Nell'ambito della propria multiforme produzione artistica Elliott Sharp ha spesso dedicato attenzione al teatro musicale e all'opera, con composizioni piuttosto complesse e originali sia negli aspetti scenici sia in quelli testuali e musicali: ad esse riserva un intero capitolo ('Acts and Spectacle') nel suo IrRational Music (Terra Nova Press, 2019), citando molti esempi da Innosense a Filiseti Mekidesi a A Passionate Journey, mancando di indicare - solo perché successiva all'uscita del libro - la recente Die größte Fuge. Una delle più interessanti è Port Bou, dedicata alla figura di Walter Benjamin, celebre filosofo, saggista e critico letterario tedesco di famiglia ebraica morto suicida esule in Catalogna nel 1940 temendo di essere catturato dalla Gestapo: la si puà ascoltare in cd (Infrequent Seams, 2014) oppure tramite Bandcamp, forte dello splendido canto di Nicholas Isherwood in piena ambientazione da 'Seconda Scuola di Vienna' e accompagnata dal lusinghiero apprezzamento del regista, sceneggiatore e produttore cinematografico Volker Schlöndorff: "L’agonia e lo smarrimento radicale di chiunque, la notte prima di chiudere la porta al mondo, sono difficili da tradurre in note musicali, e lo è ancora di più l’angoscia di un filosofo, la sua Angst. Eppure è possibile, e la sua voce, questa voce particolare, che vaga per una stanza d’albergo in esilio, ne è la prova. Un’impresa metafisica."

https://elliottsharpoperas.bandcamp.com/album/port-bou

Elliott Sharp ha pensato bene di accompagnare l'uscita del suo nuovo libro, Feedback-Translations from the IrRational (Wesleyan University Press, 2025), con la lettura pubblica di alcuni brani e con interventi musicali in solo e in duo con James Brandon Lewis: dal vivo al Roulette a Brooklyn, NY, la settimana scorsa, in diretta streaming e ora in Roulette Intermedium.

Feedback is a wide-ranging meditation on music, sound, artificial intelligence, consciousness, contemporary culture and politics, and the life of the touring musician. Author Elliott Sharp is considered one of the central figures in NYC's Downtown Scene and is a composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, and educator. Starting from a background in the sciences, Sharp found his passion for music as a teen, and it has never abated. His philosophy is informed not just by music and its creation but by continuing studies in physics and genetics and a visceral interest in our modern world and its joys and horrors. In Feedback, Sharp engages in speculative thought about how consciousness might have arisen and what the future holds for humanity with the advent of an Artificial Intelligence that is certainly artificial but might not exactly be intelligent. The "Improviser's Mind" is discussed in the context of post-quantum physics, probability, socio-acoustics, and Butoh dance. Sharp loves to digress into unpredictable areas but ties it all together in an overarching narrative that is both personal and conceptual.

https://www.weslpress.org/9780819502049/feedback
https://www.youtube.com/@RouletteIntermediumNYC

Uno dei primi documenti collettivi che tentò di cogliere in tempo reale la fremente scena downtown newyorkese tra la fine degli anni Settanta e i primissimi Ottanta, contribuendo non poco a darvi slancio e visibilità, fu realizzato con gran fervore - e pochissimi mezzi, sia tecnici sia economici - da Elliott Sharp, presentando a raffica Mofungo, The Ordinaires, The Scene Is Now, V-Effect, Crazy Hearts, The State, The Hi-Sheriffs Of Blue e I/S/M in un album divenuto a suo modo emblematico: Peripheral Vision: Bands of Loisaida, uscito nel 1982 per l'etichetta zOaR e ora rilanciato in digitale con suono leggermente migliorato. Ne racconta l'origine lo stesso Sharp in IrRational Musings: "The compilation album Peripheral Vision: Bands of Loisaida has just been remastered at 24-bit, 48K to enhance the sonics of music from nearly half a century ago that was recorded using whatever technology was available to a bunch of low-budget starving artists. Originally released on my zOaR label in September 1982, it presented music from the genre-smashing groups that blended post-punk rage with a sense of joyful experimentation encompassing new song-forms, raw noise, improvisation, poetic lyrics, elaborate orchestrations, and an attitude of "anything goes" reflecting the creative ferment of NYC's Lower East Side. Brian Eno's No New York compilation cracked the door on this scene and Peripheral Vision attempted to fling it wide open."

