davide mosconi: mosconi wagner

In one of the last projects he conceived, interrupted by his premature death in 2002, Davide Mosconi chose to absolutize as "concrete" sonic data the complete cycle of Wagner's Ring. Mosconi, an artist equally divided between the sonic universe and the visual sphere, perhaps could not resist the temptation of picking up the torch -- to intentionally fan the flame -- of he who made the Gesamtkunstwerk one of the theoretical groundings of his futuristic ideology and therefore inspired a never-more-to-be-soothed utopia in the phenomenology of contemporary arts. It is not surprising that even John Cage in one of his rare but precisely aimed iconoclastic incursions intended to refer to the Wagnerian tetralogy to ensure the translocation of this speculative object to a metalinguistic mimesis: in 1987, with the complicity of the director Frank Scheffer, he reduced Wagner's Ring to a short film in which The Ring of the Nibelung's prologue and three days breeze by in a single sequence accelerated to a spasm, finally approaching the approximate duration -- a detail not irrelevant -- of his celebrated silent piece (4:24 vs. 4'33"). MOSCONI WAGNER shares, by analogy, a similar metamusical inclination, but, opposed to Cage's openly negative paradigm -- which nullifies the context by nullifying the text -- accepts a confrontation with the hypertrophic Ring concept, which it subsumes in its entirety. Mosconi, by a rigorous procedure of montage following a logic of stratification, is perhaps trying to obtain a paroxysm of unheard-of violence in the musical material, nourishing itself on Wagner's music -- which is still structurally perceived as such -- almost like an organic lymph. He pushes to an extreme limit all the aesthetic and ideological pulsations that come together in Wagner's concept of music drama and react like a muddle of inextricable opposing forces. Digipak CD limited to 300 copies; includes full-color booklet containing photos by Mosconi from the "Polvere" series as well as liner notes by Gabriele Bonomo, who supervised the final mix of MOSCONI WAGNER using the recorded material prepared by the composer and following his prescriptions.