


The essays focuses on a video by Robert Cahen and Matias Guerra, Imaginary Video Landscape. For a random number of cuts from 14 archive videos, 2017. This short work, presented in some international festivals, is based on Imaginary Landscape n.5 by John Cage (1952), and offers a profound and interesting intersection between the avant-garde and popular music. Moreover, this “dialogue” is articulated and represented in electronic images by the French video-artist Robert Cahen and the Chilean multimedia artist Matias Guerra. The artists conflate their respective video archives: the images and the music produce a “video landscape” intertwining two different musical experiences, two different approaches and identities. The essay offers a critical analysis of this artwork in relation to John Cage’s influence on video-art, the several existing versions of his musical work, Robert Cahen’s musique concrète as well as to Guerra’s multimedia approach and to the composer Jahangir Selimkhanov’s studies and music inspired by Mugam musical tradition in Azerbaigian.



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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Imaginary Video Landscape: John Cage, Mugam Music, Video Art
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Imaginary Video Landscape: John Cage, Mugam Music, Video Art
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19
Imaginary Video Landscape: John Cage, Mugam Music,
Video Art
Sandra Lischi, Università di Pisa
Matias Guerra, artist1




Abstract

    The essays focuses on a video by Robert Cahen and Matias Guerra, Imaginary
    Video Landscape. For a random number of cuts from 14 archive videos, 2017.
    This short work, presented in some international festivals, is based on Imaginary
    Landscape n.5 by John Cage (1952), and offers a profound and interesting
    intersection between the avant-garde and popular music. Moreover, this
    “dialogue” is articulated and represented in electronic images by the French
    video-artist Robert Cahen and the Chilean multimedia artist Matias Guerra.
    The artists conflate their respective video archives: the images and the music
    produce a “video landscape” intertwining two different musical experiences,
    two different approaches and identities. The essay offers a critical analysis of
    this artwork in relation to John Cage’s influence on video-art, the several existing
    versions of his musical work, Robert Cahen’s musique concrète as well as to
    Guerra’s multimedia approach and to the composer Jahangir Selimkhanov’s
    studies and music inspired by Mugam musical tradition in Azerbaigian.

   The correlation between musical research and video art develops on various
levels starting from an electronic intuition, a sort of affinity, between sound and
visual signals: one of the first discoveries made by artists experimenting with
video recording equipment (available on the market since the mid 1960s) was
that ‘images and sound were coming from the same source: images were formed
by tension and frequencies and sound too, at least the electronic ones or those
coming from an electronic equipment. The most important thing was that image
and sound differed only in the way tension and basic frequencies were organized
in time. This unicity was the most interesting discovery’, as Steina and Woody
Vasulka have observed.2 According to Bill Viola: ‘video is closer to sound than to



1
  As an artist and music expert, Matias Guerra co-authored the project with Sandra Lischi and
contributed to the essay by writing its more specifically musical parts and by providing a general
revision.
2
  Steina and Woody Vasulka, interview in Galleria Flaviana, Locarno (Switzerland), October 4,

                                                         Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 33, Fall 2019
                                  Sandra Lischi, Matias Guerra


film or photography, you find the same relation a microphone has with the person
talking. A microphone, and suddenly the voice travels through the room […]. A
dynamic living system, an energy field. There isn’t an instance of discontinuity,
of immobility of time.’3
   The members of the Fluxus movement, in which Nam June Paik and Wolf
Vostell formed, are considered the ‘founding fathers’ of video art; within it the
role of the musical experience goes from desecrating performances, ‘silence’,
noise and disturbance to an openness to chance and to the unpredictable, simple
playfulness. Paik had started as a musician: he played the violin and had written
his university dissertation on Schönberg. Steina Vasulka was a violinist too, Vostell
was a painter, but also author of sculptures and oeuvres that produced sound
effects. Bill Viola himself declared the importance of music at the beginning of
his career; Cahen, too, whom we’ll discuss further subsequently, was educated
as a musician. Among these few examples – of many, even if we limit ourselves
to Fluxus – it is also worth recalling the collaboration between the video artist
Gianni Toti with Cage: the composer realized the sound concept for the video-
poem Tenez Tennis (1992, 15’), based on the sound of tennis balls during a game.
   Considering the relationship between music and video, alongside the
“incubator” of Fluxus outlined briefly here, we might also recall Musique
concrète (a term coined in 1948 by the theorist and composer Pierre Schaeffer).
Fluxus embraced the beginning of video art with ephemeral act poetics, with the
casual combinations and the mocking of myths and rites of the classical show;
Musique concrète, composed without a score and exists only in recording – it’s
in fact from these recordings that sound is re-created, processed and modified
– indicating methods of transformation for the material fixed on tape, methods
that will be applied by video artists to the recording of images. These provide two
different, almost opposing views, since the playful transiency, the dispersion, the
ways of Fluxus are far from the “concrete” (concretely fixed on tape), meditated,
elaborated and structured construction of the research and works of Musique
concrète. The derivations and complex entanglements we briefly mentioned here
form a multidisciplinary and undisciplined whole in video art: music, cinema,
theatre, painting which together transcend definitions and borders.

