Peronal background and context
Although I have for a long time valued very highly classical music concerts presented traditionally, in the last few years I have found myself to often be dissatisfied with them. What used to be an incredible fascination for the ritual of the classical music concert, with its silence, absence of words and dimmed lights, turned into a sense of emptiness in the end of many concerts that I experienced, leaving me wanting something more than just ‘art for art’s sake’, something more directly relevant to the lives of both myself and my fellow concert-goers. These same thoughts also started becoming persistent in my development as a performing musician: I would spend weeks, sometimes even months, getting sick about difficult passages in the music I was playing, preparing for competitions and being completely immersed in the mindset that I thought was necessary for that. But at times, some events in the external world – a chat with someone that was struggling with illness, news of violence around the world – would trigger big questions about what the meaning was of all this practicing and studying music: was it really something that could be separated entirely from the outside world? And even if that was the case, was it right that things should be that way? It started to feel, if not downright wrong, at least very silly that something as powerful as classical music would be confined to the limits of concert halls and forbidden to relate directly with problems in the lives of the people that actually went to those concerts, that even if a connection was made, it was supposed to be an entirely private, almost secret event, to be confined in the mind of the listener or of the musician. I felt that, in my practicing, the events I was witnessing found incredible analogues in the music I was playing, as many emotions I was feeling were also present in the scores. This led me to try and make those connections explicit, because I thought that they could help the unspecialized public understand music better and relate to it on a deeper level.
In the context of these reflections, I came to be confronted with increasing frequency with the subject of suicide. Two of the people that are closest to me, one of my best friends and my partner, had to grieve respectively their father and one of their best friends, as both had taken their lives. In trying to support them, I struggled to understand their experience, mostly because of two reasons: firstly, I had never gone through this kind of loss myself; secondly, they had trouble finding someone who would really understand their grief, which from the outside looked different from other kinds of bereavement. I felt like they lived their loss in a very private way – and that this way of grieving was partly due to the fear that others would not understand exactly what made their experience different from the loss due to natural causes: something that I also struggled with, as I could not relate to what they were going through and I felt like I was completely unable to share or mitigate their sorrow. Thus, I tried to go deeper into the emotions they were feeling, with the idea of translating them into a mixed performance with music and acting which I thought would give access to both the public and me to the world of feelings involved in this kind of loss. My friend Clara Scarafia, who had lost her father, agreed to be interviewed about what she felt, and her responses form the basis of the performance I will present in June 2024. With this project, I hope to accomplish at least two goals: first, I want to create a performance that combines words, gestures, and music to explore how a personal story can be shared and universalized; second, I want to learn how to use a narrative-musical association to represent Clara's emotions and her story.
METHODOLOGY
In this artistic research, I try to investigate how social elements can be integrated in a classical music performance. In answering this question, I will also delve into some collateral aspects, such as how a personal story can be relevant universally.
Reading "Handbook of Psychodrama - Psychodramatic Directing Techniques" by Jacob Levy Moreno and Zerka Toeman Moreno, in which different therapeutic approaches are described via transcripts of the authors' own group sessions, served as a major source of inspiration for this study. My research has been mostly philosophical rather than medical, drawing on the ideas and perspectives of this field of psychology to envision a performance that addresses societal challenges directly. So, I will present in the next section of this paper psychodrama, a kind of therapy that employs performance, and which I will use as a tool for creative practice. I will provide a partial definition of psychodrama, explain in detail how it relates to performance, and focus on the psychodramatic concept of ‘Auxiliary Ego’, because it will be the fundament of my vision of the show, and therefore the answer for my Research Question.
In order to assume also how a performance might gain a universal meaning, I will delve deeper into the topic of the social issue that I have chosen in the third section of this essay. The interview I had with Clara, who consented to share her story with me, is another important source for my research. She talked to me about dealing with her inner world following her father's suicide. Through her words, I was able to discover a previously unknown and painful emotional language that helped me understand the core of those universal feelings—feelings that even those who have not gone through the same catastrophe can relate to. I will present to the reader the tool of the interview and its stages, from the direct expression of the person interviewed to an identification of the emotional states. In the same section, I will also deal with the process of matching music and emotions. At the end of the paper it will also be reported the full interview with Clara transcribed.
Afterwards, I will report the results of a pilot project where I have tested a short version of the show. Finally, the concluding section will deal with the designing of the performance in its provvisory form. Specifically, I will bring to the reader’s attention the combination between music-feelings-acting I have envisioned for the performance, motivating my choice.