Val Camonica pieces: Stile I, II, III

David YOUNG
Born 1969, Brisbane, Australia

Val Camonica pieces: Stile I, II, III (1995)

guitar, violoncello

Stile I, II and III is the first in a series of five of Young's works designated Val Camonica pieces. From the taut fabric of the duo and trio, to the expanded ensembles of the later works, the writing is grounded by an insistence on the gritty solemnity of cello timbres. In some sense, maybe the recurring `weight´ of this sound points out the strain, the burden, of acquiring archaeological knowledge-for all the Val Camonica pieces recollect fragments from the vast array of ancient rock incisions found in northern Italy's Camonica Valley.

The prehistoric rock art concentrated in this alpine region accrued over a period of 8000 years or so; cosmological, figurative, and cartographic motifs are featured, in some locations forming monumental hunting and ritual `scenes´. Since the 1950s, the imagery from thousands of rock surfaces has been `catalogued´, in a vast, on-going project of transcription and classification. The leading exponent of this project is Italian archaeologist Emmanuel Anati, whose publications on the subject include copious tables; graphs; maps; magnifications and statistics, as he extracts from the Valley's astonishing accumulation of signs `precise information´ on the origins of European civilisation. Indeed, in Anati's view, such methodical study of prehistoric rock art can yield an `archive´ for a `total history´ of human origins, taking in at once the development of artistic creativity, of language, and philosophical thought.

Where Anati's archaeology has pursued the Val Camonica motifs as signs with a universal, narrative meaning, Young's interest lies in their capacity and interest as signs for musical performance, as it is structured and encultured in notated parts. With titles that quote from the archaeologist's analytical frameworks (his chronology of styles, for example, invoked by Stile I, II, III), this series of compositions draws variously on Anati's schematic representations-redacting; abstracting; charting yet again the stylised human and animal forms, the weathered lines and designs.

To appropriate this material for the writing of music is to pay tribute to Anati's prodigious documentation, while also undermining the immobility imposed by such a calculated, `encyclopaedic´ approach. Lifted from the conceptual time of chronology, re-composed and rehearsed for performance, the incisions are in effect restored to experiential time: to the vivid transience of gestures and reverberations, simultaneous with the reflexive times of a body's breathing; shivering; scratching.

Still open to the alpine air, so exhuberantly confounding historical time, the Val Camonica imagery also resists definitive interpretation, and Young's compositions celebrate this resilient variety and intricacy. Eventually, his writing all but relinquishes conventional notation, musical language eroded to curious marks and signs that depend on the imagination and discretion of each performer for `translation´. That is, in the final page of animali (the final work of the series), the `originary calligraphy´ of the rock art is literally transcribed onto the page. With pictographs layered over the score, the neatness and formality of the composer's own schema are undone, as emblems, creatures and figures break through and boldly enliven the strata of the stave.

 . . .  Inch and inch met or met scale or stamp, stone or paper drawer, rent or rent needs address excel wood and wood and only stick out either, by a place but not more sudden when and all July.
--Gertrude Stein, Emp Lace

Program note © Cynthia TROUP