   An equally complex plot intertwines art experiences like video (long considered
“avant-garde” or “experimental”, with all the necessary terminological
precautions) and popular culture. According to a misleading theory, video
art was born in opposition to television: this is can be undoubtedly true for
single episodes and some counter-informative approaches, but inaccurate
when you consider the several artist residencies in television structures and the


1984, in Catalogue V International Videoart Festival (Locarno, 1984). Repr. in Techno-Graphia
(Locarno: Videoart festival, 1993), 71 (our translation).
3
  Bill Viola quoted in Raymond Bellour, ‘La sculpture du temps (entretien avec Bill Viola)’, Cahiers
du Cinéma 379.1, January 1986, 35-44 (our translation).

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              Imaginary Video Landscape: John Cage, Mugam Music, Video Art


                                                                    Fig. 1: Nam June Paik,
                                                                    Global Groove, 1973




importance of experiences such as those of RAI’s Studio di Fonologia in Milan
or ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française), the public radio
television broadcast in France (in which in fact Pierre Schaeffer developed his
research). This is further troubled by figures such as Ernie Kovacs in the USA,
who put artistic experimentations and popular television genres in dialogue;
or Jean-Christophe Averty’s career, which started in ORTF documenting jazz
concerts, combined pioneering electronic effects and surrealist fascinations
with traditional TV genres, and renewed musical TV programs by introducing
avant-garde aesthetics for songs, long before the music video, by singers like
Yves Montand, Jane Birkin, Serge Gainsbourg; the same can be said of certain
significant production experiences in television, especially during the eighties.
   Besides experimental niches and single events, some artists came close to the
television medium in its actual popular and homogenized values. Without calling
Warhol or Schifano into question, let us consider Cage’s participation in the popular
Italian TV show Lascia o raddoppia in 1958.4 Paik himself took advantage of the TV
medium in several ways, playing with daily TV images as sources for fascination
and unusual combinatory practices, or creating anthropomorphic families with
TV monitors and programs such as Global Groove in 1973. This programme
takes (and elaborates) a patchwork of images from the television universe: Global
Groove’s non-linear structure includes tap dancing, ice-skating, Native American
drumming, a Pepsi commercial, and Allen Ginsberg chanting – all gliding through
a video landscape processed by the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer.’5 (fig.1) In Good
Morning Mr. Orwell (1984), the live split-screen satellite transmission from Paris to

4
  See Marco Senaldi, Arte e televisione. Da Andy Warhol al Grande Fratello (Milan: Postmedia,
2009).
5
  John Hanhardt, Nam June Paik Global Groove 2004, ed. by John Hanhardt and Caitlin Jones
(Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim, 2004) p. 33.

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                                 Sandra Lischi, Matias Guerra


New York plays with television conventions, entertainment and electronic effects
(we could say “mass culture” and “avant-garde interventions”). These are only a
few of the many examples of Paik’s works on and with television, even in the most
strictly commercial and mainstream terms, with assembled references, quotations
and compresence of visual stimuli. These characteristics make this artist the main
figure in post-modern art, according to Fredric Jameson (though we will not enter
into this slippery territory).6 Collages of popular television images also appear in
Paik’s video dedicated to the composer, A Tribute to John Cage (1973-1976, TV
Lab WNET/Thirteen, 29’).7
   Video art hence formed and grew in dialogue with music and television, even
in its more widespread and popular forms. If the music video (in its commercial
declination since the 1980s) owes much to certain video art experiences, video
art has in turn dealt with types of music that cannot be considered ‘cultured’.
This is evident in the work of an artist like Dara Birnbaum, not only with her
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79), a pop development from
the TV series of the same name, but also in her music videos that put together pop
musical and cultural icons. For the series Pop-Pop video “she mashed together a
shootout from the crime drama Kojak with a commercial for Wang Laboratories
computers to make Kojak/Wang (1980)”, as Alex Greenberger writes, recalling
also Birnbaum’s experience on MTV, “creating a work that involved the MTV
logo, a Max Fleischer cartoon, and blurred images of a female animator all in a
matter of 30 seconds. It showed at the time on airwaves shared with “antic music
videos” by the likes of U2, Whitney Houston, Madonna, and Bon Jovi”.8 In
different ways, other authors who are also considered part of the video art field, like
Pipilotti Rist, have dealt with pop images and music, and Zbigniew Rybczynski,
animation cinematographer that turned to video, dedicated an entire season of
his career, between 1984 and 1989, to the creation of music videos (some of
which are distinctly avant-garde in reference to the electronic effects and the
visionary staging) even for mainstream and pop groups and musicians (the likes
of Art of Noise, Lou Reed, Simple Minds, Cameo, Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono and
John Lennon).9 The most recent video works in which avantgarde and pop-


