Midway this way of life we're bound upon, Inferno
John RODGERS composer John RODGERS uses the formidable sonic resources of the ELISION Ensemble to construct an aural cartography of the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy. Controlled by the uncanny hand of a conductor in the role of Lucifer, the ensemble enacts Dante's journey through hell: live electronics describe the swirling vortex of the damned; strings ape the stifling muteness of the vale of suicides. In the compacted inner recesses of hell a flute and oboe made from ice lock themselves in a grisly embrace as their forms dissolve and their sound is engulfed by silence. Rodgers draws on the rich tapestry of metaphor employed throughout Inferno to create an image of a humanity that seems to take an almost gruesome pleasure in its own dispersal, alienation and despair. Dante's Divine Comedy offers a staggering synthesis of the intellectual, spiritual, cultural and political currents of late medieval Italy. It is the epic poem that describes Europe before the vast momentum of the Renaissance with its ensuing ideological and technological revolutions slowly ushered in the modern age. Interpolating a Ptolomaic cosmography with Christian eschatology, Dante creates a structure that both geographically and metaphysically articulates the journey of Dante's pilgrim towards God. The innate drama of this journey, from the inner recesses of the earth through to the boundless splendor of the heavens, provides the action for most of the poem, whose ultimate purpose is to describe how love acts as the agency through which humanity becomes one with the Universal Will. The extent to which the overpowering unity of the Comedy's vision has been communicated to later centuries is problematic. Cut adrift from Dante's seamless marriage of reason and belief by the paradigm shifts of the Renaissance, later readers have mostly come under the spell of Inferno, the first part of the poem, which describes the journey through the bowels of the earth, wherein dwell the flayed remnants of souls cast forever from God's grace. The image of a recalcitrant humanity, dominated by passions and excess, caught in a never-ending cycle of alienation, depravity and self-imposed despair, has seemingly become a more expressive metaphor for modern experience than its repentant and ecstatic counterparts in Purgatory and Paradise. It is was John Rodgers' declared intention to interpret Inferno using a language and vocabulary that took advantage of the phenomenal sonic resources of Australia's ELISION Ensemble. Fourteen musicians, performing on a range of conventional and constructed instruments, in combination with live and pre-recorded electronics, take on the personalities of various denizens of hell, enacting the scenes Dante describes throughout his journey. The physical conventions of instrumental performance are radically reconfigured and subverted: novel string techniques conjure the eerie silence of the vale where souls who commit suicide reside; a viola and two cellos recreate the episode in Canto VIII where a soul emerges from the slime of the river Styx to question the pilgrim, only to be devoured by his wrathful companions; perhaps most impressively, a flute and oboe made from ice play desolate fragments of sound, slowly disintegrating into fractured multiphonics as the instruments melt, describing the frigid wasteland of ice that is the innermost circle of Hell. Separated from the highly structured apparatus of redemptive belief that frames Dante's work, Rodgers' interpretation concentrates with an almost gleeful perversity on the figures of chaos, horror and atrocity that people Inferno. If the `dark woodŽ that Dante describes at the beginning of his work engulfs all knowable reality, then Rodgers' vision suggests we seek out moments of stark beauty, morbid fascination and doleful resignation within. See also Murray Kane's Dante's Musical Offering 2002 performances: Simon HEWETT conductor, 1999 and 2000 performances: Carl ROSMAN conductor, Performance dates:
The Inferno was jointly commissioned by the 2000 Telstra Adelaide Festival, Arts Queensland and the Australia Council, the Federal Government's arts funding and advisory body. |
Last updated Monday 02 February 2004
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