SHATTERING SONG
In Mark Salvatus’ solo show “Active Shadows” at MO_Space, inked fingerprints dot yellowed sheets of music fastened to a wall. “Sketches and Prints” remixes and reconfigures these old sheets, arranging them into vertical prints in a manner that obscures notes, letters and lyrics. Many staples in a musician’s repertoire like This Masquerade by The Carpenters or Palabra de Honor (that now reads, “‘La Honor”) become unfamiliar yet again, and the blanks beg to be filled in.
Beside the installation is a monitor screening hands playing the piano pieces, articulating familiar melodic cadences that fragment into a dirge-like march. The sheet music, as it has often been read by musicians before him, is now fragmented into periods of melody and pauses. It reminds us that, though a single printed piece of paper may be read by a hundred musicians, it will be interpreted in a hundred or more iterations, each varying ever so slightly or drastically. It could be the timbre of the instrument they play it on, the manner in which they physically play each note, or perhaps even their moods or thoughts dictating how the music emerges from their fingertips.
Historically, Western musical notation as a system dates back to the mid-15th century and the advent of the printing press, which was able to quickly reproduce a landscape of five evenlyspaced lines with musical notes and its accompanying annotations. Not only has it been a didactic way of instruction, it has also become a framework by which musicians write and translate ideas into music. However, the system remains quite limited in the sense that it works best for Western traditions of music.
Often, this has been taken for granted as canon in classical music and music education, and has been questioned and abstracted by experimental musicians from the 1950s onward, including Brian Eno and John Cage. In conjunction with modern art, musicians like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Cornelius Cardew approached notation as visual inquiries as well, finding answers in modern art.
In the Philippines, artists such as Gerardo