6
  Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1991). In the part regarding Paik and the spectator to whom the impossible is
asked, that is, to watch all the screens at the same time, Jameson also quotes David Bowie in The
Man who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976). The considerations on Paik had appeared also in a
smaller text of the same name published in New Left Review, 1.146, July-August 1984.
7
  See also the chapters devoted to Paik, Cage and “Fluxus” in Inkyung Hwang, Il lungo treno di
John Cage (Milano: O barra O, 2007).
8
  Alex Greenberger, ‘ArtNews’, March 27 2018, http://www.artnews.com/2018/03/27/icons-dara-
birnbaum/ [accessed 7 December 2019].
9
  On the relation between music video and video art see Alessandro Amaducci and Simone
Arcagni, Music Video, (Turin: Kaplan, 2007) and, more recently, Giacomo Ravesi, Occhi tagliati
che danzano. Forme sperimentali della videomusica italiana degli anni Duemila, in Fuori norma.
La via sperimentale del cinema italiano, ed. by Adriano Aprà (Venice: Marsilio, 2013); Bruno
Di Marino, Segni, sogni, suoni. Quarant’anni di videoclip da David Bowie a Lady Gaga (Milan:

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               Imaginary Video Landscape: John Cage, Mugam Music, Video Art


culture meet include the case of Your body must be heard, by Őzlem Sariyldiz
(Germany, 2018, 10’), a sort of re-imagining of Peter Campus’ video art classic
Three Transitions, 1973. Here, the chroma-key inlay is revealed by fragments of
scenes from old movies (from Turkish melodramas), assembled also as collages
and in split screens with popular songs and music.


Imaginary Video Landscape

   Within this context, a further interesting instance is found in the collaboration
between two artists with different backgrounds and origins, Robert Cahen and
Matias Guerra, facing the proposal of Jahangir Selimkhanov to work on the
video part of his piece based on Imaginary Landscape n.5 by John Cage (1952).
The subtitle indicates: for magnetic tape recording of any 42 phonograph records.
Imaginary Video Landscape is hereby born.10 Here two experiences intertwine
what we can, with due caution, define as avantgarde (Cage’s piece and the video
art) and a popular musical tradition, that of Mugam music from Azerbaijan,
which is revisited over an entire century from the 1920s until today. The meeting
between Cahen and Selimkhanov happens in Azerbaijan, where the French video
artist held a video workshop in 2016, after other invitations in the precedent
years. Cahen writes: ‘Thanks to Jahangir Selimkhanov I discovered Baku jazz. He
is well aware of the music of Cage, Schaeffer, Stockhausen and Boulez and we’ve
talked about contemporary music. He once came to Strasburg for an Azerbaijani
music concert…’.11 Selimkhanov is a musician and musicologist, cultivator of
the traditional Azerbaijani music, expert in the music of the 1900s and cultural
organizer; he involved Cahen in the creation of a version of Imaginary Landscape
n.5 based on Mugam music, taken from various recordings. In asking Cahen to
take care of the video part of Selimkhanov’s project, the latter writes:


Meltemi, 2018); Luca Quattrocchi, Musica per gli occhi. Interferenze tra video arte, musica pop,
videoclip (Milan: Silvana, 2018) catalogue for the art exhibition held in Santa Maria della Scala,
Siena, 10 august-4 november 2018). Concerning the relationship between image and sound (up to
video and video art a reference to Michel Chion’s work) remains crucial, first of all L’audio-vision.
Son et image au cinéma (Paris: Nathan, 1990) and, on music and video art in particular, Suono nel
cinema, suono nel video, in Cine ma Video, ed. by Sandra Lischi (Pisa: ETS, 1996). For the relation
between experimental cinema and sound see The Music and Sound of Experimental Film, ed. by
Holly Rogers, Jeremy Barham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Holly Rogers, Sounding
the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Again,
regarding the relationship between video art and music, and with references to Cage and Paik, see
Marco M. Gazzano, Kinēma. Il cinema sulle tracce del cinema, (Roma: Exorma, 2012), in particular
the chapter ‘Comporre audio-visioni. Suono e musica sulle due sponde dell’Atlantico, alle origini
delle arti elettroniche’.
10
   Imaginary Video Landscape, Azerbaijan-France, 3’ 48’’, 2017. HD 1080p video; Video editing and
post-production: Matias Guerra; Footage: Robert Cahen, Matias Guerra; Music: Interpretation
of John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape n.5 with Mugam music of Azerbaijan, conceived by Jahangir
Selimkhanov
11
   Robert Cahen to Sandra Lischi, e-mail correspondence, 3 April 2018.

