Luis Menacho

Ruin and emptiness. Guidelines for an aesthetics of the edge (Fragment)

Creating a sound image that is projected in a space, modelling time, that's what composition is about for me. But writing music is also thinking, summoning through memory some concerns that I already find almost constant, sounds, visions and ideas that return tenaciously, inevitably I could say; landscape is one of them.

The nature close to the place where I live, between the shores of the Rio de la Plata and the border with the desert of the pampas in Argentina. At the intersection of that crossing; living between the "sweet sea" as the Spanish navigators called it and that unusual extension of the pampean plain. I am interested in the variations of these landscapes, their immoderation, their strange luminosity.

On the other hand, there are the objects and their experiences, their stories. The audible universe of a place that evokes a dwelling in the world. The register of things and their permanent transformation and decline. In short, their memory, as Remo Bodei writes.

The lives of the immigrants who arrived at the port of these shores from Africa and Europe and found a new meaning in the mixture with what was here. They founded a history in the crossing of languages, knowledge, flavours, dances and musical instruments, but also of forms and genres developed in another time and at great distances from here. The hybridisation of this crossbreeding, as rich as it is dramatic, continues to this day incessantly inventing new cultural objects.

Encountering things and their stories, their sounds and the lives that brought them with them delineate the genealogy of what has been. Thus, to re-establish the experience of the past from the stories and the split voices, from the place of the shadow of what has been relegated under new discourses, shows that all immigration entails a painful uprooting. Discourses that are in the shadows, subject knowledge, as Michel Foucault pointed out. In our American continent, examples abound, from the slave labour force brought by force in colonial times, the native communities razed to the ground in the "Conquest of the Desert", the large contingents of European immigrants arriving at the beginning of the 20th century fleeing from wars and famine. Internal migrations to the cities in search of work formed the extended blocks of suburbs around the cities. The survivors, the protagonists of this uprooting and the search for new horizons of meaning, have given the contours of a certain Argentine identity in permanent transformation and mestization.

I think that music is enriched by all this hybridisation, this is its field of presence where tango is perhaps one of the clearest examples in the surroundings of the Rio de la Plata. As we can imagine, this transcends a discipline such as music to insert itself into a much more general framework which is the dialectic between the reception and production of culture. Of the tensions and divergences between civilisation and barbarism of the once "South American destiny" that Jorge Luis Borges pointed out in his famous poem about Laprida. In the permanent concern that the cultural elite discussed about the universal and the national in Argentine culture during the 20th century. Today, we see a renewed debate between the global and the local in late capitalism and the place that Argentina seeks to occupy in these new and, at the same time, very old coordinates and antinomies.

Things hold the passage of time in their precarious presence, their historicity. They illuminate an inactual place, in "ruins". Ruins are not to be found, they are a pilgrimage. This is the differential status between the ruin and the "objet trouvé"; the latter, as a recovered past, is restored to a present that consecrates it as something new. The ruin is detained as a thing, just as the allegory is detained as an encrypted memory. Between the two extends that parallelism that Walter Benjamin pointed out between ruin and allegory, "Allegories are to the realm of thought what ruins are to the realm of things". Being the bearer of a negativity that is actualised, the objet trouvé resists occupying the stillness of the museum showcase. This "objet" is something that is somehow recycled, when it is found it comes back to life and is reinserted into the chain of production. The ruin, on the other hand, resists radical negativity in its own silence. It is the insistence on the "useful", it is the return to a certain inorganic nature in the obstinacy of its silenced presence, both are opposed to each other because if the objet trouvé reclaims life as Bios, the ruin tends towards the mineral and the silence.

I think that to write music along these lines is to carry out a kind of "sound archaeology", to recover what has been and to imagine what can be: between what is not yet, and what is no longer; it is to point to the creative act as potency as Giorgio Agamben says. Two thresholds around a void. From there it becomes an edge giving rise to the object.

But I also believe that human creation is about supporting a plane of convergence. Praxis leads the composer to erect the site of an illusory surface, it is there where that place emerges where nothingness is bordered to give emergence to the object with the material, as in the well-known formula of the potter and the creation of the pot; it is created from the hole, it is modelled from nothingness as Heidegger wrote. It is about creating a surface in music, the illusory zone where things live and where sensations and sounds are organised. It is that fictional sphere where concepts, practices, traditions converge. To compose - in short - is to give support to a signifying constellation where the "imago acustica" unfolds little by little, giving birth to a ludus: like children who assemble their Umwelt, that is to say the surrounding space around them in their playground, this is why art is always a form of childhood.

The sound biography, one's own history as a listener delineates a universe in the form of a lived history, fragmentary and diffuse, which is embodied in the mano habilis of the craft. From there, the stroke, the gesture are those that model the object, bordering on nothingness, with something that emerges but that "is neither of the order of Being nor of nothingness but of emptiness", says Isidoro Vegh. The object, the work of art for this reason, recreates the void.

Before the ruin of objects, witnesses of a lived world and emptiness, I find myself. In front of the moving silence of a sunset on the Pampas plains, when the sun falls lividly on the distant horizon line and the slightest difference becomes evident, the gentle breeze that moves the grasses, as in the slight tide that makes the water ripple, the forms of the rootedness to the landscape. Between edges, those of the desert and the river; under that arch I attempt a writing.

Perhaps it is nothing more than the sketch - always fragile - of putting into practice the fleetingness of time, little ritenuto... as we say, to preserve the current sparkle of a time already past that lives sedimented in all things, as happens with old instruments. Modelled time which is, as Borges said, that of which we are intimately made.

(c) Luis Menacho 2023

Press 

"In Luis Menacho's music there is a different breathing. It has its own strength and centre of gravity. First, in an orchestra of sharp and subtle sounds, conducted with precision and nuance by Esteban Rajmilchuk; second, in the accomplished vocal lines, especially that of the Reverend (excellent baritone Sebastián Sorarrain), which play subtly with the religious form, as well as those of the small choir formed by Alejandra Cabral, Alejandra de Olano and Esteban Manzano, who also at times seem to play beautifully with the Morton Feldman of Three Voices.

Federico Monjeau on El viento que arrasa. Opera in three acts based on the novel of the same name by Selva Almada. Review in the newspaper Clarín. Buenos Aires. 15 September 2016. 

"The music, directed with commitment and meticulousness by Esteban Rajmilchuk, skirts the plot, eventually underlines it, and even encourages the incidental or the ironic -that oboe with baroque resonances that accompanies the preacher, almost like Morricone's music in the film The Mission-. A detailed piece of writing, with remarkable flashes in the use of the prepared piano, which was magnificently interpreted".

Diego Fisherman on El viento que arrasa. Review from the newspaper Página 12. Buenos Aires. Friday 16 September 2016.