راه ابریشم

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 04:21:12] all rights reserved

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The artist Otacílio Melgaço has two official curators in the virtual world. A curator (from Latin: ´curare´, meaning ´to take care´) is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or, as the present case: sound archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and, highlighting the context in force here, involved with the interpretation of personal (heritage) material. Both, Mr. Paz and Mr. Campbell, are, therefore, reviewers of the Melgacian works. To learn more about their missions, tasks, assignments and responsibilities by means of valuable informations regarding the compositional process, the performative rhizomes and other special features, just click the following link: otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/preamblebypsp
(O.M.Team; P r e l u d e)

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"Originally the title is in Persian.
Translating: S i l k R o u t e.

Once asked the members of the British band The Clash about the reason for giving birth - at first - to a triple disc (´Sandinista!´). ´Why triple?´ (The production was the subject of controversy with the label for various reasons, mainly financial and market). They replied that ´were thinking of workers on oil platforms at high seas´. When I take into account the four hours twenty-one minutes and twelve seconds of
´راه ابریشم ´ - and I will not even try to calculate how many vinyls would be required to contain singular duration -, I´m not led to ´maritime men´ but those who will labor on future space platforms, orbital stations. Astronauts that will explore the universe and subsequently inhabit other planets... For them (also) this masterpiece of a visionary Otacílio Melgaço was made.

We witnessed, yet astonished, a work of unbelievable proportions - qualitative and pluri-spatial/transtemporal.

Since renowned surgeons to top athletes, since select astronauts to unfailing warriors - it´s known that the need for concentration is superhuman. Or, to be more exact, extraordinary. 1630s, ´action of bringing to a center´, noun of action from verb concentrate (v.). Meaning ´a mass so collected´ is from 1670s; ´continuous focus of mental activity´ is from 1846. This probably goes beyond ´concentration´; it´s a supreme focus, able to abstract from everything. At that particular moment, the man and his action become the same, indistinguishable and inextricable. There´s a kind of transcendent ability so. A different Reality beyond the borders of the mere real. Nothing else can be distracting or distortion or deviation or... The degree of uniqueness is so considerable that the whole history of
t-h-a-t Being turns at the same epicenter - in unison - for the excellence of t-h-a-t act, The act.

Well, it´s the same as ´راه ابریشم´ (and therefore O.M.) seems to require of those who will enjoy his sonorous Orphic seeds. Fertile connections...

>> Ethereal tones,

>> heralds pauses,

>> implied colors,

>> mountainous intensities,

>> durations fruitful,

>> cadences fey,

>> structural ambiguities,

>> harmonies slippery... Otacílio offers us the passages, habitats, ducts, liaisons, (...), the sagas ... and what it´s for us is extraordinarily the embark. Contemplative venturous and
s-i-l-k-y.

Sound routes are proposed in addition to global and almost mythical pathways (from the Melgacian perspective) that were crucial to Who we are today. There were not only significant for the development and flowering of great civilizations but also helped support the early modern world. This stunning offspring of Otacílio Melgaço, in an impressively splendid way and alongside other rare creations carrying similar momentum/impetus, represents the same for the (artistic) contemporaneity! I do not hesitate to express it.

I do not hesitate to express it, at least for those who were not swallowed by the frantic and ephemeral appetite of current time-space, ie, we are standing here on the other side - the open side to the depths and ascensions, criterious/meticulous and empathetic with perennial...

Now my words may seem suitable for the ´esoteric or gnostic´. As always happened with Messiaen or as it has become for Stockhausen. I respect them and who seek this line in Melgaço and find it: will be welcome. There´s a spiritual dimension in Melgaço´s creations, no doubt. Just as in the great works (and expressions) of mankind, I believe. Artistic or sexual or mythological or scientific or architectural or philosophical or psychological or anthropological or... Even those who seek to deny this dimension, the unbelievers (and here I include myself) does not fail to recognize it as part of human dialectic. Only want to be clear, when I refer to ´depths and ascensions´ or ´perennial´, are figures of speech representing the man and his circumstances - overactive and superlative. If physics or metaphysics are tools for that; I leave to you, ladies and gentlemen.

