The Moon's Silence: Music and Word under the Chinese Sky offers us an avant-garde vision of China's past poetic, musical and scientific production, in which melodies from medieval Europe are combined with the sound of the Altai mountains, celestial poems from more than 2000 years ago or the Tao of the zither, ending with music and texts from the 20th century: 2500 years of science, literature, philosophy and music.
articulates this performance around a chronological selection of scientific texts whose authorship ranges from the earliest philosophers of nature to contemporary science fiction writers, including both male voices and works in which Chinese women astronomers, poets and painters of the past reflect on gender issues around art, science and the roles of women in the society they inhabited. The occasional appearances of scientific texts of Western origin will recreate a sort of imaginary dialogue between philosophers of the nature of both traditions through time and space, discovering some concepts that were enunciated in the East centuries before being formulated in the West.
The reading of the texts goes hand in hand with the interpretation of Chinese music that includes both ancient works (contemporary to our medieval, renaissance and baroque production) and classical and contemporary pieces, interpreted with Chinese instruments and, as in the readings, with occasional interventions by Western voices that constitute a meeting point between China and Europe.
In support of the entire soundscape, the show is accompanied by the projection of images that will provide the ideal visual content to serve as a framework for the rest: Chinese pictorial and calligraphic works, as well as facsimiles of scientific documents in Chinese, including the oldest extant star map in the world.
The Moon’s Silence: Music and Word under the Chinese Sky puts voice, music and image to authors such as Qu Yuan 屈原 (4th century BCE), Wang Bi 王弼 (3th century), Zhang Zai 张载 (11th century), Hildegard von Bingen (12th century), Galileo Galilei (17th century), Wang Zhenyi 王贞仪 (18th century), ...
Through a threefold musical, poetic and visual narrative, this performative show aims to open new paths towards understanding the study of nature by showing a history of science independent of Western science, thus broadening the horizons of the form and methods of exploration of the phenomena of the world around us.
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