “gave its name to this temple and its high tower.”
2. After watching the above video and reading the above statement, in which way has sound been the music that connects with other worlds?
"Perhaps even more than silence, which is never absolute (as John Cage demonstrated in his iconic piece 4’33, known as Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds of Silence), certain sounds contain the power to connect us to what is invisible, or to what has not been given enough visibility."
3. What does it mean, as explained above, that "certain sounds contain the power to connect us to what is invisible"?
"Among the sound instruments we include a parallel section for works—created by artists such as Enrique Ramírez or Cecilia Paredes—that evoke ancestral acoustic traditions and their rituals, reaffirming the presence of indigenous legacies through the fusion of diverse modes of contemporary practices and technologies. There are also pieces that contain sound documentations of musical practices that mirror the social abyss separating the descendants of slaves from the conquistadors. This is the case of Ivan Grilo´s piece, which exposes the tensions behind syncretism inspired by the thinker Boaventura do Santos. Vivian Cacurri’s pieces arise from the conjunction of materials recollected during walks in urban areas and objects that evoke pieces of instruments of African origin, such as the samba bells, which were at some point subject to disdain or made invisible."
4. The reappearance of these objects in art, mentioned above, "empowers the resonance of the past in the creative forms of the present." Explain the statement.
5. Based on the work we do in class, in which we use no music, how does these new ideas about sound, exposed in the exhibit, help us understand the creation of dance without music?
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