                                                                                                  81
                                 Sandra Lischi, Matias Guerra


     I’m working currently on a music performance project where the traditional Mugam
     music will be put into the context of electronic sounds - from noises to recorded sounds
     of the planets, and with some music references in between (including generative music
     based on samples from Mugam and also a reconstruction of Alvin Lucier’s experiment
     on revealing the sound portrait of a particular room through circular recording onto
     two recorders). One of the electronic ‘interventions’ I’m planning to do is to make
     a version of the Imaginary Landscape n.5 by John Cage based on the bits of Mugam
     music – both in the pure form and electronically processed. I came to an idea in
     this regard which I dare to share with you. Do you think it might be interesting to
     precisely follow the Cage’s score which he composed for 42 scrapes of music and
     make a parallel video score with 42 scraps of video [...] Wouldn’t it be interesting for
     you (it’s a sort of hommage to your idea to convey the logic and techniques of Musique
     Concrète to the medium of moving image)?12

   Robert Cahen (Valence, France, 1945) is one of the most important and well-
known artists and pioneers of international video art, he was trained at the end
of the 1960s within Pierre Schaeffer’s Musique Concrète school,13 at the Paris
Conservatory and at the radiophonic studios of the public radio and television
in France. A cinematographer and photographer, too, Cahen’s first video dates
back to 1973, inspired by the desire to experiment the electronic effects obtained
with the Musique Concréte’s method, recording first and developing afterwards,
testing the effect generators of the TV studios that were next door to the radio
ones. From his formative years, his path was marked by a particular emphasis
on the relation between image and sound design (often authored by Michel
Chion) in almost total absence of speech. He experimented in this way both
in his own videos and in musically inspired ones (La recherche instrumentale
à l’IRCAM (1983), Boulez-Répons (1985); Instantanés (1987), portraits of three
IRCAM musicians, Compositeurs à l’écoute (1998); Le deuxième jour (1988),
with the music of John Zorn). The video installation Le Maître du temps - Pierre
Boulez dirige Mémoriale, 2011, is dedicated to Pierre Boulez, whilst Hong Kong
Song (1989) is the result of interdisciplinary and international research on the
sound of urban spaces (fig. 2). Work on John Zorn’s composition Godard ça
vous chante? Tribute to Jean-Luc Godard, commissioned as an international co-
production for an author video music series, shows the search for non-linear
and variable rhythmical correspondences with the musical composition, and the
succession of urban images linked also with constant variations of space and
time. Music penetrates all of Cahen’s work: aside from the composers with whom
he collaborates and to whom he has dedicated the aforementioned works, he
uses music from different times and styles, both famous and unknown, and often
only via quick evocations: Schumann, Crumb, Chopin, Strauss, Ravel, Verdi,


12
  Selimkhanov to Robert Cahen, e-mail correspondence, June 2017.
13
  See Robert Cahen’s Compositeurs à l’écoute, 1998, outcome of a visual montage (drawing mainly
on photographs of yesterday and today) starting from compositions from various Musique Concrète
authors, and produced on occasion of the 50 years since 1948.

82
                Imaginary Video Landscape: John Cage, Mugam Music, Video Art


                                                     Fig. 2: Robert Cahen, Hong Kong Song,
                                                     1989




Max Roach, Bartók. For some videos he also worked as sound designer, mainly
in the first period of his career.
   In a different way, Matias Guerra (1973, Santiago, Chile) also works on the
relationship between music and image; he is a painter, musician and author of
works that dialogue with music, cinema, the electronic image as well as literature
and astronomical references. Regarding the latter, a musical composition and
sound installation (one permanent and two temporary) from 2016 within the
“Moby Dick” festival at Piane di Bronzo (Tuscania) are worth mentioning.14
Guerra has an education in information technology and philosophy, and a
particular attention to science. His research marks works with rich networks of
references, which are not presented as explicit quotations but as structural and
deep affinities with the matter in question: this is very pertinent in Nekrotzar.
Following the rainbow, with a study of the works of Stanley Kubrick as its starting
point (paint on canvas, digital prints, video, sound, collective work and research
and more- fig. 3). This same piece has also a sound and video-loop installation
version.