https://elliottsharp.substack.com/revisiting-peripheral-vision
https://peripheralvisionnyc.bandcamp.com

 

Come altri lettori avranno osservato, la raccolta di scritti personali che da qualche tempo Elliott Sharp condivide sul web tramite Substack ha cambiato nome: era Translations From The IrRational, ora è IrRational Musings-Sounds, Culture, Satire. C'è un perché: "I’ve changed the name of this site to IrRational Musings as Translations From The IrRational has become the subtitle of my upcoming book Feedback. Feedback will be published by Wesleyan University Press and should be out in November 2025. It will be a wide-ranging volume covering music and sound theory, philosophy of mind, compositional strategies ranging from improvisation to graphic notation, socioacoustics, tour diaries, interviews, and more. Some of the elements of this book have appeared here but are now being revised for inclusion in Feedback."

In attesa a fine anno dell'antologia completa, che darà seguito al più autobiografico IrRational Music (Terra Nova Press, 2019), non sono da farsi sfuggire due tra i più recenti contributi pubblicati - critici, allarmanti, perfettamente nello spirito del tempo: Goodbye Spotify e Presidents Day: Making America Eugenic Again.

https://substack.com/@elliottsharp

 

Elliott Sharp avvia tramite SubStack un'iniziativa di dialogo e di condivisione di materiali collegati a temi e argomenti a suo tempo esposti nel libro IrRational Music (Terra Nova, 2019) e naturalmente alle esperienze prodotte sul campo nel corso di una carriera lunga oltre quarant'anni: Translations From The IrRational.

"Over the years I've tried to refine and develop my creative output in various ranges of the spectrum: improvising on guitars, reeds, electronics; composing long-form and chamber works for ensembles ranging from full orchestras to solo instruments, creating and directing operas, developing a language for graphic notation; inventing and building musical instruments; writing accounts of activities that I've participated in; engaging in philosophical extrapolation on consciousness and the nature of mind and creativity; and finally, rants and discussions on historical and political issues of the day.

My posts on SubStack will touch upon all of these topics and more. I hope to engage in dialog with you, the readers, as well as presenting my own output. Besides writing, the output may include musical recordings and scores, videos, new graphic notations, and images from the always porous border between art and life (plus some surprises!)."

https://elliottsharp.substack.com/p/translations-from-the-irrational

Insieme manifesto artistico e racconto autobiografico, è giunto alle stampe l'atteso libro di Elliott Sharp IrRational Music, pubblicato da Terra Nova Press seguendo il successo di una campagna di finanziamento collettivo attivata via Kickstarter.

Elliott Sharp's new book IrRational Music is a mix of memoir, music theory, and ruminations on culture, art, and philosophy. Speaking of IrRational Music, author Jonathan Lethem states “Elliott Sharp’s writing, like his music, recombines the scrupulously discursive with the deeply humane and reflective. What a joy it is to be informed by this remarkable account of the coming-of-age of his psyche, his curiosity, and his methodology. Sharp paints a picture of lost kingdoms of the avant-garde which aren’t really lost, but continuous in our present if we’re inclined to notice them. With this book, a reader joins Sharp in the step-by-step reinvigoration of intentional sound itself – sound as culture, as science, as art -- a process that can never be finished.” From composer and electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick: "Sharp is of the first generation of composers to come of age in a musical environment when everything seemed connected; Gregorian Chant to John Cage's chance. His book, IrRational Music, is a fascinating window into that moment in time when music opened up to everyone and all things became possible.”

https://www.terranovapress.com/books/irrationalmusic
https://www.kickstarter.com/irrational-music-by-elliott-sharp
https://youtu.be/QXuXDLTVAYg