Ending show for the award night
Started in 2010, Musicafoscari is a project by prof. Daniele Goldoni that since then has continued to be enacted through workshops, festivals (JazzFest) and expositions. Many workshops and concerts with international musicians have been organized.
An essential part of the project is the permanent workshop, targeting students from all curricula, but also recent graduates or PhD students, with the purpose of making them feel a sense of belonging to the university. The aim of this workshop is to involve participants to use instruments and/or the voice of any musical material they feel more familiar with, to practice this usage through learning and practicing free collective improvisation, taking possession of these means as you do with language and conversation. Through this musical ‘linguistic game’ we achieve something otherwise unattainable. This is an example of a community experience – both aesthetically and ethically – that becomes possible in our university.
The experience of improvisation as a conscious and disciplined practice has now become the core of many studies, not only in the context of music and arts: recent publications have highlighted the growing interest in an all-encompassing reflective approach, from psychology to pedagogy and the management of this practice (cfr. p. es. G. Lewis and B. Piekut (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, voll. 1, 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; A. Bertinetto, M. Ruta (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts, New York: Routledge 2022, presented at Conservatorio B. Marcello on 6.12.2022).
In collaboration with the workshop and in order to enrich the knowledge of practices and languages, but also to give back to Venice the hospitality of the university, we are planning to organize free seminars and public concerts with masters of contemporary improvisation and composition, also in collaboration with other institutions.
In collaboration with the workshop and in order to enrich the knowledge of practices and languages, we collaborate with the conservatories in Venice and Rome. There is an active agreement between Ca’ Foscari and “Santa Cecilia” conservatory in Rome, thanks to which a joint event was organized in the spring of 2022. The collaboration and the participation in “Santa Cecilia” project has already been planned through the Convention signed with Ca’ Foscari.
It is possible that joint performances with Ca’ Foscari’s Choir and Orchestra will take place soon, as already happened in 2022 with the concert “La terra vista dal Cielo” (13th November 2022), and also on 15th December 2018 (“La Voce”) and on 14th December 2019 (“Contemplazioni, Proverbio, Insegnamento”).
In this project, music is experienced not only as an autonomous art, but also as a field for a transdisciplinary ethical reflection, as witnessed in November 2015 with “Languages”, in December 2018 with the theme of “voice” seen through its relationship with the body (with the participation of Giorgio Agamben), in December 2019 with a theorical (with prof. Nico Stringa) and musical interpretation (with Massimo Menotti and Daniele Goldoni at the piano) of the book, made up of (only) images, Contemplazioni (1918) by Arturo Martini.
We plan to involve university students in trying to experiment improvisation in other disciplinary fields (theatre, cinema, visual). We also aim to record concerts and to reproduce them in high quality, so that people from inside and outside the university may be able to listen to them (as in the past with Rai 3 broadcast “Battiti”). By communicating the concerts inside and outside of the university, by having public lectures and exhibitions of the Musicafoscari Ensemble during institutional events, we project into society an image of Ca’ Foscari as a place of democratic participation, cooperation, and cultural and social commitment.
For the Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival Musicafoscari creates live sound effects for the film
One week
Directed by Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline, 1920
A young couple gets married and receives a very unusual gift: a prefabricated house that they will have to assemble themselves, following the instructions that will show them how to properly put together different numbered pieces. These are the premises of “One week” (1920), a short movie directed by Buster Keaton, who also plays the male lead, and Eddie Cline. The newlywed’s future is put at risk when a young man who has fallen in love with the wife (Sybil Seely) decides to sabotage the assembly of the house by changing the numbers impressed on the packing cases containing the pieces of the house they have to put together. The result is an odd-looking deformed house that gets hit by a windstorm, then by a torrential downpour and that, in the end, will have to be moved to a different plot of land.
In just a few minutes hilarious and surreal scenes follow one another non-stop, in a frenetic climax that culminates in the memorable ending scene. Even though this is one of Keaton’s first works as a director, in “One week” we can already notice some of the features that will be key elements in his production, making him go down in history as one of the greatest figures of mute cinema in America: the setting in an upside-down world, in which what’s easy becomes difficult, what’s wrong turns right, a critic of American society but, above all, a sharp sense of irony.