     Compendium K for soundscape, electric guitar, live electronics and sometimes
     video, Nekrotzar, is part of a series of pieces called Compendia, namely live musical
     performances and elements, such as video or painting, reflecting a specific knowledge.
     Compendium K (the K stands for Stanley Kubrick) puts together soundscapes, live
     music performance and a video with a fixed duration and narrative. [...] It is not a
     montage-film, it’s not by any means a film. It’s another mechanism for sense and non-
     sense, an instrument to play with. Each device pertains a certain quality of my vision
     of Stanley Kubrick’s work. The video work can be ideally divided in four macro scenes
     as in Der Grosse Makabre of the Ligeti/Meschke libretto, where quotations, cites and
     references to past musical styles are the devices to create its pastiche form. The choice
     here of Ligeti is manifest, but maybe the choice of the libretto as a baseline for the
     narrative is less obvious, as occult and evident are certain routes of Kubrick’s vision.15


14
     http://www.matiasguerra.com/moby-dick.php [accessed 9 December 2019].
15
     M. Guerra, “Nekrotzar. Video and Performance”, http://www.matiasguerra.com/nekrotzar.php

                                                                                             83
                                  Sandra Lischi, Matias Guerra


   Fig. 3: Matias Guerra,
 Nekrotzar. Following the
    rainbow (2016-2017)




   Guerra also wrote the musical score and contributed to the editing of Andrea
Semerano’s film Dedalo 2018 (2018), radically and decisively experimental and
rich in loving, existential and cinematographic visions. Cahen and Guerra had
met for the realization of a video, This is an Unknown Surface (2014) from an
idea and a text by Alessandro De Francesco – another artist that is comfortable
with different media, but mainly with the formal elaboration of language and
augmented writing.16 Also thanks to this collaboration Cahen decided to call
Guerra, by Jahagir Selimkhanov’s invitation, writing to the French artist,

     That would be so great to visualize Cage’s score! I thought that 8 levels of sound
     volume (equivalent to pp to fff) in his score could be applied to 8 levels of opacity
     of video images, so that landscapes appearance vary from extremely blurred, as in a
     fog, to very bright, as under sunshine, and the zones of complete silence represented
     by TV screen ‘white noise’ [...]. We are working now on sonorization of the score
     with 42 fragments from recorded samples of Azerbaijanian music of all genres – folk,
     traditional, symphonic, jazz – up to underground synth-pop. A sort of imaginary
     soundscape of the national music in 3 minutes…17


Cage, Mugam Music, Video

   Imaginary Landscape n.5 was composed by Cage in 1952, constituting the last
of the Imaginary Landscapes series, the first of which is dated 1939. Imaginary


[accessed 9 December 2018].
16
    https://docplayer.fr/14932490-Alessandro-de-francesco-portfolio.html [accessed 9 December
2018]. On the international collaborations of Cahen and Guerra, see S. Lischi, ‘Videoarte
nomade. Cinema, immagine elettronica, musica, scrittura. Percorsi, dialoghi e intrecci planetari (e
cosmici): dalla Patagonia all’Azerbaigian, con echi di Cage, Kubrick, Ligeti’, Alias (il Manifesto),
14 April 2018, https://ilmanifesto.it/videoarte-nomade-dalla-patagonia-allazerbaigian/ [accessed
9 December 2018].
17
   J. Selimkhanov to R.Cahen, e-mail correspondence, June 2017.

84
               Imaginary Video Landscape: John Cage, Mugam Music, Video Art


Landscape n.5 is for 42 records to be re-recorded on tape, as Cage’s version was
originally composed for a dance piece by Jean Erdman, Portrait of a Lady, using
42 jazz records to be played in eight simultaneous tracks. The score indicates that
any type of recording can be used, focusing in fact on the length of the excerpts
being played and further characteristics such as amplitude, crescendo and
diminuendo, and changes of records, all notated on block graphic paper forming
a graphical score that anticipates not only the musical concept of sampling but
also its graphical presentation – in fact, Cage’s score resembles the interface of
any modern audio sequencer software. The final piece is a set of indications or
rules that create a system where the sound content produced will vary according
to the records used, and the recording of such system will create a different, set
musical object every time. As a result, there have been many different versions
of the score, of which the most interesting to date is Michael Barnhart’s, on the
prestigious Mode record label, using recordings of Cage’s music.18
   Jahangir Selimkhanov, as one can understand, is interested in national music,
a theme on which he often writes and to which he is dedicated as a musicologist
and curator of events and festivals, also with the Musicians’ Society of Azerbaijan.
His work consists, among other aims, in revamping popular musical traditions
including Mugam, and also circulating them abroad: dissemination that becomes
easier and wider after 1989.19 The artistic value of Azerbaijani Mugam and its
cultural importance was acknowledged in 2003 by UNESCO, when it included
Azerbaijani Mugam on The Representative List of the Intangible Cultural
Heritage of Humanity. It is worth noticing that the video, which premiered at the
Baku Festival (International Symposium on Azerbaijani Carpet, from October 17
to 20) was projected for the first time at an evening with live performed Mugam
music.

