I write filled with joy and gratitude after an inspirational and rejuvenating two weeks at the Cortona Sessions for New Music. It was such a pleasure to work with the wonderful fellows and inspiring faculty on music new and less new, to open deep conversations and learn about the wonderful paths so many are charting.

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We were Under the Tuscan Sun, but also amidst the Etruscan Walls, on the Roman Roads, amongst the Florentine Flags, encircling the Tuscan Chingali with our stomachs, and basically any other preposition a high-school language teacher could think of.

While I’ve been ruminating on the linkages between flags (there are so many in Cortona), walls, food, and musical analysis—the topic of my next deep dive—I was swept away in some smaller learning adventures.

Fragments

I hovered for many minutes at the Museo Nazionale Romano’s Palazzo Massimo in front of the Fasti Antiates Maiores, a Roman Republican wall calendar created somewhere between 84 and 55 BC, before the Julian calendar was instituted.

Notwithstanding that I believe fragments in context are more powerful than complete works out of context, I was fascinated with the clarity of the time-keeping system.

The columns:

• 13 months (1 is mensis intercalaris, a leap month necessary because the lunar cycle gradually diverges from the seasons
• K, N, and I: Kalends, 3 principal days each month, following the phases of the moon. (It’s also the root of Calendar)
• Fasti (F, C, N, etc): when public events and judicial activities could occur
• A-H = 8 days indicating market days

Much like the Peutinger Table (the Roman road map I wrote about previously), this calendar is designed for people who are already on the road, those with emic cultural perspectives. By the way, Christians just kept going with this system, albeit with more scandalous "fest day" images.

A Question

After a few days binging on Roman marble carvings, one thought: who was carving these things? And what happened to the tablets with typos? I hope a reader can chime in with a more well-researched opinion than I’m capable of.

Art in an age of non-mechanical reproduction

As I mentioned, at times I prefer fragments to entire works. What's more fascinating than a fragment? An exact copy.

In Rome, I was fascinated with Roman reproductions of Greek statues, removed from temples, transposed from bronze to marble, and placed within the homes of socialites, middle-class tradespeople, and leaders looking to up their cultural street cred. In fact, this is how we know Greek culture: through layers upon layers of Roman reproductions. Mechanical reproductions. Maybe the guy carving Tabulae was in on this as well!

These copies of the discobolus got me thinking of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), in which he posits that a work of art’s aura is derived from its (1) authenticity (its uniqueness) and (2) its location, where the piece is intended to be situated both physically and culturally. Despite the ability to perfectly recreate a work of art through mechanical means, a copy can never be “authentic,” because it is by its very nature situated in a different time and space. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai would go further. In "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy,” he argues that globalization and industrialization has fragmented culture into five interconnected “scapes:” ethnoscapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, financescapes, and mediascapes, each of which powerfully crosscuts geography, culture, and ethnicity.

Benjamin does have a point, that mechanical reproduction can void an art work’s “cult” value—its value as being present, not necessarily on public view—because it can place an art work in a public space that allows people with etic perspectives (people not in the original culture). In these cases, the copy is detached from its original perspective, detached from the designs of the creator and from the needs of the “cult,” however one defines it. But, doesn’t each copy create its own authenticity as it is situated in a new culture? I’m sure the NFT community would agree.

The challenge of “original instruments”

What does this have to do with music? For those who work to reproduce music in a time and space different than its creation, or who aspire to create a sound as a composer of the past might have heard it, Benjamin’s point is self-evident, eye-roll worthy. And it’s not new. It’s not enough to study the work of art, of course: we need to examine the world in which the art was created, locating it within a nexus of ‘scapes and intentions and relationships: we need to know something about what was innovative or quotidian, and how the art might have landed or impacted those present at its inception or unveiling. Authentic is in the eye of the beholder though, and those of us that exist in the elusive world of sonic performance know that we must change change change to create the illusion of historical authenticity.

Or, we can copy copy copy, like Picasso and his pigeons or van Gogh and his boots…​

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