All are welcome to travel through the Melgacian Silk Road. Will musically be voyages, pilgrimages, discoveries, inventions, ... , especially: transcendences. All of them. I hope each of you go ahead through its irreplaceable transcendence. Or would be ´transoundence´?
D o Y o u W a n t?

In ´Through the Looking Glass´ (by Lewis Carroll) there´s a similar situation, when Alice and the Unicorn are introduced to each other:
Alice: ´You know, I also always thought unicorns were fabled monsters. I had never seen a living before!´
´Well, now that we've met,´ said the Unicorn, ´if you want to believe me, I will believe in you too. Deal?´
´Y e s, I f Y o u W a n t,´ said Alice.

Paraphrasing Calvino, perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the Being is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a ... Unicorn. I speak and speak but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

It is the E A R...

And now are eight the routes to multicultural unlimited
h E A R i n g..." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"´The Silk Road, or Silk Route, is a series of trade and cultural transmission routes that were central to cultural interaction through regions of the Asian continent connecting the West and East by linking traders, merchants, pilgrims, monks, soldiers, nomads, and urban dwellers from China and India to the Mediterranean Sea during various periods of time.

Extending 4,000 miles (6,437 kilometres), the Silk Road derives its name from the lucrative trade in Chinese silk carried out along its length, beginning during the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD). The Central Asian sections of the trade routes were expanded around 114 BC by the Han dynasty, largely through the missions and explorations of Chinese imperial envoy, Zhang Qian. The Chinese took great interest in the safety of their trade products and extended the Great Wall of China to ensure the protection of the trade route.

Trade on the Silk Road was a significant factor in the development of the civilizations of China, the Indian subcontinent, Persia, Europe, and Arabia, opening long-distance, political and economic interactions between the civilizations. Though silk was certainly the major trade item from China, many other goods were traded, and religions, syncretic philosophies, and various technologies, as well as diseases, also travelled along the Silk Routes. In addition to economic trade, the Silk Road served as a means of carrying out cultural trade among the civilizations along its network.

The main traders during antiquity were the Chinese, Persians, Greeks, Syrians, Romans, Armenians, Indians, and Bactrians, and from the 5th to the 8th century the Sogdians. During the coming of age of Islam, Arab traders became prominent.´

So...

Audible ´octopieces´ or - in Portuguese - ´rotas´ (´routes´) that reveal endless; visible and invisible journeys but in ´راه ابریشم´, always hearable: intrinsic and extrinsic ´phonodysseys´ simultaneously. Simultaneously two memories come to mind and respective parallel I do:

>> The lyrics of a song by Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner:

´Upon a secret journey
I met a holy man
His blindness was his wisdom
I'm such a lonely man

And as the world was turning
It rolled itself in pain
This does not seem to touch you
He pointed to the rain

You will see light in the darkness
You will make some sense of this
When you've made your secret journey
You will find this love you miss

And on the days that followed
I listened to his words
I strained to understand him
I chased his thoughts like birds

You will see light in the darkness
You will make some sense of this
You will see joy in this sadness
You will find this love you miss

And when you've made your secret journey
You will be a holy man
When you've made your secret journey
You will be a holy man
When you've made your secret journey
You will be a holy man´

and

>> a literary work of Italo Calvino. Le città invisibili, Invisible Cities.

´Without stones there is no arch.´ (M.P.)

´The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer, Marco Polo. Is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 cities, apparently narrated by Polo. Short dialogues between the two characters are interspersed every five to ten cities and are used to discuss various ideas presented by the cities on a wide range of topics including linguistics and human nature. Is structured around an interlocking pattern of numbered sections, while the length of each section's title graphically outlines a continuously oscillating sine wave, or perhaps a city skyline. The interludes between Khan and Polo are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories. Marco Polo and Kublai Khan do not speak the same language. When Polo is explaining the various cities, he uses objects from the city to tell the story. The implication is that each character understands the other through their own interpretation of what they are saying. They literally are not speaking the same language, which leaves many decisions for the individual reader. The book, because of its approach to the imaginative potentialities of cities, has been used by architects and artists to visualize how cities can be, their secret folds, where the human imagination is not necessarily limited by the laws of physics or the limitations of modern urban theory. It offers an alternative approach to thinking about cities, how they are formed and how they function. ´The Travels of Marco Polo´ (or ´Livre des Merveilles du Monde´ or ´Book of the Marvels of the World´), Polo's travel diary depicting his purported journey across Asia and in Yuan Dynasty (Mongol Empire) China, written in the 13th century, shares with Invisible Cities the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities Polo claimed to have visited, accompanied by descriptions of the city's inhabitants, notable imports and exports, and whatever interesting tales Polo had heard about the region.´