     Mugam is not merely the main form the national music tradition – one could say
     it’s one of basic cultural values which constitute national identity of Azerbaijan
     people. Historically and in contemporary use, this term has various meanings – it
     may simultaneously refer to specific categories of tone scale, melodic pattern and
     genre. The history of mugam dates back to ancient times. Azerbaijanian mugam bears
     similarities with various forms of Eastern music – the common principles of modal
     composition and melodic elaboration could be observed in Indian raga, Iraqi maqam,
     Magreb noubah, Uzbek and Tajik Shashmakom, Iranian destgah [...]. Since early
     20th century Azerbaijanian mugam started to attract the attention of listeners beyond
     the circle of devoted connoisseurs. Many music groups perform mugam regularly


18
   The are many renditions of the score and concept of Imaginary Landscape n.5, too many to count,
nevertheless to our knowledge there has never been a video realization that has actually taken into
account the score, the concept and the principle of Cage’s work in the process of creating images.
The video is hence not merely an accompaniment to the music, but more similar to a transposition,
where the conceptual and artistic value of the piece is inherent to the relation between sound and
image.
19
   See Jahangir Selimkhanov, ‘Music: Then and Now’, Azerbaijan International, 3.1 (Spring 1995),
36-37, 45.

                                                                                                85
                                 Sandra Lischi, Matias Guerra


     in festivals and concert programs all over the world [...]. The Azerbaijani Mugham
     is a traditional musical form, characterized by a large degree of improvisation. The
     Mugham, though a classical and academic art, draws upon popular bard melodies,
     rhythms and performance techniques and is performed in many venues throughout
     the country.20

  Thus Selimkhanov turned to Mugam music for his interpretation of Imaginary
Landscape n.5 by Cage, summarizing the operation in the following way:

     The ‘collage’ made out of bits of Azerbaijanian music is a precise realization of
     the Imaginary Landscape n.5 (1952) by John Cage, a seminal work in the history
     of electronic music. The composer has created a graphic score, where 42 scraps of
     magnetic tape to be chosen randomly are given the precise indication of duration,
     dynamic level and are distributed between 8 channels. There are countless renditions
     of this ‘author instruction’, which differ quite substantially, however, the composer’s
     intention was not to present a final ‘product’ completely under his control, but rather
     to initiate a situation allowing to show contemporary soundscape which is disruptively
     simultaneous, non-linear, fragmented. The idea to use 42 fragments of recordings of
     Azerbaijanian music from archive recordings of 1920-ies up to very contemporary
     ones was related to the desire to show a condensed landscape of the national music
     in all its variety - traditional and new urban folk, jazz, rock, pop, classical and
     contemporary classical. This fragment of recorded sound appears all of a sudden - as
     an expression of forced ‘re-formatting’ all the musical perception of the participants
     of the performance.21

   As Selimkhanov had written to Cahen, the reference to the performance is due
to the version of which this experimentation, entitled Bahariya, with the sound
artist Farhad Farzaliyev.22 This inspired the idea to call Cahen, who had been
trainedin the Musique concrète school:

     I thought about a precise ‘translation’ of the score intended for 42 sound fragments
     into 42 video fragments to be constructed following the indicated length and intensity
     of each fragment - in a way, that might be a parallel to what Cahen did in the Seventies
     – a `translating` approach to sound into the realm of vision [...] Robert Cahen replied
     very enthusiastically, however, he didn’t choose to follow the exact instruction of the
     Cage`s score, and rather has constructed his video work created jointly with Matias
     Guerra as an evocation to the music piece we have sent to him. Most important point
     is that the authors of the video have picked up the historical spirit of an archived
     memory which is felt in our rendition of the Cage`s piece, and Robert and Matias have
     decided to attract their own early works as layers into the translucent, polyphonic
     imagery of this piece.23



20
   J. Selimkhanov to S. Lischi, e-mail correspondence, 11 December 2018.
21
   Ibidem.
22
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqaMomtwp6I&t=10s [accessed 18 December 2018]
23
   J. Selimkhanov to Sandra Lischi, e-mail correspondence, 11 December 2018.

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               Imaginary Video Landscape: John Cage, Mugam Music, Video Art


‘For a random number of cuts from 14 archive videos’

  Robert Cahen and Matias Guerra therefore worked together on the video
score, analysing first Jahangir Selimkhanov’s musical montage. They retrace
their archives, intertwining different fragments, including those of their faces on
camera today, and in fact the subtitle indicates For a random number of cuts from
14 archive videos. Guerra’s account is useful here:

