Sergio Armaroli: Mahler (in a) Cage | Casetta di composizione
Gruenrekorder
The booklet included with the physical CD release of Mahler (in/a) Cage, the latest addition to Gruenrekorder's Field Recording Series, provides helpful context for the recording. In the “Preludio,” the work is described as a “possible reconstruction of a hypothetical and natural soundscape, within Mahler's music or rather his musical imaginary following some archetypal signals (e.g. cowbells, birdsongs).” Even more helpful are notes by Alessandro Camnasio, credited as the sound engineer for Italian sound artist Sergio Armaroli's project. Referring to the process by which details at the site were first captured and then subjected to shaping in the studio, he states that de-noising processing was used to purge the field recordings of car and machinery noises in order to “recreate a soundscape closer to the one that Mahler probably heard during his stays in Dobbiaco.” Further to that, water sounds were coloured with resonances tuned to specific frequencies from Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) and the soundscape sculpted to reconstruct “Mahler's subjective listening experiences in those places.”
Described in simpler terms, Mahler (in/a) Cage appears to be an attempt to fashion a facsimile of the outdoors setting Mahler immersed himself within Dobbiaco (Toblach in German) in Northern Italy during the period from 1909 to 1911 when he composed his final works. Adding to that, some semblance of the composer's inner experience is incorporated too. Armaroli even went so far as to schedule the field recordings to be gathered over three days in August 2020, the same time of the year when Mahler resided in Dobbiaco to compose. The recording thus offers a striking re-imagining in soundscape form of the physical environment he was exposed to and the inner states he experienced in response to it during his stay.
Unfolding across seven parts, the seventy-four-minute soundscape emerges, appropriately enough, from silence at dawn with rustlings of the land, wind, and bird noises gradually fleshing out the sound field. Moving from vibrant activity on land, we're submerged for the five minutes of “Variant and shape of water” before returning to the surface for further explorations of the area, encounters with wildlife during “Zoo: animal symbolism,” and eventual arrival at the actual composition house (and thus metaphorically inside Mahler's mind) in “Casetta di composizione”.
Admittedly, the cowbells that emerge within the densely layered second part, “Characters,” more evoke Mahler's sixth symphony, composed during the summers of 1903 and 1904, than Das Lied von der Erde, created from 1908 to 1909. That detail notwithstanding, the sound element will evoke Mahler for aficionados of his work, regardless of the specific work or time period with which it's associated. I'll also confess that—at the risk of seeming too much of a literalist—there are moments where I would have liked to have heard slightly more direct reference to Mahler's music in the soundscape, a desire cued perhaps by Camnasio's statement that certain key pitches and thematic elements in Das Lied von der Erde were used to enrich the material. While those pitches do audibly hover in the background of “The long look: forever \ Ewig,” a faint trace of the singer's repeated “Ewig” at the end of “Der Abschied” (“The Farewell”), for example, might have been worked into the soundscape's closing section to render the connection more explicit. Even so, Armaroli's creation does impress as an inspired, original, and imaginative homage to the composer.December 2021