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.

Hello Anna, Elisabeth, Liv and Rick and thank you for your patience.
These recording are at present totally 'uncooked' by any studio
process but I thought it best to let everybody hear them that way
during the selection.

You are all busy people and I hope this will not take much more than
two hours of your time, but the task now is for everybody to select
nine or ten 'resonance points'' in the sonic travelogue. Some of the
street-noise clips are, quite frankly...boring!...but I include them
because as Warhol said, some things can be boring in an interesting
way if you stay with them. I don't want to get Freudian but suspect
there is something to be done with the 'latent' and 'manifest' content
of these sections. The conversations, Rick's reading and subsequent
discussions, the political polemic from our Palestinian guide, street
interviews etc I have cut mercilessly. We have long versions of all of
them which are fascinating but excessive for our present schedule.
Also we have full recordings of Elisabeth's and Hannah's singing which
will be crucial to the 'final cut'.

For now, the best way I can think of to proceed is to make a
comfortable space, grab some headphones and a coffee, and set a
stopwatch running on your phone. When listening, just make a note of a
time when something strikes you as significant eg. ''Hannah's song at
34 mins 50 sec to 34:60''.

One of the reasons I included so much seemingly random and
'background' material, whispers, footsteps and so on is that I did not
want to pre-judge what YOU might find significant. What would be
hyper-helpful would be if Elisabeth can gather your responses and she
can let me have them anonymously. It will be interesting to see what
emerges as patterns of convergence and difference between the choices.
And if something strikes you as especially important (or problematic),
by all means write a comment next to the time of the snippet. We have
so much high quality material to work with here, and I can not thank
you all enough for your generosity of spirit!

With Warmest Wishes, Mark.

JERUSALEM SOUNDSCAPES

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