     This short work, presented in a few international festivals by now, is based on
     Imaginary Landscape n.5 by John Cage (1952), and offers an interesting intersection
     between avant-garde and popular music (in this case between Cage’s score and the
     Mugam musical tradition, here re-created by the Azerbaijani musicologist and scholar
     Jahangir Selimkhanov). Moreover, this ‘dialogue’ is articulated and represented in
     electronic images by the french video-artist Robert Cahen and myself. Our video-
     strategy actualizes the fragments, which in a new time and space create unexpected
     micro-narratives. We have chosen excerpts from our respective video archives
     to create a ‘video landscape’ intertwining two different musical experiences, two
     different approaches and identities, two different histories and aesthetics. The main
     elements in play become the key references within the images, like the small narratives
     that open up from second to second and the recognizable repetitions which not only
     give a rhythm but a semantic context too. We were commissioned the piece and had
     the music given to us first, instead of focusing on the Azerbaijani Imaginary Landscape
     n.5 version we decided to go back to the root, thus not analysing specifically actual
     ‘mugam’ distinctive marks like it’s tempo or ‘mood’ but studied the original score
     breaking down elements of main interest to follow the score not blindly but as a
     transposition for video, in the end the score was for sound and not image, where the
     principle and the baseline ideas from Cage’s work are respected.24

   Cahen has commented on this collaboration with Guerra,25 highlighting the
necessity to adopt a pre-existent piece of music (with a commissioned work: two
characteristics that recall his work at the end of the 1980s on the music of John
Zorn in Le Deuxième Jour), but deciding to ‘fabricate a mosaic’ with pre-shot
images that were not filmed for the occasion and opting for less recent and more
geometric videos, with saturated colours: what he calls ‘the primitive côté of the
first video gestures transformed in image (figg 4 - 5). Also in Cage, as a matter of
fact, we find great liberty in composing a piece done with scraps of other works. A
correspondence of assemblies’. With this approach in place, the editing was done

24
    M. Guerra, http://www.matiasguerra.com/imaginary-video-landscape-n5.php (accessed 18
December 2019). See also Origini/Origins, catalogue 27th edition of the festival Invideo-Video e
cinema oltre, 16-19 November 2017. The video was presented at its world premiere at the Festival
ISAC, BAKU 2017; then at the INVIDEO 2017 Festival, Milan; at Nasimi Festival, Baku, 2018; at
cinema Arsenale, Pisa April 2018, during Ondavideo, Paesaggi sonori. On this topic and the relation
between sound and image, Guerra held a master’s class at the IED in Milan (November 2017), and
Cahen and Guerra held a seminar (again on this work) at the University of Pisa, Dipartimento di
Civiltà e forme del sapere, in April 2018.
25
   Cahen’s statements were collected by S. Lischi, in Pisa on 1 November 2018.

                                                                                                87
                                 Sandra Lischi, Matias Guerra


       Figg. 4,5: Cahen-
 Guerra, Imaginary Video
         Landscape, 2017




intuitively and enriched by inserting the faces of the authors – or rather the details
of their faces, a sort of identification of the author with non-archival clips that were
filmed in the moment. ‘The alive aspect’, Cahen observes, ‘which allows the author
to escape the gesture expressed uniquely by his creation’. This reminds Cahen of
Cage himself, ‘his face, his laughter, his gestures – as those of his performances,
like the closing of the piano [in 4’33”, 1952]’. This ensemble in the end takes on
‘a micro-coherence of sense’, even if its fundamental impetus, Cahen concludes, is
that of playfulness: to play with the archive images, to play with details of faces and
the correspondences between the music and the visual score.
   On the other hand, while writing to Jahangir Selimkhanov, Guerra comments
as follows:

     We thought that by using our archives we could match Cage’s principle and not go too
     far from our own aesthetic directions. The historical progression line within the works
     is strong but I feel it vanishes, making the fragments contemporary, which to me means
     mainly that they don’t have a firmly marked time distinction (the time the video was
     made as a distinctive element), as the main elements in play become the key references

88
                 Imaginary Video Landscape: John Cage, Mugam Music, Video Art


     within the images, like the small narratives that open up from second to second and
     the recognizable repetitions which not only give a rhythm but a semantic context too.
     I’ve watched it without music and I think it works too, as one can ride along according
     to what marker each person can find or wants to find or simply receives. Anyhow it’s a
     paysage vidéo that interlaces two different types of work, two identities which are put
     in discussion by the work itself.26

     As already stated, the score wasn’t specifically followed and Guerra remarks:

     The 3” tape unit of measure could be applied and transposed to video but it would
     create in some instances a convulsive visual effect that doesn’t happen in sound, the
     score wasn’t meant for film so we decided to avoid a blind faithful approach, instead,
     we took 14 videos, 7 of Robert and 7 mine, they were divided in units of 3 minutes
     taking what we recognized as having moments that visually could pertain to Cage’s
     indications of, for example, amplitude, crescendi or espressivo, by choosing colour,
     rhythm, subject and narrative movements. For example a crescendi of 4 to 6, as per the
     score, in some instances is simply given through a clip with an intense colour change
     or upwards frequency modification, whereas a set amplitude is given by choosing
     an arbitrary mix of narrative, movement and colour within the clip. We re-created
     an eight track system in the editing software were we placed the chosen clips, to be
     then cut to a minimum of 1 second, the lines from 1 to 3 from the original score
     can be easily identified by length and as a sort of baseline for the cross-dissolving
     shorter clips. In a very early stage we had quite an accurate transposition of the score
     and it was tempting to settle for it, but the insertion of the details of our faces, if I
     recall properly, changed radically our approach and led us to focus on the rhythm
     and semantics of the video, leaving the timings chosen and a baseline, but drastically
     changing the resulting order, I guess that once we had a system in place given by a
     context and a set of rules, playfulness prevailed, not so much as in determining the
     ending video but as in playing around with the clips: it was like having a set of puzzle
     pieces that can create a different final image each time according to where you place
     them, they will all somehow by chance fit (thanks to the system chosen). I think that in
     this way we have maintained the underlining philosophy of the composition.27

