LESSONS in the SHADOWS of DEATH by Laasonen Belgrano, Price, Hjälm, Carlsson Redell, Ideström

The research project 'Lessons in the Shadows of Death' explores and exposes an almost lost tradition of public mourning - the Art of Lamentation. The project follows the structure of the 17th century musical genre 'Leçons de Ténèbres' – traditionally composed as vocal ‘lessons’ performed during Easter week contemplating the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and based on the Biblical Lamentations. The overall purpose is to create and promote an intra-active 'grief-entangled' music practice in relation to public mourning and wounds of loss. Previous artistic research on vocal mad scenes, lamentations and Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano 2011) and performance philosophical explorations of apophenia and autopoesis (Price 2017) has since 2019 merged and developed into a growing archive investigating ‘ornamentation-as methodology’. The primary aim of this project is to transform the ornamented music and words of Michel Lambert’s nine Leçons de Tenebres from 1661 into nine video-essays. Together with an international network of artists and scholars we will bring the 17th century musical mourning to a contemporary Jerusalem – a city which lives as a symbol of any falling, wounded and embodied space-time. The project reconfigures the Art of Lamentation as a living practice for a wounded world in need of re-learning how to attend to existential consciousness and communal grief.The research project 'Lessons in the Shadows of Death' explores and exposes an almost lost tradition of public mourning - the Art of Lamentation. The project follows the structure of the 17th century musical genre 'Leçons de Ténèbres' – traditionally composed as vocal ‘lessons’ performed during Easter week contemplating the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and based on the Biblical Lamentations. The overall purpose is to create and promote an intra-active 'grief-entangled' music practice in relation to public mourning and wounds of loss. Previous artistic research on vocal mad scenes, lamentations and Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano 2011) and performance philosophical explorations of apophenia and autopoesis (Price 2017) has since 2019 merged and developed into a growing archive investigating ‘ornamentation-as methodology’. The primary aim of this project is to transform the ornamented music and words of Michel Lambert’s nine Leçons de Tenebres from 1661 into nine video-essays. Together with an international network of artists and scholars we will bring the 17th century musical mourning to a contemporary Jerusalem – a city which lives as a symbol of any falling, wounded and embodied space-time. The project reconfigures the Art of Lamentation as a living practice for a wounded world in need of re-learning how to attend to existential consciousness and communal grief.

THROUGH ''Nothing' and ''Nothingness'' in relation to expanded sensing

They sat by the table. Silent. A packet of tissues on the clean surface. As if should be. No words. Nothing to tell. silence. Stories on hold. Held. Hard. Wanted nothing else than dying. Nothing else than disappear. Forgetting. Be forgotten.

We can not start from nothing. If Rene Descartes and the Italian Futurists proved anything, it is that 'starting afresh with no traditional luggage' is a way of smuggling some very old prejudices over the border, un-noticed even to one's self. An artist
or thinker can not start from nothing for the same reason that they can not jump if they are floating in space.

Nevertheless, there is value in starting with as close to nothing as possible. If one marches into unknown territory armed with a theory, the theory will to a large extent determine what can be observed, heard, or otherwise sensed. This is a fact so commonplace that it applies in the realms of spirituality, art and poetry (William Blake, 'A Vision of the Last judgement, 1810, Erdman, 565-6) and also contemporary physics: ''Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is theory which decides what can be observed. [Albert Einstein, to Werner Heisenberg during his 1926 Berlin lecture, quoted in Salam, 1990].

We recognise the cognitive point that there is no 'view from nowhere' (Nagel, 1986), and that it is very likely impossible to obtain intellectual knowledge from no perspective whatsoever (Nietzsche, 1887, III:12). Even so, it is quite possible to minimise the 'merely subjective' perspective by non-cognitive means: this is what mystics, artists, and musicians have been doing for millennia. Given that our
project is very much concerned with expanded sensing, it seems obvious that the less theoretical baggage we carry, then the more we can sense of the territory we wish to explore.

We have found the ornamentation methods we have developed assist us in approaching something like a 'cloud of unknowing': by starting with the bare sonic minimum of the interval between two notes and allowing them to develop with as little egoic or conscious direction as possible, soundscapes emerge which are new and surprising to the participants. They often emerge 'as if from nothing'. The Christian might call it 'grace', materialists might call it 'the self-organising properties of physical forces'. Both of those are local perspectives. Both are valuable, and there are innumerable other perspectives such as the Tao, the hand of Fate, the Muses, apophenia, glossolalia, the dance of Shiva. Nietzsche's avowed (and contestable) atheism is instructive in this regard: ''There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity' be.'' (Nietzsche, 1887, GM; III:12). We aim to push the point further than eyes and seeing and the observation of 'things'.
Hearing, and having 'as many ears as possible on the project' is our point of departure, but the expansion of the senses to include somatic, kinaesthetic, and other inner experiences including the 'spiritual' is of course crucial to a rigorous mapping of the territories of Lamentation.

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