The Venetian traveled the Silk Road. From now on, Marco Polo becomes the codename of Otacílio Melgaço. Maybe this makes each of us a new Kublai Khan, who knows? Otherwise, we are Polo - pilgrims - and everything around us is an immanent and transcendent creation of which Melgaço/Khan is spokesman. Or the own voice. The creator.

But not of another book; ubiquitously we are facing
T h e D i s c O f
T h e M a r v e l s
O f T h e W o r l d..." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - The Silk Road derives its name from the lucrative Chinese silk trade, a major reason for the connection of trade routes into an extensive transcontinental network. The German terms Seidenstraße and Seidenstraßen (´the Silk Road(s)/Route(s)´) were coined by Ferdinand von Richthofen, who made seven expeditions to China from 1868 to 1872. Some scholars prefer the term ´Silk Routes´ because the road included an extensive network of routes, though few were more than rough caravan tracks;

II - In June 2014, UNESCO designated the Chang'an-Tianshan corridor of the Silk Road as a World Heritage Site;

III - The Silk Road consisted of several routes. As it extended westwards from the ancient commercial centers of China, the overland, intercontinental Silk Road divided into northern and southern routes bypassing the Taklimakan Desert and Lop Nur.

Northern route

The northern route started at Chang'an (now called Xi'an), an ancient capital of China that was moved further east during the Later Han to Luoyang. The route was defined around the 1st century BC when Han Wudi put an end to harassment by nomadic tribes.

The northern route travelled northwest through the Chinese province of Gansu from Shaanxi Province and split into three further routes, two of them following the mountain ranges to the north and south of the Taklamakan Desert to rejoin at Kashgar, and the other going north of the Tian Shan mountains through Turpan, Talgar, and Almaty (in what is now southeast Kazakhstan). The routes split again west of Kashgar, with a southern branch heading down the Alai Valley towards Termez (in modern Uzbekistan) and Balkh (Afghanistan), while the other traveled through Kokand in the Fergana Valley (in present-day eastern Uzbekistan) and then west across the Karakum Desert. Both routes joined the main southern route before reaching ancient Merv, Turkmenistan. Another branch of the northern route turned northwest past the Aral Sea and north of the Caspian Sea, then and on to the Black Sea.

A route for caravans, the northern Silk Road brought to China many goods such as "dates, saffron powder and pistachio nuts from Persia; frankincense, aloes and myrrh from Somalia; sandalwood from India; glass bottles from Egypt, and other expensive and desirable goods from other parts of the world." In exchange, the caravans sent back bolts of silk brocade, lacquer ware, and porcelain.

Southern route

The southern route or Karakoram route was mainly a single route running from China through the Karakoram mountains, where it persists to modern times as the international paved road connecting Pakistan and China as the Karakoram Highway. It then set off westwards, but with southward spurs enabling the journey to be completed by sea from various points. Crossing the high mountains, it passed through northern Pakistan, over the Hindu Kush mountains, and into Afghanistan, rejoining the northern route near Merv, Turkmenistan. From Merv, it followed a nearly straight line west through mountainous northern Iran, Mesopotamia, and the northern tip of the Syrian Desert to the Levant, where Mediterranean trading ships plied regular routes to Italy, while land routes went either north through Anatolia or south to North Africa. Another branch road traveled from Herat through Susa to Charax Spasinu at the head of the Persian Gulf and across to Petra and on to Alexandria and other eastern Mediterranean ports from where ships carried the cargoes to Rome.