   Two different approaches, then, to video composition, two different poetics
that relate to each other, two video archives and two ‘self-representations’ with
new footage, inserted in an architecture of images that is transformed by the
irruption of eyes, mouths, the creases of the faces, hair, beards, ears and the
texture of the skin (fig. 6). It is like a double signature or a vital and ‘present’
element that insinuates itself here and there in the brief video sequences of
the archive footage (from the past) of the two authors. An element of surprise
or mystery that in fact has radically changed the approach to the visual score,
adding the touch of an apparently unexpected form of study and research. The
video opens with a detail of eyes and proceeds by showing, in fast succession and


26
     M. Guerra to J. Selimkhanov, e-mail correspondence, September 2017.
27
     M. Guerra, specifically written for this text.

                                                                                           89
                             Sandra Lischi, Matias Guerra


Fig. 6: Cahen-Guerra,
Imaginary Video
Landscape, 2017




sometimes superimposed, fragments of other works: landscapes, abstract images,
a browsed book, trains and gestures, sometimes in black and white and at others
in colour, solarizations, sometimes lush colours ‘pop’ like the first effects and the
first chromatic electronic canvases, rarely they are naturalistic. Then sea reflexes,
incumbent seas that seem to invade and force the surface of the image, that
make the crest of the seafoam dance. Someone passes by, runs, arrives, we go
forth through a green pathway, we see train tracks from above. Sometimes it is
a suspension, sometimes a correspondence between sound and image, like the
short sequence in which a black and white geometric grid – almost a keyboard –
appears alongside piano notes in the music composition. At times, even the faces
are taken in the archive images with the use of superimposition, occasionally in a
single image we find two superimposed details: an eye, a mouth (fig. 7).
   The audio track consists specifically of a succession of Mugam clips: a kind of
music which was transmitted generation after generation, and which changed over
time, interbreeding with other musical genres but maintaining its tradition and
broad popularity. It is usually sung (by a female or male voice) and accompanied
by musicians that play traditional instruments such as the kamancha (a four-string
spiked fiddle), the tar (a long-neck lute), and the daf (a type of large tambourine).
   Selimkhanov’s composition, even though it consists in a set of brief, sequential
cuts, maintains the melodic character of the music as audible, recognisable and
driven by a well consolidated tradition. Nevertheless, its fragmentation and,
in particular, its development through an extremely experimental video score
modifies sense and perception, making space for an audio-vision made also of
dissonances and deviations, not only within the musical part but also in the video.
The procedure of confronting an avant-garde work (Cage’s) with popular and
traditional music finds a sort of enhancement in the union of sound and image
(which is also inherent in Cage’s system, considering the use of jazz, a popular
music, in relation with the score and way the sound is conveyed), mainly because
the visual idea avoids a ‘blind faithful approach’, to paraphrase Guerra.
   The artwork includes definitely experimental images and definitely popular

90
               Imaginary Video Landscape: John Cage, Mugam Music, Video Art


Fig. 7: Cahen-Guerra,
Imaginary Video
Landscape, 2017




music, weaved into Cage’s avant-garde and the reflections of another avant-
garde – which produced the well-known declaration The Future of Sound in
1928 (signed by Eisenstein, Pudovkin e Alexandrov). Also known as Statement
on Sound, the latter sought to avoid the dominance of sound over image – it
was produced at the advent of sound in cinema, and it feared in particular the
possible use of speech – and over editing, with all the latter’s dialectic and creative
power. To avoid the shoals of the illustrative dimension equates to create a “new
orchestral counterpoint” between image and sound.28 Even in this orchestration,
the encounter between avant-garde and popular music finds in Imaginary Video
Landscape an example of a profound research, one rich in echoes.




28
  Sergej Ejzenštejn, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Grigorij Alexandrov, ‘Il futuro del sonoro. Dichiarazione’,
in Sergej M. Ejzenštejn, Forma e tecnica del film e lezioni di regia, ed. by Paolo Gobetti (Torino:
Einaudi, 1964), pp. 523-524.

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