By Ricardo Resende
For Walter Smetak, performing music is a form of madness.1
Siri, a nickname from high school, is a musician who has always studied music and has always lived music. He has worked with music since he was a child playing and making sounds out of cans. Any can that fell into his hands was transformed into something that could be extracted into sound.
His intelligence in inventing soundscapes comes from this, from his childlike playfulness in creating with everything that aroused his curiosity with any sound or rhythm: the pronunciation of words, the sounds emitted by men, animals and the natural elements of the world, such as water and the wind in the rustling of leaves on trees and in the undergrowth.
Music became his toy for making the art of sounds. Sounds that can come from a pot of water.
Siri hasn’t found his place in contemporary music, not even in experimental music: in fact, the ceiling is low for him, because he set out to go beyond the limits of understanding so-called “traditional” harmony and “conventional” music.
If he hasn’t found his place in this segment, he has found shelter in the visual arts with his freedom to work with musical textures, musical form, abstraction and the “surreality” produced by combined sounds and noises.
With instruments, he frees them from their premature death when they are no longer played. They are dismantled and transformed into something else.
The first works were musical performances, then installations and sound environments. Then came the sculptural pieces with sound, and then the “kisses” without sound. Collaged pieces made from new, old or disused instruments that are given a new lease of life.
Now the sculptures are made of “pieces” of music. Siri works with parts of piano keyboards and strings. He creates objects with the fragments of musical instruments as if they were indigenous headdresses.
Siri gives them a long life by transforming them into sculptural objects, comparable only to those created by the master Smetak in the musical environment of Salvador in the forties, fifties and sixties. For those who create, compose and perform music, the most abstract artistic language of all, because it is neither tangible nor visible, but is heard and felt physically in its vibrations, it is a form of madness.
I would add the uncontrollable to this form of madness. Everything that penetrates the human body and emanates from it, music, without the possibility of hindrance. The most complete of the arts, because there is no one who is not touched by music. Even if we don’t hear it, we can feel its vibrations penetrating our bodies. That’s what madness does: we create sounds and listen to them.
Ricardo Resende, Curator
- Walter Smetak, musician, researcher and teacher, was born in Switzerland in 1913 and lived in Brazil fleeing the wars since 1937. He was a professor at the School of Music of the Federal University of Bahia. He died in 1984 in Salvador. ↩︎