Southwestern route

The southwestern route is believed to be the Ganges/Brahmaputra Delta, which has been the subject of international interest for over two millennia. Strabo, the 1st-century Roman writer, mentions the deltaic lands: "Regarding merchants who now sail from Egypt...as far as the Ganges, they are only private citizens..." His comments are interesting as Roman beads and other materials are being found at Wari-Bateshwar ruins, the ancient city with roots from much earlier, before the Bronze Age, presently being slowly excavated beside the Old Brahmaputra in Bangladesh. Ptolemy's map of the Ganges Delta, a remarkably accurate effort, showed that his informants knew all about the course of the Brahmaputra River, crossing through the Himalayas then bending westward to its source in Tibet. It is doubtless that this delta was a major international trading center, almost certainly from much earlier than the Common Era. Gemstones and other merchandise from Thailand and Java were traded in the delta and through it. Chinese archaeological writer Bin Yang and some earlier writers and archaeologists, such as Janice Stargardt, strongly suggest this route of international trade as Sichuan-Yunnan-Burma-Bangladesh route. According to Bin Yang, especially from the 12th century the route was used to ship bullion from Yunnan (gold and silver are among the minerals in which Yunnan is rich), through northern Burma, into modern Bangladesh, making use of the ancient route, known as the 'Ledo' route. The emerging evidence of the ancient cities of Bangladesh, in particular Wari-Bateshwar ruins, Mahasthangarh, Bhitagarh, Bikrampur, Egarasindhur, and Sonargaon, are believed to be the international trade centers in this route;

IV - Marco Polo (1254 – 1324) was a Venetian merchant traveller whose travels are recorded in Livres des merveilles du monde (Book of the Marvels of the World, also known as The Travels of Marco Polo, c. 1300), a book that introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China.

He learned the mercantile trade from his father and uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, who travelled through Asia, and met Kublai Khan. In 1269, they returned to Venice to meet Marco for the first time. The three of them embarked on an epic journey to Asia, returning after 24 years to find Venice at war with Genoa; Marco was imprisoned and dictated his stories to a cellmate. He was released in 1299, became a wealthy merchant, married, and had three children. He died in 1324 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice.

Marco Polo was not the first European to reach China but he was the first to leave a detailed chronicle of his experience. This book inspired Christopher Columbus and many other travellers. There is a substantial literature based on Polo's writings; he also influenced European cartography, leading to the introduction of the Fra Mauro map.

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
quotes have Wikipedia as a source...

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Between two parentheses...
(Atonalism, Twelve-Tone, Serialism, Musique Concrète... Acousmatic. Eletroacoustic. Magnetic Tape. Expressionism, New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, Mythic Method. Electronic...Computer Music, Spectral, Polystylism, Neoromanticism, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism...are addressed by Melgaço. Paradoxically New Simplicity and New Complexity also.
Art Rock, Free Jazz, Ethnic Dialects, Street Sounds are occasional syntax elements.
All the possibilities mentioned above and others that were not mentioned are the usual accoutrements of the composer/instrumentalist to establish his ´babelic´ glossary. We can prove this in a short passage of a single composition up along the entirety of a conceptual phonograph album. All distributed over a career and idiosyncratic records. Have we a universe before us and I propose to see it through a telescope, not a microscope.
I propose not handle very specialized topics here. Otherwise would be, with the exception of musicians and scholars, all hostages of a hermetic jargon. Because more important is to present Otacílio Melgaço to the general public and not to a segment of specialists. Faction of experts not need presentations, depart for the enjoyment beforehand. For this reason there is no niche here for intellectual onanism and encrypted musical terminology. The reason for these parentheses is to establish such elucidation. The non-adoption of technicalities leads to more panoramic, amplifier reviews. Are You always welcome. Those who do not dominate contemporary music and are introduced to the world of ubiquitous O.M. [autodidact and independent artist who, being more specific, does not belong to schools or doctrines; artist who makes Music and that´s enough; music devoid of labels or stylistic, chronological, historical paradigms or trends] and Those who belong to the métier and turn to enjoy propositions they know and also delving into advanced Melgacian sound cosmogonies...
I conclude poetically. ´Certeza/Certainty´ by Octavio Paz. ´Si es real la luz blanca De esta lámpara, real La mano que escribe, ¿son reales
Los ojos que miran lo escrito? De una palabra a la otra Lo que digo se desvanece. Yo sé que estoy vivo Entre dos paréntesis.´ If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write? From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.
We´re all more and more a-l-i-v-e now.)
- P.S.P.