[04] Alessandro Bosetti: The Notebooks

The archive at the Leoš Janáček Memorial in Brno contains a remarkable treasure: a lot of tiny notebooks in which the significant Czech composer notated fragments of everyday speech. All of these records of speech melodies were made between 1904 and 1928 and are unique records, or sound photographs, of fragments of an acoustic environment of a bygone era. They might resemble the current practice of field recordings although at that time they were made with a pencil and paper. At the beginning of the summer of 2014, the contemporary composer of Italian origin, Alessandro Bosetti, spent a few days at the Janáček Archive at the Moravian Museum, going through hundreds of scribbles in Leoš Janáček’s notebooks. He was fascinated by Janáček’s obsession with notating melodic profiles of speech. Bosetti has been dealing with the musicality of human speech for a long time and in his work The Notebooks he tries to use his own speech and voice to revive the acoustic situations that might have been part of Janáček’s note-taking process. He listens to the world through Janáček’s ears and enables us to listen to the world concealed in a unique poetic gesture, in the sound treasure of Janáček’s notation of the melody of speech. However, his focus is not on imitating Janáček’s compositional style or celebrating his legacy. Bosetti reconstructs the imaginary reality of magical and mysterious tracks and traces back the tradition of “music anecdotique,” whose beginnings can be found in Janáček, in the area of “music concrete” and in the works of Luc Ferrari and Pierre Schaeffer.

The composition won the PALMA ARS ACUSTICA in 2015.